United States

We consider the problem of language model inversion: given outputs of a language model, we seek to extract the prompt that generated these outputs. We develop a new black-box method, output2prompt, that extracts prompts without access to the model’s logits and without adversarial or jailbreaking queries. Unlike previous methods, output2prompt only needs outputs of normal user queries. To improve memory efficiency, output2prompt employs a new sparse encoding techique. We measure the efficacy of output2prompt on a variety of user and system prompts and demonstrate zero-shot transferability across different LLMs.

EMNLP 2024

Extracting Prompts by Inverting LLM Outputs

large language model

bias detection

safety

ethics

fairness

bias

## 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.

technical paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Recent advances in foundation models have emphasized the need to align pre-trained models with specialized domains using small, curated datasets. Studies on these foundation models underscore the importance of low-data training and fine-tuning. This topic, well-known in natural language processing (NLP), has also gained increasing attention in the emerging field of scientific machine learning (SciML). To address the limitations of low-data training and fine-tuning, we draw inspiration from Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) theory, analyzing the shape of empirical spectral densities (ESDs) and revealing an imbalance in training quality across different model layers. To mitigate this issue, we adapt a recently proposed layer-wise learning rate scheduler, TempBalance, which effectively balances training quality across layers and enhances low-data training and fine-tuning for both NLP and SciML tasks. Notably, TempBalance demonstrates increasing performance gains as the amount of available tuning data decreases. Comparative analyses further highlight the effectiveness of TempBalance and its adaptability as an “add-on” method for improving model performance.

Model Balancing Helps Low-data Training and Fine-tuning

Extensive efforts in automated approaches for content moderation have been focused on developing models to identify toxic, offensive, and hateful content with the aim of lightening the load for moderators. Yet, it remains uncertain whether improvements on those tasks have truly addressed moderators’ needs in accomplishing their work. In this paper, we surface gaps between past research efforts that have aimed to provide automation for aspects of content moderation and the needs of volunteer content moderators, regarding identifying violations of various moderation rules. To do so, we conduct a model review on Hugging Face to reveal the availability of models to cover various moderation rules and guidelines from three exemplar forums. We further put state-of-the-art LLMs to the test, evaluating how well these models perform in flagging violations of platform rules from one particular forum. Finally, we conduct a user survey study with volunteer moderators to gain insight into their perspectives on useful moderation models. Overall, we observe a non trivial gap, as missing developed models and LLMs exhibit moderate to low performance on a significant portion of the rules. Moderators’ reports provide guides for future work on developing moderation assistant models.

Toxicity Detection is NOT all you Need: Measuring the Gaps to Supporting Volunteer Content Moderators through a User-Centric Method

Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for various natural language processing tasks has led to superlative claims about their performance. For the evaluation of machine translation (MT), existing research shows that LLMs are able to achieve results comparable to fine-tuned multilingual pre-trained language models. In this paper, we explore what translation information, such as the source, reference, translation errors and annotation guidelines, is needed for LLMs to evaluate MT quality. In addition, we investigate prompting techniques such as zero-shot, Chain of Thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting for eight language pairs covering high-, medium- and low-resource languages, leveraging varying LLM variants. Our findings indicate the importance of reference translations for an LLM-based evaluation. While larger models do not necessarily fare better, they tend to benefit more from CoT prompting, than smaller models. We also observe that LLMs do not always provide a numerical score when generating evaluations, which poses a question on their reliability for the task. Our work presents a comprehensive analysis for resource-constrained and training-less LLM-based evaluation of machine translation. We release the accrued prompt templates, code and data publicly for reproducibility.

What do large language models need for machine translation evaluation?

Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. LLMs have been successfully used to help find and improve prompt candidates for single-step tasks. However, realistic tasks for agents are multi-step and introduce new challenges: (1) Prompt content is likely to be more extensive and complex, making it more difficult for LLMs to analyze errors, (2) the impact of an individual step is difficult to evaluate, and (3) different people may have varied preferences about task execution. While humans struggle to optimize prompts, they are good at providing feedback about LLM outputs; we therefore introduce a new LLM-driven discrete prompt optimization framework PROMST that incorporates human-designed feedback rules to automatically offer direct suggestions for improvement. We also use an extra learned heuristic model that predicts prompt performance to efficiently sample from prompt candidates. This approach significantly outperforms both human-engineered prompts and several other prompt optimization methods across 11 representative multi-step tasks (an average 10.6%-29.3% improvement to current best methods on five LLMs respectively). We believe our work can serve as a benchmark for automatic prompt optimization for LLM-driven multi-step tasks.

PRompt Optimization in Multi-Step Tasks (PROMST): Integrating Human Feedback and Heuristic-based Sampling

Prompt-based fine-tuning has become an essential method for eliciting information encoded in pre-trained language models for a variety of tasks, including text classification. For multi-class classification tasks, prompt-based fine-tuning under low-resource scenarios has resulted in performance levels comparable to those of fully fine-tuning methods. Previous studies have used crafted prompt templates and verbalizers, mapping from the label terms space to the class space, to solve the classification problem as a masked language modeling task. However, cross-domain and fine-grained prompt-based fine-tuning with an automatically enriched verbalizer remains unexplored, mainly due to the difficulty and costs of manually selecting domain label terms for the verbalizer, which requires humans with domain expertise. To address this challenge, we introduce SciPrompt, a framework designed to automatically retrieve scientific topic-related terms for low-resource text classification tasks. To this end, we select semantically correlated and domain-specific label terms within the context of scientific literature for verbalizer augmentation. Furthermore, we propose a new verbalization strategy that uses correlation scores as additional weights to enhance the prediction performance of the language model during model tuning. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art, prompt-based fine-tuning methods on scientific text classification tasks under few and zero-shot settings, especially in classifying fine-grained and emerging scientific topics.

