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Multimodal intent detection is designed to leverage diverse modalities for a comprehensive understanding of user intentions in real-world scenarios, thus playing a critical role in modern task-oriented dialogue systems. Existing methods have made great progress in modal alignment and fusion, however, two vital limitations are neglected: (I) close entanglement of multimodal semantics with modal structures; (II) insufficient learning of the causal effects of semantic and modality-specific information on the final predictions under the end-to-end training fashion. To alleviate the above limitations, we introduce the Dual-oriented Disentangled Network with Counterfactual Intervention (DuoDN). DuoDN addresses key limitations in current systems by effectively disentangling and utilizing modality-specific and multimodal semantic information. The model consists of a Dual-oriented Disentangled Encoder that decouples semantics-oriented and modality-oriented representations, alongside a Counterfactual Intervention Module that applies causal inference to understand causal effects by injecting confounders. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate DuoDN&#39;s superiority over existing methods, with extensive analysis validating its advantages.

EMNLP 2024

Dual-oriented Disentangled Network with Counterfactual Intervention for Multimodal Intent Detection

multimodal jailbreaking

jailbreak attack

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Multimodal intent detection is designed to leverage diverse modalities for a comprehensive understanding of user intentions in real-world scenarios, thus playing a critical role in modern task-oriented dialogue systems. Existing methods have made great progress in modal alignment and fusion, however, two vital limitations are neglected: (I) close entanglement of multimodal semantics with modal structures; (II) insufficient learning of the causal effects of semantic and modality-specific information on the final predictions under the end-to-end training fashion. To alleviate the above limitations, we introduce the Dual-oriented Disentangled Network with Counterfactual Intervention (DuoDN). DuoDN addresses key limitations in current systems by effectively disentangling and utilizing modality-specific and multimodal semantic information. The model consists of a Dual-oriented Disentangled Encoder that decouples semantics-oriented and modality-oriented representations, alongside a Counterfactual Intervention Module that applies causal inference to understand causal effects by injecting confounders. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate DuoDN's superiority over existing methods, with extensive analysis validating its advantages.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in various tasks, yet their effectiveness in predicting disease progression remains relatively unexplored. To fill this gap, we use LLMs and employ advanced graph prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to predict disease comorbidity within disease networks. Specifically, we introduce a disease Comorbidity prediction model using LLM, named ComLLM, which leverages domain knowledge to enhance the prediction performance. Based on the comprehensive experimental results, ComLLM consistently outperforms conventional models, such as Graph Neural Networks, achieving average area under the curve (AUC) improvements of 10.70% and 6.07% over the best baseline models in two distinct disease networks. ComLLM is evaluated across multiple settings for disease progression prediction, employing various prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, graph prompting and RAG. Our results show that graph prompting and RAG enhance LLM performance in disease progression prediction tasks. ComLLM exhibits superior predictive capabilities and serves as a proof-of-concept for LLM-based systems in disease progression prediction, highlighting its potential for broad applications in healthcare.

Can Large Language Models Enhance Predictions of Disease Progression? Investigating Through Disease Network Link Prediction

Recent work has revealed that in-context learning for large language models exhibits compositional generalization capacity, which can be enhanced by selecting in-context demonstrations similar to test cases to provide contextual information. However, how to exhibit in-context compositional generalization (ICCG) of large vision-language models (LVLMs) is non-trival. Due to the inherent asymmetry between visual and linguistic modalities, ICCG in LVLMs faces an inevitable challenge---redundant information on the visual modality. The redundant information affects in-context learning from two aspects: (1) Similarity calculation may be dominated by redundant information, resulting in sub-optimal demonstration selection. (2) Redundant information in in-context demonstrations brings misleading contextual information to in-context learning. To alleviate these problems, we propose a demonstration selection method to achieve ICCG for LVLMs, by considering two key factors of demonstrations: content and structure, from a multimodal perspective. Specifically, we design a diversity-coverage-based matching score to select demonstrations with maximum coverage, and avoid selecting demonstrations with redundant information via their content redundancy and structural complexity. We build a GQA-ICCG dataset to simulate the ICCG setting, and conduct experiments on GQA-ICCG and the VQA v2 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

In-Context Compositional Generalization for Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) may produce outputs that are unfaithful to reality, also known as visual hallucinations (VH), which hinders their application in multimodal understanding and decision-making. In this work, we introduce a novel plug-and-play train-free decoding algorithm named Game and Tree based Hallucination Mitigation (GTHM), designed for mitigating VH. GTHM is inspired by empirical observations that the fuzziness of multi-granularity view perception exacerbates VH. Based on this, GTHM leverages visual information to construct a coarse-to-fine visual view tree (CFTree) that organizes visual objects, attributes, and relationships in a hierarchical manner. Additionally, we innovatively model the optimal visual-token matching process on the CFTree as the cooperative game. Specifically, we define the Tree-based Shapley Value (TSV) for each visual view on the CFTree to assess its significant contribution to the overall visual understanding, thereby determining the optimal visual granularity. Subsequently, we utilize the TSV as guidance to implement adaptive weight contrastive decoding to achieve vision-aware decoding. Extensive experiments on four popular benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our GTHM in alleviating VH across different LVLM families without additional training or post-processing. Our code is published at https://github.com/mengchuang123/GTHM.

Game on Tree: Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Coarse-to-Fine View Tree and Game Theory

Human lexicons contain many different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., *purple* or *magenta* for the same shade of color. On the one hand, studies on language use have explored how speakers adapt their referring expressions to successfully communicate in context, without focusing on properties of the lexical system. On the other hand, studies in language evolution have discussed how competing pressures for informativeness and simplicity shape lexical systems, without tackling in-context communication. We aim at bridging the gap between these traditions, and explore why a soft mapping between referents and words is a good solution for communication, by taking into account both in-context communication and the structure of the lexicon. We propose a simple measure of informativeness for words and lexical systems, grounded in a visual space, and analyze color naming data for English and Mandarin Chinese. We conclude that optimal lexical systems are those where multiple words can apply to the same referent, conveying different amounts of information. Such systems allow speakers to maximize communication accuracy and minimize the amount of information they convey when communicating about referents in contexts.

