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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling complex reasoning tasks by generating step-by-step rationales. Some methods have proven effective in boosting accuracy by introducing extra verifiers to assess these paths. However, existing verifiers, typically trained on binary-labeled reasoning paths, fail to fully utilize the relative merits of intermediate steps, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the feedback provided. To overcome this limitation, we propose Tree-based Preference Learning Verifier (Tree-PLV), a novel approach that constructs reasoning trees via a best-first search algorithm and collects step-level paired data for preference training. Compared to traditional binary classification, step-level preferences more finely capture the nuances between reasoning steps, allowing for a more precise evaluation of the complete reasoning path. We empirically evaluate Tree-PLV across a range of arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks, where it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks. For instance, Tree-PLV achieved substantial performance gains over the Mistral-7B self-consistency baseline on GSM8K (67.55% → 82.79%), MATH (17.00% → 26.80%), CSQA (68.14% → 72.97%), and StrategyQA (82.86% → 83.25%). Additionally, our study explores the appropriate granularity for applying preference learning, revealing that step-level guidance provides feedback that better aligns with the evaluation of the reasoning process.

EMNLP 2024

Advancing Process Verification for Large Language Models via Tree-Based Preference Learning

embedding inversion attack

model inference

privacy protection

## 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.

poster

With the rapidly-growing deployment of large language model (LLM) inference services, privacy concerns have arisen regarding to the user input data. Recent studies are exploring transforming user inputs to obfuscated embedded vectors, so that the data will not be eavesdropped by service provides. However, in this paper we show that again, without a solid and deliberate security design and analysis, such embedded vector obfuscation failed to protect users' privacy. We demonstrate the conclusion via conducting a novel inversion attack called Element-wise Differential Nearest Neighbor (EDNN) on the glide-reflection proposed in \cite{mishra2024sentinellms}, and the result showed that the original user input text can be 100% recovered from the obfuscated embedded vectors. We further analyze security requirements on embedding obfuscation and present several remedies to our proposed attack.

An Inversion Attack Against Obfuscated Embedding Matrix in Language Model Inference

Text style transfer (TST) is crucial in natural language processing, aiming to endow text with a new style without altering its meaning. In real-world scenarios, not all styles have abundant resources. This work introduces TWIST (reusing Transferable Weight Increments for Style Text generation), a novel framework to mitigate data scarcity by utilizing style features in weight increments to transfer low-resource styles effectively. During target style learning, we derive knowledge via a specially designed weight pool and initialize the parameters for the unseen style. To enhance the effectiveness of merging, the target style weight increments are often merged from multiple source style weight increments through singular vectors. Considering the diversity of styles, we also designed a multi-key memory network that simultaneously focuses on task- and instance-level information to derive the most relevant weight increments. Results from multiple style transfer datasets show that TWIST demonstrates remarkable performance across different backbones, achieving particularly effective results in low-resource scenarios.

Reusing Transferable Weight Increments for Low-resource Style Generation

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training. This study explores whether stronger reward models invariably lead to better language models. 
In this paper, through experiments on relevance, factuality, and completeness tasks using the QA-FEEDBACK dataset and reward models based on Longformer, we uncover a surprising paradox: language models trained with moderately accurate reward models outperform those guided by highly accurate ones. This challenges the widely held belief that stronger reward models always lead to better language models, and opens up new avenues for future research into the key factors driving model performance and how to choose the most suitable reward models.

Exploring Reward Model Strength's Impact on Language Models

Despite the remarkable progress made by large language models in mathematical reasoning, interactive theorem proving in formal logic still remains a prominent challenge. Previous methods resort to neural models for proofstep generation and search. However, they suffer from exploring possible proofsteps empirically in a large search space. Moreover, they directly use a less rigorous informal proof for proofstep generation, neglecting the incomplete reasoning within. In this paper, we propose BC-Prover, a backward chaining framework guided by pseudo steps. Specifically, BC-Prover prioritizes pseudo steps to proofstep generation. The pseudo steps boost the proof construction in two aspects: (1) Backward Chaining that decomposes the proof into sub-goals for goal-oriented exploration. (2) Step Planning that makes a fine-grained planning to bridge the gap between informal and formal proofs. Experiments on the miniF2F benchmark show significant performance gains by our framework over the state-of-the-art approaches. Our framework is also compatible with existing provers and further improves their performance with the backward chaining technique.

BC-Prover: Backward Chaining Prover for Formal Theorem Proving

The integration of visual and textual information represents a promising direction in the advancement of language models. In this paper, we explore the dual modality of language—both visual and textual—within an autoregressive framework, pre-trained on both document images and texts. Our method employs a multimodal training strategy, utilizing visual data through next patch prediction with a regression head and/or textual data through next token prediction with a classification head. We focus on understanding the interaction between these two modalities and their combined impact on model performance. Our extensive evaluation across a wide range of benchmarks shows that incorporating both visual and textual data significantly improves the performance of pixel-based language models. Remarkably, we find that a unidirectional pixel-based model trained solely on visual data can achieve comparable results to state-of-the-art bidirectional models on several language understanding tasks. This work uncovers the untapped potential of integrating visual and textual modalities for more effective language modeling. We release our code, data, and model checkpoints at https://github.com/ernie-research/pixelgpt.

