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Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown capabilities close to human performance in various analytical tasks, leading researchers to use them for time and labor-intensive analyses. However, their capability to handle highly specialized and open-ended tasks in domains like policy studies remains in question. This paper investigates the efficiency and accuracy of LLMs in specialized tasks through a structured user study focusing on Human-LLM partnership. The study, conducted in two stages—Topic Discovery and Topic Assignment—integrates LLMs with expert annotators to observe the impact of LLM suggestions on what is usually human-only analysis. Results indicate that LLM-generated topic lists have significant overlap with human generated topic lists, with minor hiccups in missing document-specific topics. However, LLM suggestions may significantly improve task completion speed, but at the same time introduce anchoring bias, potentially affecting the depth and nuance of the analysis, raising a critical question about the trade-off between increased efficiency and the risk of biased analysis.

EMNLP 2024

The LLM Effect: Are Humans Truly Using LLMs, or Are They Being Influenced By Them Instead?

child language development

curricularization

learning efficiency

babylm challenge

tinydialogues

child-directed speech

data quality

synthetic data

language acquisition

data efficiency

roberta

pretraining

gpt-2

curriculum learning

language models

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.

Language models, characterized by their black-box nature, often hallucinate and display sensitivity to input perturbations, causing concerns about trust. To enhance trust, it is imperative to gain a comprehensive understanding of the model's failure modes and develop effective strategies to improve their performance. In this study, we introduce a methodology designed to examine how input perturbations affect language models across various scales, including pre-trained models and large language models (LLMs). Utilizing fine-tuning, we enhance the model's robustness to input perturbations. Additionally, we investigate whether exposure to one perturbation enhances or diminishes the model's performance with respect to other perturbations. To address robustness against multiple perturbations, we present three distinct fine-tuning strategies. Furthermore, we broaden the scope of our methodology to encompass large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a chain of thought (CoT) prompting approach augmented with exemplars. We employ the Tabular-NLI task to showcase how our proposed strategies adeptly train a robust model, enabling it to address diverse perturbations while maintaining accuracy on the original dataset.

Evaluating Concurrent Robustness of Language Models Across Diverse Challenge Sets

Understanding whether a generated table is of good quality is important to be able to use it in creating or editing documents using automatic methods. In this work, we underline that existing measures for table quality evaluation fail to capture the overall semantics of the tables, and sometimes unfairly penalize good tables and reward bad ones. We propose TabEval, a novel table evaluation strategy that captures table semantics by first breaking down a table into a list of natural language atomic statements and then compares them with ground truth statements using entailment-based measures. To validate our approach, we curate a dataset comprising of text descriptions for 1,250 diverse Wikipedia tables, covering a range of topics and structures, in contrast to the limited scope of existing datasets.\footnote{We will release the dataset upon acceptance.} We compare TabEval with existing metrics using unsupervised and supervised text-to-table generation methods, demonstrating its stronger correlation with human judgments of table quality across four datasets.

Is This a Bad Table? A Closer Look at the Evaluation of Table Generation from Text

Developing effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedical tasks but still challenging due to the lack of sufficient publicly annotated biomedical data and computational resources. We present BMRetriever, a series of dense retrievers for enhancing biomedical retrieval via unsupervised pre-training on large biomedical corpora, followed by instruction fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets and synthetic pairs. Experiments on 5 biomedical tasks across 11 datasets verify BMRetriever's efficacy on various biomedical applications. BMRetriever also exhibits strong parameter efficiency, with the 410M variant outperforming baselines up to 11.7 times larger, and the 2B variant matching the performance of models with over 5B parameters. The training data and model checkpoints are released at https://huggingface.co/BMRetriever to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and application to new domains.

BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text Retrievers

Despite their improved capabilities in generation and reasoning, adapting large language models (LLMs) to the biomedical domain remains challenging due to their immense size and privacy concerns. In this study, we propose MedAdapter, a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of LLMs towards biomedical applications. Instead of fine-tuning the entire LLM, MedAdapter effectively adapts the original model by fine-tuning only a small BERT-sized adapter to rank candidate solutions generated by LLMs. Experiments on four biomedical tasks across eight datasets demonstrate that MedAdapter effectively adapts both white-box and black-box LLMs in biomedical reasoning, achieving average performance improvements of 18.24% and 10.96%, respectively, without requiring extensive computational resources or sharing data with third parties. MedAdapter also yields enhanced performance when combined with train-time adaptation, highlighting a flexible and complementary solution to existing adaptation methods. Faced with the challenges of balancing model performance, computational resources, and data privacy, MedAdapter provides an efficient, privacy-preserving, cost-effective, and transparent solution for adapting LLMs to the biomedical domain.

MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical Reasoning

Code generation models are not robust to small perturbations, which often lead to incorrect generations and significantly degrade the performance of these models. Although improving the robustness of code generation models is crucial to enhancing user experience in real-world applications, existing research efforts do not address this issue. To fill this gap, we propose CodeFort, a framework to improve the robustness of code generation models, generalizing a large variety of code perturbations to enrich the training data and enabling various robust training strategies, mixing data augmentation, batch augmentation, adversarial logits pairing, and contrastive learning, all carefully designed to support high-throughput training. Extensive evaluations show that we increase the average robust pass rates of baseline CodeGen models from 14.79 to 21.74. We notably decrease the robustness drop rate from 95.02% to 54.95% against code-syntax perturbations.