SciPrompt: Knowledge-Augmented Prompting for Fine-Grained Categorization of Scientific Topics

The widespread adoption of synthetic data raises new questions about how models generating the data can influence other large language models (LLMs). To start, our work exhaustively characterizes the impact of passive inheritance of model properties by systematically studying how the source of synthetic data shapes models' internal biases, calibration and preferences, and their generations' textual attributes, providing one of the most comprehensive studies to-date. We find that models are surprisingly sensitive towards certain attributes even when the synthetic data prompts appear "neutral" which invites the question: can we explicitly steer the distilled data towards desired properties? We demonstrate how such active inheritance can steer the generation profiles of models towards desirable non-differentiable attributes in both directions, e.g. increasing lexical diversity or reducing toxicity. Overall, our study broadens the understanding of the implicit biases inherited by LLMs and explores how we can leverage them to positive effect.

LLM See, LLM Do: Leveraging Active Inheritance to Target Non-Differentiable Objectives

Recent works leverage LLMs to roleplay realistic social scenarios, aiding novices in practicing their social skills. However, simulating sensitive interactions, such as in the domain of mental health, is challenging. Privacy concerns restrict data access, and collecting expert feedback, although vital, is laborious. To address this, we develop Roleplay-doh, a novel human-LLM collaboration pipeline that elicits qualitative feedback from a domain-expert, which is transformed into a set of principles, or natural language rules, that govern an LLM-prompted roleplay. We apply this pipeline to enable senior mental health supporters to create customized AI patients as simulated practice partners for novice counselors. After uncovering issues with basic GPT-4 simulations not adhering to expert-defined principles, we also introduce a novel principle-adherence prompting pipeline which shows a 30% improvement in response quality and principle following for the downstream task. Through a user study with 25 counseling experts, we demonstrate that the pipeline makes it easy and effective to create AI patients that more faithfully resemble real patients, as judged by both creators and third-party counselors. We provide access to the code and data on our project website: https://roleplay-doh.github.io/.

Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principles

Translating text that contains entity names is a challenging task, as cultural-related references can vary significantly across languages. These variations may also be caused by transcreation, an adaptation process that entails more than transliteration and word-for-word translation. In this paper, we address the problem of cross-cultural translation on two fronts: (i) we introduce XC-Translate, the first large-scale, manually-created benchmark for machine translation that focuses on text that contains potentially culturally-nuanced entity names, and (ii) we propose KG-MT, a novel end-to-end method to integrate information from a multilingual knowledge graph into a neural machine translation model by leveraging a dense retrieval mechanism. Our experiments and analyses show that current machine translation systems and large language models still struggle to translate texts containing entity names, whereas KG-MT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin, obtaining a 129% and 62% relative improvement compared to NLLB-200 and GPT-4, respectively.

Towards Cross-Cultural Machine Translation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs

Simultaneous Speech Translation (SiST) begins translating before the entire source input is received, making it crucial to balance quality and latency. In real interpreting situations, interpreters manage this simultaneity by breaking sentences into smaller segments and translating them while maintaining the source order as much as possible. SiST could benefit from this approach to balance quality and latency. However, current corpora used for simultaneous tasks often involve significant word reordering in translation, which is not ideal given that interpreters faithfully follow source syntax as much as possible. Inspired by conference interpreting by humans utilizing the salami technique, we introduce the Simul-MuST-C, a dataset created by leveraging the Large Language Model (LLM), specifically GPT-4o, which aligns the target text as closely as possible to the source text by using minimal chunks that contain enough information to be interpreted. Experiments on three language pairs show that the effectiveness of segmented-base monotonicity in training data varies with the grammatical distance between the source and the target, with grammatically distant language pairs benefiting the most in achieving quality while minimizing latency.

Simul-MuST-C: Simultaneous Multilingual Speech Translation Corpus Using Large Language Model

Language models can be manipulated by adversarial attacks, which introduce subtle perturbations to input data. While recent attack methods can achieve a relatively high attack success rate (ASR), we've observed that the generated adversarial examples have a different data distribution compared with the original examples. Specifically, these adversarial examples exhibit reduced confidence levels and greater divergence from the training data distribution. Consequently, they are easy to detect using straightforward detection methods, diminishing the efficacy of such attacks. To address this issue, we propose a Distribution-Aware Adversarial Attack (DA$^3$) method. DA$^3$ considers the distribution shifts of adversarial examples to improve attacks' effectiveness under detection methods. We further design a novel evaluation metric, the Non-detectable Attack Success Rate (NASR), which integrates both ASR and detectability for the attack task. We conduct experiments on four widely used datasets to validate the attack effectiveness and transferability of adversarial examples generated by DA$^3$ against both the white-box BERT-base and RoBERTa-base models and the black-box LLaMA2-7b model.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Model Balancing Helps Low-data Training and Fine-tuning

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Reverse Prompt Engineering: A Zero-Shot, Genetic Algorithm Approach to Language Model Inversion

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