United States

In various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) often leads to the issue of spurious correlations, which negatively impacts performance, particularly when dealing with out-of-distribution data. To address this problem, we propose **SALAD** (**S**tructure **A**ware and **L**LM-driven **A**ugmented **D**ata), a novel approach designed to enhance model robustness and generalization by generating structure-aware and counterfactually augmented data for contrastive learning. Our method leverages a tagging-based approach to generate structure-aware positive samples and utilizes large language models (LLMs) to generate counterfactual negative samples with diverse sentence patterns. By applying contrastive learning, *SALAD* enables the model to focus on learning the structural relationships between key sentence components while minimizing reliance on spurious correlations. We validate our approach through experiments on three tasks: Sentiment Classification, Sexism Detection, and Natural Language Inference. The results demonstrate that *SALAD* not only improves model robustness and performance across different environments but also enhances generalization to out-of-distribution datasets and cross-domain scenarios.

NAACL 2025

SALAD: Improving Robustness and Generalization through Contrastive Learning with Structure-Aware and LLM-Driven Augmented Data

data shortcuts/artifacts

counterfactual/contrastive explanations

robustness

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Understanding how linguistic knowledge is encoded in language models is crucial for improving their generalisation capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the processing of morphosyntactic phenomena, by leveraging a recently proposed method for probing language models via Shapley Head Values (SHVs). Using the English language BLiMP dataset, we test our approach on two widely used models, BERT and RoBERTa, and compare how linguistic constructions such as anaphor agreement and filler-gap dependencies are handled. Through quantitative pruning and qualitative clustering analysis, we demonstrate that attention heads responsible for processing related linguistic phenomena cluster together. Our results show that SHV-based attributions reveal distinct patterns across both models, providing insights into how language models organize and process linguistic information. These findings support the hypothesis that language models learn subnetworks corresponding to linguistic theory, with potential implications for cross-linguistic model analysis and interpretability in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Linguistically Grounded Analysis of Language Models using Shapley Head Values

Superposition refers to encoding representations of multiple features within a single neuron, which is common in deep neural networks. This property allows neurons to combine and represent multiple features, enabling the model to capture intricate information and handle complex tasks. Despite promising performance, the model's interpretability has been diminished. This paper presents a novel approach to enhance model interpretability by regularizing feature superposition. We introduce SAFR, which simply applies regularizations to the loss function to promote monosemantic representations for important tokens while encouraging polysemanticity for correlated token pairs, where important tokens and correlated token pairs are identified via VMASK and attention weights respectively. We evaluate SAFR with a transformer model on two classification tasks. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SAFR in improving model interpretability without compromising prediction performance. Besides, SAFR provides explanations by visualizing the neuron allocation within the intermediate layers.

SAFR: Neuron Redistribution for Interpretability

The rapid expansion of text data has increased the need for effective methods to distill meaningful information from large datasets. Traditional and state-of-the-art approaches have made significant strides in topic modeling, yet they fall short in generating contextually specific and semantically intuitive topics, particularly in dynamic environments and low-resource languages. Additionally, multi-document summarization systems often struggle with issues like redundancy, scalability, and maintaining readability. We introduce FIDELITY (Fine-grained Interpretable Distillation for Effective Language Insights and Topic Yielding), a hybrid method that combines topic modeling and text summarization to produce fine-grained, semantically rich, and contextually relevant output. FIDELITY enhances dataset accessibility and interpretability, outperforming traditional models in topic diversity, similarity, and in the ability to process new, unseen documents. Additionally, it demonstrates robust multilingual capabilities, effectively handling low-resource languages like Tagalog. This makes FIDELITY a powerful tool for distilling and understanding complex textual data, providing detailed insights while maintaining the necessary granularity for practical applications.

