United States

Ensuring robust safety measures across a wide range of scenarios is crucial for user-facing systems. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate valuable data for safety measures, they often exhibit distributional biases, focusing on common scenarios and neglecting rare but critical cases. This can undermine the effectiveness of safety protocols developed using such data. To address this, we propose a novel framework that integrates active learning with clustering to guide LLM generation, enhancing their representativeness and robustness in safety scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by constructing a dataset of 5.4K potential safety violations through an iterative process involving LLM generation and an active learner model&#39;s feedback. Our results show that the proposed framework produces a more representative set of safety scenarios without requiring prior knowledge of the underlying data distribution. Additionally, data acquired through our method improves the accuracy and F1 score of both the active learner model as well models outside the scope of active learn ing process, highlighting its broad applicability.

EMNLP 2024

Active Learning for Robust and Representative LLM Generation in Safety-Critical Scenarios

llm generation

ai safety

active learning

## 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.

Ensuring robust safety measures across a wide range of scenarios is crucial for user-facing systems. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate valuable data for safety measures, they often exhibit distributional biases, focusing on common scenarios and neglecting rare but critical cases. This can undermine the effectiveness of safety protocols developed using such data. To address this, we propose a novel framework that integrates active learning with clustering to guide LLM generation, enhancing their representativeness and robustness in safety scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by constructing a dataset of 5.4K potential safety violations through an iterative process involving LLM generation and an active learner model's feedback. Our results show that the proposed framework produces a more representative set of safety scenarios without requiring prior knowledge of the underlying data distribution. Additionally, data acquired through our method improves the accuracy and F1 score of both the active learner model as well models outside the scope of active learn ing process, highlighting its broad applicability.

## 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.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

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.

Customizing text style or content typically involves extensive fine-tuning of large models, demanding significant data and training. Traditional unsupervised approaches using sampling often yield low diversity and creativity. We present a novel discrete Langevin proposal that samples directly from the categorical token distribution, overcoming these limitations. By adapting the continuous Langevin algorithm for discrete spaces, our approach enables efficient gradient-based sampling. Evaluations on style transfer tasks demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, BLEU, BERTScore, and diversity. Our proposed approach paves way for advanced customized text generation with desired styles as well as allows future scope for prompt generation for model safeguarding and jail-breaking.

Customized Style Transfer using Discrete Sampling

Although people are impressed by the content generation skills of large language models, the use of LLMs, such as ChatGPT, is limited by the domain grounding of the content. The correctness and groundedness of the generated content need to be based on a verified context, such as results from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). One important issue when adapting LLMs to a customized domain is that the generated responses are often incomplete, or the additions are not verified and may even be hallucinated. Prior studies on hallucination detection have focused on evaluation metrics, which are not easily adaptable to dynamic domains and can be vulnerable to attacks like jail-breaking. In this work, we propose 1) a post-processing algorithm that leverages knowledge triplets in RAG context to correct hallucinations and 2) a dual-decoder model that fuses RAG context to guide the generation process.

Trustful LLMs: Customizing and Grounding Text Generation with knowledge bases and Dual Decoders

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of machine learning, yet current benchmarks often fall short in capturing the diverse behavior of these models in real-world applications. A benchmark’s usefulness is determined by its ability to clearly differentiate between models of varying capabilities (separability) and closely align with human preferences. Existing frameworks like Alpaca-Eval 2.0 LC (Dubois et al., 2024a) and Arena-Hard v0.1 (Li et al., 2024a) are limited by their focus on generalpurpose queries and lack of diversity across domains such as law, medicine, and multilingual contexts. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing a novel data pipeline that curates diverse, domain-specific evaluation sets tailored for LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks. Our approach leverages a combination of manual curation, semi-supervised learning to generate clusters, and stratified sampling to ensure balanced representation across a wide range of domains and languages. The resulting evaluation set, which includes 1573 samples across 14 categories, demonstrates high separability (84%) across ten topranked models, and agreement (84%) with Chatbot Arena and (0.915) Spearman correlation. The agreement values are 9% better than Arena Hard and 20% better than AlpacaEval 2.0 LC, while the Spearman coefficient is 0.7 more than the next best benchmark, showcasing a significant improvement in the usefulness of the benchmark. We further provide an open-source evaluation tool that enables fine-grained analysis of model performance across user-defined categories, offering valuable insights for practitioners. This work contributes to the ongoing effort to enhance the transparency, diversity, and effectiveness of LLM evaluation methodologies.

