Thailand

Large language models (LLMs) possess immense capabilities but are susceptible to malicious exploitation. To mitigate the risk, safety alignment is employed to align LLMs with ethical standards. However, safety-aligned LLMs may remain vulnerable to carefully crafted jailbreak attacks, but these attacks often face high rejection rates and limited harmfulness. In this paper, we expose the vulnerabilities of safety alignment in open-access LLMs, which can significantly enhance the success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks. Through reverse alignment, achieved by accessing model parameters, we show the feasibility of efficiently fine-tuning LLMs to undermine their inherent safeguards. We investigate two types of reverse alignment techniques: reverse supervised fine-tuning (RSFT) and reverse preference optimization (RPO). RSFT operates by supervising the fine-tuning of LLMs to reverse their inherent values. We also explore how to prepare data needed for RSFT. RPO optimizes LLMs to enhance their preference for harmful content, reversing the models&#39; safety alignment. Our extensive experiments reveal that open-access high-performance LLMs can be adeptly reverse-aligned to output harmful content, even in the absence of manually curated malicious datasets. Our research acts as a whistleblower for the community, emphasizing the need to pay more attention to safety of open-accessing LLMs. It also underscores the limitations of current safety alignment approaches and calls for research on robust safety alignment methods to counteract malicious fine-tuning attacks.

ACL 2024

On the Vulnerability of Safety Alignment in Open-Access LLMs

open-access

llms

safety

### 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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*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

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

Large language models (LLMs) possess immense capabilities but are susceptible to malicious exploitation. To mitigate the risk, safety alignment is employed to align LLMs with ethical standards. However, safety-aligned LLMs may remain vulnerable to carefully crafted jailbreak attacks, but these attacks often face high rejection rates and limited harmfulness. In this paper, we expose the vulnerabilities of safety alignment in open-access LLMs, which can significantly enhance the success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks. Through reverse alignment, achieved by accessing model parameters, we show the feasibility of efficiently fine-tuning LLMs to undermine their inherent safeguards. We investigate two types of reverse alignment techniques: reverse supervised fine-tuning (RSFT) and reverse preference optimization (RPO). RSFT operates by supervising the fine-tuning of LLMs to reverse their inherent values. We also explore how to prepare data needed for RSFT. RPO optimizes LLMs to enhance their preference for harmful content, reversing the models' safety alignment. Our extensive experiments reveal that open-access high-performance LLMs can be adeptly reverse-aligned to output harmful content, even in the absence of manually curated malicious datasets. Our research acts as a whistleblower for the community, emphasizing the need to pay more attention to safety of open-accessing LLMs. It also underscores the limitations of current safety alignment approaches and calls for research on robust safety alignment methods to counteract malicious fine-tuning attacks.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Dialects introduce syntactic and lexical variations in language that occur in regional or social groups. Most NLP methods are not sensitive to such variations. This may lead to unfair behavior of the methods, conveying negative bias towards dialect speakers. While previous work has studied dialect-related fairness for aspects like hate speech, other aspects of biased language, such as lewdness, remain fully unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate performance disparities between dialects in the detection of five aspects of biased language and how to mitigate them. To alleviate bias, we present a multitask learning approach that models dialect language as an auxiliary task to incorporate syntactic and lexical variations. In our experiments with African-American English dialect, we provide empirical evidence that complementing common learning approaches with dialect modeling improves their fairness. Furthermore, the results suggest that multitask learning achieves state-of-the-art performance and helps to detect properties of biased language more reliably.

Disentangling Dialect from Social Bias via Multitask Learning to Improve Fairness

Fact verification aims to automatically probe the veracity of a claim based on several pieces of evidence. Existing works are always engaging in accuracy improvement, let alone explainability, a critical capability of fact verification systems.
Constructing an explainable fact verification system in a complex multi-hop scenario is consistently impeded by the absence of a relevant, high-quality dataset. Previous datasets either suffer from excessive simplification or fail to incorporate essential considerations for explainability. To address this, we present EX-FEVER, a pioneering dataset for multi-hop explainable fact verification. With over 60,000 claims involving 2-hop and 3-hop reasoning, each is created by summarizing and modifying information from hyperlinked Wikipedia documents. Each instance is accompanied by a veracity label and an explanation that outlines the reasoning path supporting the veracity classification. Additionally, we demonstrate a novel baseline system on our EX-FEVER dataset, showcasing document retrieval, explanation generation, and claim verification, and validate the significance of our dataset. Furthermore, we highlight the potential of utilizing Large Language Models in the fact verification task. We hope our dataset could make a significant contribution by providing ample opportunities to explore the integration of natural language explanations in the domain of fact verification.