Why do objects have many names? A study on word informativeness in language use and lexical systems.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices presents significant challenges due to the substantial computational overhead and memory requirements. Activation sparsification can mitigate these resource challenges by reducing the number of activated neurons during inference. Existing methods typically employ thresholding-based sparsification based on the statistics of activation tensors. However, they do not model the impact of activation sparsification on performance, resulting in suboptimal performance degradation. To address the limitations, this paper reformulates the activation sparsification problem to explicitly capture the relationship between activation sparsity and model performance. Then, this paper proposes CHESS, a general activation sparsification approach via CHannel-wise thrEsholding and Selective Sparsification. First, channel-wise thresholding assigns a unique threshold to each activation channel in the feed-forward network (FFN) layers. Then, selective sparsification involves applying thresholding-based activation sparsification to specific layers within the attention modules. Finally, we detail the implementation of sparse kernels to accelerate LLM inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CHESS achieves lower performance degradation over eight downstream tasks while activating fewer parameters than existing methods, thus speeding up the LLM inference by up to 1.27x.

CHESS: Optimizing LLM Inference via Channel-Wise Thresholding and Selective Sparsification

To study the requirements needed for a human-like language to develop, Language Emergence research uses jointly trained artificial agents which communicate to solve a task, the most popular of which is a referential game. The targets that agents refer to typically involve a single entity, which limits their ecological validity and the complexity of the emergent languages. Here, we present a simple multi-entity game in which targets include multiple entities that are spatially related. We ask whether agents dealing with multi-entity targets benefit from the use of graph representations, and explore four different graph schemes. Our game requires more sophisticated analyses to capture the extent to which the emergent languages are compositional, and crucially, what the decomposed features are. We find that emergent languages from our setup exhibit a considerable degree of compositionality, but not over all features.

The Emergence of Compositional Languages in Multi-entity Referential Games: from Image to Graph Representations

Zero-shot temporal action localization (TAL) aims to temporally localize actions in videos without prior training examples. To address the challenges of TAL, we offer GRIZAL, a model that uses multimodal embeddings and dynamic motion cues to localize actions effectively. GRIZAL achieves sample diversity by using large-scale generative models such as GPT-4 for generating textual augmentations and DALL-E for generating image augmentations. Our model integrates vision-language embeddings with optical flow insights, optimized through a blend of supervised and self-supervised loss functions. On ActivityNet, Thumos14 and Charades-STA datasets, GRIZAL greatly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TAL models, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability across a wide range of video content. We will make all the models and code publicly available by open-sourcing them.

GRIZAL: Generative Prior-guided Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization

The emergence of personalized generation has made it possible to create texts or images that meet the unique needs of users. Recent advances mainly focus on style or scene transfer based on given keywords. However, in e-commerce and recommender systems, it is almost an untouched area to explore user historical interactions, automatically mine user interests with semantic associations, and create item representations that closely align with user individual interests.

In this paper, we propose a brand new framework called **I**nterest-**A**ugmented **M**ultimodal **G**enerator (**I-AM-G**). The framework first extracts tags from the multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with, and the most frequently occurred ones are extracted to rewrite the text description of the item. Then, the framework uses a decoupled text-to-text and image-to-image retriever to search for the top-$K$ similar item text and image embeddings from the item pool. Finally, the Attention module for user interests fuses the retrieved information in a cross-modal manner and further guides the personalized generation process in collaboration with the rewritten text.

We conducted extensive and comprehensive experiments to demonstrate that our framework can effectively generate results aligned with user preferences, which potentially provides a new paradigm of **Rewrite and Retrieve** for personalized generation.

I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization

Iterative data generation and model re-training can effectively align large language models~(LLMs) to human preferences. The process of data sampling is crucial, as it significantly influences the success of policy improvement. Repeated random sampling is a widely used method that independently queries the model multiple times to generate outputs. In this work, we propose a more effective sampling method, named Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling (PRS). Unlike random sampling, PRS employs a tree-based generation framework to enable more efficient sampling. It leverages adaptive self-refinement techniques to better explore the sampling space. By specifying user preferences in natural language, PRS can further optimize response generation according to these preferences. As a result, PRS can align models to diverse user preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that PRS generates higher-quality responses with significantly higher rewards. On AlpacaEval and Arena-Hard, PRS substantially outperforms repeated random sampling in best-of-$N$ sampling. Moreover, PRS shows strong performance when applied in iterative offline RL training.

Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling for Aligning Language Models

Ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as they become integral to applications like translation and question answering. Current alignment methods struggle with dynamic user intentions and complex objectives, making models vulnerable to generating harmful content. We propose Safety Arithmetic, a training-free framework enhancing LLM safety across different scenarios: Base models, Supervised fine-tuned models (SFT), and Edited models. Safety Arithmetic involves Harm Direction Removal to avoid harmful content and Safety Alignment to promote safe responses. Additionally, we present NoIntentEdit, a dataset highlighting edit instances that could compromise model safety if used unintentionally. Our experiments show that Safety Arithmetic significantly improves safety measures, reduces over-safety, and maintains model utility, outperforming existing methods in ensuring safe content generation.

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Dual-oriented Disentangled Network with Counterfactual Intervention for Multimodal Intent Detection

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Can Large Language Models Enhance Predictions of Disease Progression? Investigating Through Disease Network Link Prediction

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