CodeFort: Robust Training for Code Generation Models

We present LoCoVQA, a dynamic benchmark generator for evaluating long-context reasoning in vision language models (VLMs). LoCoVQA augments test examples for mathematical reasoning, VQA, and character recognition tasks with increasingly long visual contexts composed of both in-distribution and out-of-distribution distractor images.

Across these tasks, a diverse set of VLMs rapidly lose performance as the visual context length grows, often exhibiting a striking logarithmic decay trend. This test assesses how well VLMs can ignore irrelevant information when answering queries---a task that is quite easy for language models (LMs) in the text domain---demonstrating that current state-of-the-art VLMs lack this essential capability for many long-context applications.

Losing Visual Needles in Image Haystacks: Vision Language Models are Easily Distracted in Short and Long Contexts

In this paper, we study an under-explored area of language and vocabulary learning: keyword mnemonics, a technique for memorizing vocabulary through memorable associations with a target word via a verbal cue. Typically, creating verbal cues requires extensive human effort and is quite time-consuming, necessitating an automated method that is more scalable. We propose a novel overgenerate-and-rank method via prompting large language models (LLMs) to generate verbal cues and then ranking them according to psycholinguistic measures and takeaways from a pilot user study. To assess cue quality, we conduct both an automated evaluation of imageability and coherence, as well as a human evaluation involving English teachers and learners. Results show that LLM-generated mnemonics are comparable to human-generated ones in terms of imageability, coherence, and perceived usefulness, but there remains plenty of room for improvement due to the diversity in background and preference among language learners.

Exploring Automated Keyword Mnemonics Generation with Large Language Models via Overgenerate-and-Rank

To ensure that math curriculum is grade-appropriate and aligns with critical skills or concepts in accordance with educational standards, pedagogical experts can spend months carefully reviewing published math problems. Drawing inspiration from this process, our work presents a novel angle for evaluating language models' (LMs) mathematical abilities, by investigating whether they can discern skills and concepts enabled by math content. We contribute two datasets: one consisting of 385 fine-grained descriptions of K-12 math skills and concepts, or *standards*, from Achieve the Core (*ATC*), and another of 9.9K math problems labeled with these standards (*MathFish*). We develop two tasks for evaluating LMs' abilities to assess math problems: (1) verifying whether a problem aligns with a given standard, and (2) tagging a problem with all aligned standards. Working with experienced teachers, we find that LMs struggle to tag and verify standards linked to problems, and instead predict labels that are close to ground truth, but differ in subtle ways. We also show that LMs often generate problems that do not fully align with standards described in prompts, suggesting the need for careful scrutiny on use cases involving LMs for generating curricular materials. Finally, we categorize problems in GSM8k using math standards, allowing us to better understand why some problems are more difficult to solve for models than others.

Evaluating Language Model Math Reasoning via Grounding in Educational Curricula

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit advanced proficiency in language reasoning and comprehension across a wide array of languages. While their performance is notably robust in well-resourced languages, their capabilities in low-resource languages, such as Bahasa Melayu (hereinafter referred to as $\textit{Malay}$), remain less explored due to a scarcity of dedicated studies and benchmarks. To enhance our understanding of LLMs/LVLMs performance
in Malay, we introduce the first multi-task language understanding benchmark specifically for this language, named MalayMMLU. This
benchmark comprises 24,213 questions spanning both primary (Year 1-6) and secondary (Form 1-5) education levels in Malaysia, encompassing 5 broad topics that further divided into 22 subjects. We conducted an empirical evaluation of 44 LLMs/LVLMs, assessing their proficiency in both Malay and the nuanced contexts of Malaysian culture using this benchmark. The benchmark and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/UMxYTL-AI-Labs/MalayMMLU.

MalayMMLU: A Multitask Benchmark for the Low-Resource Malay Language

High-quality text generation capability of latest Large Language Models (LLMs) causes concerns about their misuse (e.g., in massive generation/spread of disinformation). Machine-generated text (MGT) detection is important to cope with such threats. However, it is susceptible to authorship obfuscation (AO) methods, such as paraphrasing, which can cause MGTs to evade detection. So far, this was evaluated only in monolingual settings. Thus, the susceptibility of recently proposed multilingual detectors is still unknown. We fill this gap by comprehensively benchmarking the performance of 10 well-known AO methods, attacking 37 MGT detection methods against MGTs in 11 languages (i.e., 10 × 37 × 11 = 4,070 combinations). We also evaluate the effect of data augmentation on adversarial robustness using obfuscated texts. The results indicate that all tested AO methods can cause evasion of automated detection in all tested languages, where homoglyph attacks are especially successful. However, some of the AO methods severely damaged the text, making it no longer readable or easily recognizable by humans (e.g., changed language, weird characters).

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The LLM Effect: Are Humans Truly Using LLMs, or Are They Being Influenced By Them Instead?

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Evaluating Concurrent Robustness of Language Models Across Diverse Challenge Sets

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