EX-FEVER: A Dataset for Multi-hop Explainable Fact Verification

Document collections of various domains, e.g., legal, medical, or financial, often share some underlying collection-wide structure, which captures information that can aid both human users and structure-aware models.
We propose to identify the typical structure of document within a collection, which requires to capture recurring topics across the collection, while abstracting over arbitrary header paraphrases, and ground each topic to respective document locations. 
These requirements pose several challenges: headers that mark recurring topics frequently differ in phrasing, certain section headers are unique to individual documents and do not reflect the typical structure, and the order of topics can vary between documents. 
Subsequently, we develop an unsupervised graph-based method which leverages both inter- and intra-document similarities, to extract the underlying collection-wide structure. 
Our evaluations on three diverse domains in both English and Hebrew indicate that our method extracts meaningful collection-wide structure, and we hope that future work will leverage our method for multi-document applications and structure-aware models.

Leveraging Collection-Wide Similarities for Unsupervised Document Structure Extraction

Educational chatbots are a promising tool for assisting student learning. However, the development of effective chatbots in education has been challenging, as high-quality data is seldom available in this domain. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating synthetic teacher-student interactions grounded in a set of textbooks. Our approaches capture a key aspect of learning interactions where curious students with partial knowledge interactively ask teachers questions about the material in the textbook. We highlight various quality criteria that such dialogues must fulfill and compare several approaches relying on either prompting or finetuning large language models according to these criteria. We use the synthetic dialogues to train educational chatbots and show the benefits of further fine-tuning in educational domains. However, careful human evaluation shows that our best data synthesis method still suffers from hallucinations and tends to reiterate information from previous conversations. Our findings offer insights for future efforts in synthesizing conversational data that strikes a balance between size and quality. We will open-source our data and code.

Book2Dial: Generating Teacher Student Interactions from Textbooks for Cost-Effective Development of Educational Chatbots

Scientific writing is a challenging task, particularly for novice researchers who often rely on feedback from experienced peers. Recent work has primarily focused on improving surface form and style rather than manuscript content. In this paper, we propose a novel task: automated focused feedback generation for scientific writing assistance. We present SWIF$^2$T: a Scientific WrIting Focused Feedback Tool. It is designed to generate specific, actionable and coherent comments, which identify weaknesses in a scientific paper and/or propose revisions to it. Our approach consists of four components - planner, investigator, reviewer and controller - leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) to implement them. We compile a dataset of 300 peer reviews citing weaknesses in scientific papers and conduct human evaluation. The results demonstrate the superiority in specificity, reading comprehension, and overall helpfulness of SWIF$^2$T's feedback compared to other approaches. In our analysis, we also identified cases where automatically generated reviews were judged better than human ones, suggesting opportunities for integration of AI-generated feedback in scientific writing.

Automated Focused Feedback Generation for Scientific Writing Assistance

The task of persona-steered text generation requires large language models (LLMs) to generate text that reflects the distribution of views that an individual fitting a persona could have. People have multifaceted personas, but prior work on bias in LLM-generated opinions has only explored multiple-choice settings or one-dimensional personas. We define an incongruous persona as a persona with multiple traits where one trait makes its other traits less likely in human survey data, e.g. political liberals who support increased military spending. We find that LLMs are 9.7% less steerable towards incongruous personas than congruous ones, sometimes generating the stereotypical stance associated with its demographic rather than the target stance. Models that we evaluate that are fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are more steerable, especially towards stances associated with political liberals and women, but present significantly less diverse views of personas. We also find variance in LLM steerability that cannot be predicted from multiple-choice opinion evaluation. Our results show the importance of evaluating models in open-ended text generation, as it can surface new LLM opinion biases. Moreover, such a setup can shed light on our ability to steer models toward a richer and more diverse range of viewpoints.