Constructing Domain-Specific Evaluation Sets for LLM-as-a-judge

Precise estimation of downstream performance in large language models (LLMs) prior to training is essential for guiding their development process. Scaling laws analysis utilizes the statistics of a series of significantly smaller sampling language models (LMs) to predict the performance of the target LLM. For downstream performance prediction, the critical challenge lies in the emergent abilities in LLMs that occur beyond task-specific computational thresholds. In this work, we focus on the pre-training loss as a more computation-efficient metric for performance estimation. Our two-stage approach consists of first estimating a function that maps computational resources (e.g., FLOPs) to the pre-training Loss using a series of sampling models, followed by mapping the pre-training loss to downstream task Performance after the critical "emergent phase". In preliminary experiments, this FLP solution accurately predicts the performance of LLMs with 7B and 13B parameters using a series of sampling LMs up to 3B, achieving error margins of 5% and 10%, respectively, and significantly outperforming the FLOPs-to-Performance approach. This motivates FLP-M, a fundamental approach for performance prediction that addresses the practical need to integrate datasets from multiple sources during pre-training, specifically blending general corpora with code data to accurately represent the common necessity. FLP-M extends the power law analytical function to predict domain-specific pre-training loss based on FLOPs across data sources, and employs a two-layer neural network to model the non-linear relationship between multiple domain-specific loss and downstream performance. By utilizing a 3B LLM trained on a specific ratio and a series of smaller sampling LMs, FLP-M can effectively forecast the performance of 3B and 7B LLMs across various data mixtures for most benchmarks within 10% error margins.

Predicting Downstream Performance in LLMs

Argument Generation is proposed, a prompting method that allows for better performance in smaller models. Additional tests show that surprisingly, prompting methods do not always elicit higher gains in larger models.

“Let’s Argue Both Sides”: Argument Generation Can Force Small Models to Utilize Previously Inaccessible Reasoning Capabilities

Accurate product categorization in e-commerce is critical for delivering a satisfactory online shopping experience to customers. With the vast number of available products and the numerous potential categories, it becomes crucial to develop a classification system capable of assigning products to their correct categories with high accuracy. We present a dual-expert classification system that utilizes the power of large language models (LLMs). This framework integrates domain-specific knowledge and pre-trained LLM’s general knowledge through effective model fine-tuning and prompting techniques. First, the fine-tuned domain-specific expert recommends top K candidate categories for a given input product. Then, the more general LLM-based expert, through prompting techniques, analyzes the nuanced differences between candidate categories and selects the most suitable target category. We introduce a new in-context learning approach that utilizes LLM self-generated summarization to provide clearer instructions and enhance its performance. Experiments on e-commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our LLM-based Dual-Expert classification system.

E-Commerce Product Categorization with LLM-based Dual-Expert Classification Paradigm

Working within specific NLP subdomains presents significant challenges, primarily due to a persistent deficit of data. Stringent privacy concerns and limited data accessibility often drive this shortage. Additionally, the medical domain demands high accuracy, where even marginal improvements in model performance can have profound impacts. In this study, we investigate the potential of vocabulary transfer to enhance model performance in biomedical NLP tasks. Specifically, we focus on vocabulary extension, a technique that involves expanding the target vocabulary to incorporate domain-specific biomedical terms. Our findings demonstrate that vocabulary extension, leads to measurable improvements in both downstream model performance and inference time.

Vocabulary Transfer for Biomedical Texts: Add Tokens if You Can Not Add Data

The concept of persona, originally adopted in dialogue literature, has re-surged as a promising framework for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific context (e.g., personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge). However, the growing research on leveraging persona in LLMs is relatively disorganized and lacks a systematic taxonomy. To close the gap, we present a comprehensive survey to categorize the current state of the field. We identify two lines of research, namely (1) LLM Role-Playing, where personas are assigned to LLMs, and (2) LLM Personalization, where LLMs take care of user personas. Additionally, we introduce existing methods for LLM personality evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first survey for role-playing and personalization in LLMs under the unified view of persona. We continuously maintain a paper collection to foster future endeavors.

Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), the focus in Conversational AI has shifted from merely generating coherent and relevant responses to tackling more complex challenges, such as personalizing dialogue systems. In an effort to enhance user engagement, chatbots are often designed to mimic human behaviour, responding within a defined emotional spectrum and aligning to a set of values. In this paper, we aim to simulate personal traits according to the Big Five model with the use of LLMs. Our research showed that generating personality-related texts is still a challenging task for the models. As a result, we present a dataset of generated texts with the predefined Big Five characteristics and provide an analytical framework for testing LLMs on a simulation of personality skills.

Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models to Simulate Personality

Few-shot learning benchmarks are critical for evaluating modern NLP techniques. It is possible, however, that benchmarks favor methods which easily make use of unlabeled text, because researchers can use unlabeled text from the test set to pretrain their models. Given the dearth of research on this potential problem, we run experiments to quantify the bias caused by pretraining on unlabeled test set text instead of on unlabeled, independently drawn text. Controlled few-shot and zero-shot experiments on 25 classification tasks and 3 language models -- BERT, GPT-2, and Mistral 7B -- do not find evidence of overoptimism. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of repeated subsampling when studying few-shot text classification, and recommend that few-shot learning benchmarks include multiple training folds. Code and data are available here: https:// github.com/kddubey/pretrain-on-test/.

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Customized Style Transfer using Discrete Sampling

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Customized Style Transfer using Discrete Sampling

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Is Safety Standard Same for Everyone? User-Specific Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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