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In-context learning (ICL) has demonstrated excellent performance across various downstream NLP tasks, especially when synergized with powerful large language models (LLMs). 
Existing studies evaluate ICL methods primarily based on downstream task performance. This evaluation protocol overlooks the significant cost associated with the demonstration configuration process, i.e., tuning the demonstration as the ICL prompt. However, in this work, we point out that the evaluation protocol leads to unfair comparisons and potentially biased evaluation, because we surprisingly find the correlation between the configuration costs and task performance. Then we call for a two-dimensional evaluation paradigm that considers both of these aspects, facilitating a fairer comparison.
Finally, based on our empirical finding that the optimized demonstration on one language model generalizes across language models of different sizes, we introduce a simple yet efficient strategy that can be applied to any ICL method as a plugin, yielding a better trade-off between the two dimensions according to the proposed evaluation paradigm.

EMNLP 2024

Rethinking the Evaluation of In-Context Learning for LLMs

unsupervised probing

interpretability

poster

## 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.

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven considerable interest in fine-tuning them with domain-specific data to create specialized language models. Nevertheless, such domain-specific fine-tuning data often contains contextually sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). Direct fine-tuning LLMs on this data without privacy protection poses a risk of data leakage of sensitive PII during inference time. To address this challenge, we introduce Contextual Privacy Protection Language Models (CPPLM), a novel paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. Our work offers a theoretical analysis for model design and delves into various techniques such as corpus curation, penalty-based unlikelihood in training loss, and instruction-based tuning, etc. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. In particular, instruction tuning with both positive and negative examples, stands out as a promising method, effectively protecting private data while enhancing the model’s knowledge. Our work underscores the potential for Large Language Models as robust contextual privacy protection learners.

Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is vital for real-world applications, as they combine semantic textual and contextual structural information. Research in this field generally consist of two main perspectives: local-level encoding and global-level aggregating, respectively refer to textual node information unification ($e.g.$, using Language Models) and structure-augmented modeling ($e.g.$, using Graph Neural Networks). Most existing works focus on combining different information levels but overlook the interconnections, $i.e.$, the contextual textual information among nodes, which provides semantic insights to bridge local and global levels. In this paper, we propose GraphBridge, a $multi-granularity integration$ framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information, enhancing fine-grained understanding of TAGs. Besides, to tackle scalability and efficiency challenges, we introduce a graph-aware token reduction module. Extensive experiments across various models and datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while our graph-aware token reduction module significantly enhances efficiency and solves scalability issues. Codes are available at https://github.com/wykk00/GraphBridge.

Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs

Most works on gender bias focus on intrinsic bias --- removing traces of information about a protected group from the model's internal representation. However, these works are often disconnected from the impact of such debiasing on downstream applications, which is the main motivation for debiasing in the first place. In this work, we systematically test how methods for intrinsic debiasing affect neural machine translation models, by measuring the extrinsic bias of such systems under different design choices. We highlight three challenges and mismatches between the debiasing techniques and their end-goal usage, including the choice of embeddings to debias, the mismatch between words and sub-word tokens debiasing, and the effect on different target languages. We find that these considerations have a significant impact on downstream performance and the success of debiasing.

Applying Intrinsic Debiasing on Downstream Tasks: Challenges and Considerations for Machine Translation

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a crucial approach to aligning language models with human values and intentions. A fundamental challenge in this method lies in ensuring that the reward model accurately understands and evaluates human preferences. Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach the reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions. To address this issue, we introduce contrastive learning into the reward modeling process. In addition to supervised ranking loss, we introduce an unsupervised contrastive loss to enable the reward model to fully capture the distinctions in contrastive data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed contrastive learning-based reward modeling method effectively enhances the generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences.

Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning

Although language model scores are often treated as probabilities, their reliability as probability estimators has mainly been studied through calibration, overlooking other aspects. In particular, it is unclear whether language models produce the same value for different ways of assigning joint probabilities to word spans. Our work introduces a novel framework, ConTestS (Consistency Testing over Spans), involving statistical tests to assess score consistency across interchangeable completion and conditioning orders. We conduct experiments on post-release real and synthetic data to eliminate training effects. Our findings reveal that both Masked Language Models (MLMs) and autoregressive models exhibit inconsistent predictions, with autoregressive models showing larger discrepancies. Larger MLMs tend to produce more consistent predictions, while autoregressive models show the opposite trend. Moreover, for both model types, prediction entropies offer insights into the true word span likelihood and therefore can aid in selecting optimal decoding strategies. The inconsistencies revealed by our analysis, as well their connection to prediction entropies and differences between model types, can serve as useful guides for future research on addressing these limitations.

CONTESTS: a Framework for Consistency Testing of Span Probabilities in Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability for text generation. However, achieving optimal results with a given prompt or instruction can be challenging, especially for billion-sized models. Additionally, undesired behaviors such as toxicity or hallucinations can manifest. While much larger models (e.g., ChatGPT) may demonstrate strength in mitigating these issues, there is still no guarantee of complete prevention. In this work, we propose formalizing text generation as a future-constrained generation problem to minimize undesirable behaviors and enforce faithfulness to instructions. The estimation of future constraint satisfaction, accomplished using LLMs, guides the text generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach across three distinct text generation tasks: keyword-constrained generation (Lin et al., 2020), toxicity reduction (Gehman et al., 2020), and factual correctness in question-answering (Gao et al., 2023).

Unlocking Anticipatory Text Generation: A Constrained Approach for Large Language Models Decoding

Language models can greatly benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm, a simple and reliable method. BPE has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal compression that may affect the downstream performance. We introduce PickyBPE, a modified BPE algorithm that carries out vocabulary refinement during tokenizer training by removing merges that leave intermediate "junk" tokens. Our method improves vocabulary efficiency, eliminates under-trained tokens, and does not compromise text compression. Our experiments show that this method either improves downstream performance or does not harm it.

BPE Gets Picky: Efficient Vocabulary Refinement During Tokenizer Training

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are instrumental in various real-world applications, yet they often suffer from incompleteness due to missing relations. To predict instances for novel relations with limited training examples, few-shot relation learning approaches have emerged, utilizing techniques such as meta-learning. However, the assumption is that novel relations in meta-testing and base relations in meta-training are independently and identically distributed, which may not hold in practice. To address the limitation, we propose RelAdapter, a context-aware adapter for few-shot relation learning in KGs designed to enhance the adaptation process in meta-learning. First, RelAdapter is equipped with a lightweight adapter module that facilitates relation-specific, tunable adaptation of meta-knowledge in a parameter-efficient manner. Second, RelAdapter is enriched with contextual information about the target relation, enabling enhanced adaptation to each distinct relation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark KGs validate the superiority of RelAdapter over state-of-the-art methods.

Context-Aware Adapter Tuning for Few-Shot Relation Learning in Knowledge Graphs

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has exposed vulnerabilities to various adversarial attacks. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of jailbreaking research targeting both LLMs and MLLMs, highlighting recent advancements in evaluation benchmarks, attack techniques and defense strategies. Compared to the more advanced state of unimodal jailbreaking, multimodal domain remains underexplored. We summarize the limitations and potential research directions of multimodal jailbreaking, aiming to inspire future research and further enhance the robustness and security of MLLMs.

From LLMs to MLLMs: Exploring the Landscape of Multimodal Jailbreaking

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) significantly enhances the generation quality of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have raised concerns regarding the complexity and instability associated with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, proposing a series of order-based alignment methods as viable alternatives. This paper delves into existing order-based methods, unifying them into one framework and examining their inefficiencies in utilizing reward values. Building upon these findings, we propose a new Value-based Calibration (VCB) method to better align LLMs with human preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that VCB surpasses existing alignment methods on AI assistant and summarization datasets, providing impressive generalizability, robustness, and diversity in different settings.

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Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners

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