Evaluating Large Language Model Biases in Persona-Steered Generation

It is imperative to ensure the stability of every prediction made by a language model; that is, a language’s prediction should remain consistent despite minor input variations, like word substitutions. In this paper, we investigate the problem of certifying a language model’s robustness against Universal Text Perturbations (UTPs), which have been widely used in universal adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks. Existing certified robustness based on random smoothing has shown considerable promise in certifying the input-specific text perturbations (ISTPs), operating under the assumption that any random alteration of a sample’s clean or adversarial words would negate the impact of sample-wise perturbations. However, with UTPs, masking only the adversarial words can eliminate the attack. A naive method is to simply increase the masking ratio and the likelihood of masking attack tokens, but it leads to a significant reduction in both certified accuracy and the certified radius due to input corruption by extensive masking. To solve this challenge, we introduce a novel approach, the \textit{superior prompt search} method, designed to identify a \textit{superior prompt} that maintains higher certified accuracy under extensive masking. Additionally, we theoretically motivate why ensembles are a particularly suitable choice as base prompts for random smoothing. The method is denoted by \textit{superior prompt ensembling} technique. We also empirically confirm this technique, obtaining state-of-the-art results in multiple settings. These methodologies, for the first time, enable high certified accuracy against both UTPs and ISTPs. The source code of CR-UTP is available at \url{https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/CR-UTP}.

CR-UTP: Certified Robustness against Universal Text Perturbations on Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant success in using LLMs as agents. Nevertheless, a common assumption that LLMs always process honest information neglects the widespread deceptive or misleading content in human and AI-generated material. This oversight might expose LLMs to malicious manipulations. To enhance LLMs' ability to identify and counteract deceptive information, in this paper, inspired by humans' recursive thinking and perspective-taking, we introduce a novel cognitive framework, Recursive Contemplation (ReCon). ReCon combines formulation and refinement contemplation processes; formulation contemplation produces initial thoughts and speech, while refinement contemplation further polishes them. Additionally, we incorporate first-order and second-order perspective transitions into these processes respectively. Specifically, the first-order allows an LLM agent to infer others’ mental states, and the second-order involves understanding how others perceive the agent’s mental state. After integrating ReCon with various LLMs, extensive experiment results from the Avalon game and BigTom benchmark indicate ReCon's efficacy in aiding LLMs to discern and maneuver around deceptive information without extra fine-tuning and data. Finally, we demonstrate ReCon's scaling trend with model parameters, and explore the current limitations of LLMs in terms of safety and reasoning, potentially furnishing insights for subsequent research. Our project page can be found at https://shenzhi-wang.github.io/avalon_recon.

Boosting LLM Agents with Recursive Contemplation for Effective Deception Handling

Pretrained models learned from real corpora can often capture undesirable features, leading to bias issues against different demographic groups. Most existing studies on bias dataset construction or bias mitigation methods only focus on one demographic group pair to study a certain bias, e.g. \emph{black} vs. \emph{white} for racial bias. However, in real-world applications, there are more than two demographic groups that are at risk of the same bias. In this paper, we propose to analyze and reduce biases across multiple demographic groups. We collect and build a multi-demographic bias dataset including five commonly discussed bias dimensions. To mitigate multi-demographic bias, we adopt several novel debiasing methods, including regularisation-based and augmentation-based methods, as well as appropriate evaluation metrics for multi-demographic bias measurement. Experimental results on the proposed multi-demographic dataset show that a fairer model can be achieved using a multi-demographic debiasing approach. Also, the model debiased using the proposed multi-demographic debiasing methods can better transfer to unseen demographics without sacrificing the performance of the pretrained model.

More than Minorities and Majorities: Understanding Multilateral Bias in Language Generation

Automatic evaluation of natural language generation (NLG) tasks has gained extensive research interests, since it can rapidly assess the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, automatic NLG evaluation struggles with medical QA because it fails to focus on the crucial correctness of medical facts throughout the generated text. To address this, this paper introduces a new data structure, \textit{imap}, designed to capture key information in questions and answers, enabling evaluators to focus on essential details. The \textit{imap} comprises three components: Query, Constraint, and Inform, each of which is in the form of term-value pairs to represent medical facts in a structural manner. We then introduce \textit{imap}Score, which compares the corresponding medical term-value pairs in the \textit{imap} to score generated texts. We utilize GPT-4 to extract \textit{imap} from questions, human-annotated answers, and generated responses. To mitigate the diversity in medical terminology for fair term-value pairs comparison, we use a medical knowledge graph to assist GPT-4 in determining matches. To compare \textit{imap}Score with existing NLG metrics, we establish a new benchmark dataset. The experimental results show that \textit{imap}Score consistently outperforms state-of-the-art metrics, demonstrating an average improvement of 79.8\% in correlation with human scores. Furthermore, incorporating \textit{imap} into n-gram, embedding, and LLM metrics boosts the base versions, increasing correlation with human scores by averages of 89.9\%, 81.7\%, and 32.6\%, respectively.

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Disentangling Dialect from Social Bias via Multitask Learning to Improve Fairness

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