Dual Modalities of Text: Visual and Textual Generative Pre-Training

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to generate text with citations to evidence sources can mitigate hallucinations and enhance verifiability in information-seeking systems. However, improving this capability requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive. Inspired by recent advances in self-improvement that enhance LLMs without manual annotation, we present START, a Self-Taught AttRibuTion framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of LLMs. First, to prevent models from stagnating due to initially insufficient supervision signals, START leverages the model to self-construct synthetic training data for warming up. To further self-improve the model's attribution ability, START iteratively utilizes fine-grained preference supervision signals constructed from its sampled responses to encourage robust, comprehensive, and attributable generation. Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets, covering long-form QA and multi-step reasoning, demonstrate significant performance gains of 25.13% on average without relying on human annotations and more advanced models. Further analysis reveals that START excels in aggregating information across multiple sources.

Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving

Translation systems, including foundation models capable of translation, can produce errors that result in gender mistranslation, and such errors can be especially harmful. To measure the extent of such potential harms when translating into and out of English, we introduce a dataset, MiTTenS, covering 26 languages from a variety of language families and scripts, including several traditionally under-represented in digital resources. The dataset is constructed with handcrafted passages that target known failure patterns, longer synthetically generated passages, and natural passages sourced from multiple domains. We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset by evaluating both neural machine translation systems and foundation models, and show that all systems exhibit gender mistranslation and potential harm, even in high resource languages.

MiTTenS: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender Mistranslation

Hate speech (HS) on social media exacerbates misinformation and baseless prejudices. Evidence-supported counterspeech (CS) is crucial for correcting misinformation and reducing prejudices through facts. Existing methods for generating evidence-supported CS often lack clear guidance with a core claim for organizing evidence and do not adequately address factuality and faithfulness hallucinations in CS within anti-hate contexts. In this paper, to mitigate the aforementioned, we propose F$^2$RL, a Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning framework for generating claim-guided and evidence-supported CS. Firstly, we generate counter-claims based on hate speech and design a self-evaluation mechanism to select the most appropriate one. Secondly, we propose a coarse-to-fine evidence retrieval method. This method initially generates broad queries to ensure the diversity of evidence, followed by carefully reranking the retrieved evidence to ensure its relevance to the claim. Finally, we design a reinforcement learning method with a triplet-based factuality reward model and a multi-aspect faithfulness reward model. The method rewards the generator to encourage greater factuality, more accurate refutation of hate speech, consistency with the claim, and better utilization of evidence. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves excellent performance in CS generation, with strong factuality and faithfulness.

F$^2$RL: Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning Framework for Claim-Guided Evidence-Supported Counterspeech Generation

Program-of-Thought (PoT) replaces natural language-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT) as the most popular method in Large Language Models (LLMs) mathematical reasoning tasks by utilizing external tool calls to circumvent computational errors. However, our evaluation of the GPT-4 and Llama series reveals that using PoT introduces more reasoning errors, such as incorrect formulas or flawed logic, compared to CoT. To address this issue, we propose Human-Think Language (HTL), which leverages a suite of strategies that help integrate PoT and CoT, encompassing: (1) a new generation paradigm that uses full CoT reasoning to control code generation. (2) Focus Attention, that directs model attention to the CoT reasoning during PoT to generate more logical code. (3) reinforcement learning that utilizes the accuracy of both CoT and PoT responses as rewards to prevent repetitive reasoning steps in LLMs when solving difficult math problems. Our method achieves an average improvement of 6.5% on the Llama-Base model and 4.3% on the Mistral-Base model across 8 mathematical calculation datasets. It also shows significant effectiveness on five out-of-domain datasets by controlling the model's information flow, exhibiting strong transferability. Additionally, HTL shows the most significant improvement in non-mathematical natural language inference task, contributing to a unified reasoning task framework.

How Do Humans Write Code? Large Models Do It the Same Way Too

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has significantly improved performance in various vision-language tasks by expanding the dataset with image-text pairs obtained from the web. This paper further explores CLIP from the perspectives of data and model architecture. To mitigate the impact of the noise data and enhance the quality of large-scale image-text data crawled from the internet, we introduce a diverse description generation framework that can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to combine and refine information from web-based image-text pairs, synthetic captions, and detection tags. Additionally, we propose RWKV-CLIP, the first RWKV-driven vision-language representation learning model that combines the effective parallel training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. Extensive experiments across different model scales and pre-training datasets demonstrate that RWKV-CLIP is a robust vision-language representation learner and it achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks, including linear probing, zero-shot classification, and zero-shot image-text retrieval. To facilitate future research, the code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/deepglint/RWKV-CLIP.

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An Inversion Attack Against Obfuscated Embedding Matrix in Language Model Inference

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