FIDELITY: Fine-grained Interpretable Distillation for Effective Language Insights and Topic Yielding

This study analyzes the attention patterns of fine-tuned encoder-only models based on the BERT architecture (BERT-based models) towards two distinct types of Multiword Expressions (MWEs): idioms and microsyntactic units (MSUs). Idioms present challenges in semantic non-compositionality, whereas MSUs demonstrate unconventional syntactic behavior that does not conform to standard grammatical categorizations. We aim to understand whether fine-tuning BERT-based models on specific tasks influences their attention to MWEs, and how this attention differs between semantic and syntactic tasks. We examine attention scores to MWEs in both pre-trained and fine-tuned BERT-based models. We utilize monolingual models and datasets in six Indo-European languages — English, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Our results show that fine-tuning significantly influences how models allocate attention to MWEs. Specifically, models fine-tuned on semantic tasks tend to distribute attention to idiomatic expressions more evenly across layers. Models fine-tuned on syntactic tasks show an increase in attention to MSUs in the lower layers, corresponding with syntactic processing requirements.

Attention on Multiword Expressions: A Multilingual Study of BERT-based Models with Regard to Idiomaticity and Microsyntax

Data attribution methods are used to measure the contribution of training data towards model outputs, and have several important applications in areas such as dataset curation and model interpretability. However, many standard data attribution methods, such as influence functions, utilize model gradients and are computationally expensive. In our paper, we show in-context probing (ICP) -- prompting a LLM -- can serve as a fast proxy for gradient-based data attribution for data selection under conditions contingent on data similarity. We study this connection empirically on standard NLP tasks, and show that ICP and gradient-based data attribution are well-correlated in identifying influential training data for tasks that share similar task type and content as the training data. Additionally, fine-tuning models on influential data selected by both methods achieves comparable downstream performance, further emphasizing their similarities. We then examine the connection between ICP and gradient-based data attribution using synthetic data on linear regression tasks. Our synthetic data experiments show similar results with those from NLP tasks, suggesting that this connection can be isolated in simpler settings, which offers a pathway to bridging their differences.

On the Feasibility of In-Context Probing for Data Attribution

Even though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in solving various natural language tasks, the capability of an LLM to follow human instructions is still an area of active development. Recent works (Ouyang et al., 2022; Rafailov et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023) have shown great improvements in instruction-following capability through additional training for instruction-following tasks. However, the mechanisms responsible for effective instruction-following capabilities remain inadequately understood. Here, we introduce a simplified instruction-following task and use synthetic datasets to analyze a Transformer-based causal language model. Our findings suggest that the model learns task-specific information by clustering data within its hidden space, with this clustering process evolving dynamically during learning. We also demonstrate how this phenomenon assists the model in handling unseen instances, and validate our results in a more realistic setting. We further present applications in pre-training and alignment, inspired by clustering.

Transformer-based Causal Language Models Perform Clustering

According to the stages-of-inference hypothesis, early layers of language models map their subword-tokenized input, which does not necessarily correspond to a linguistically meaningful segmentation, to more meaningful representations that form the model's ''inner vocabulary''. Prior analysis of this *detokenization* stage has predominantly relied on probing and interventions such as path patching, which involve selecting particular inputs, choosing a subset of components that will be patched, and then observing changes in model behavior. Here, we show that several important aspects of the detokenization stage can be understood purely by analyzing model weights, without performing any model inference steps. Specifically, we introduce an analytical decomposition of first-layer attention in GPT-2. Our decomposition yields interpretable terms that quantify the relative contributions of position-related, token-related, and mixed effects. By focusing on terms in this decomposition, we discover weight-based explanations of attention bias toward close tokens and attention for detokenization.

Weight-based Analysis of Detokenization in Language Models: Understanding the First Stage of Inference Without Inference

Large Language Model (LLM) agents exhibit remarkable performance across diverse applications by using external tools to interact with environments. However, integrating external tools introduces security risks, such as indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks. Despite defenses designed for IPI attacks, their robustness remains questionable due to insufficient testing against adaptive attacks. In this paper, we evaluate eight different defenses and bypass all of them using adaptive attacks, consistently achieving an attack success rate of over 50%. This reveals critical vulnerabilities in current defenses. Our research underscores the need for adaptive attack evaluation when designing defenses to ensure robustness and reliability. The code is available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/AdaptiveAttackAgent.

Adaptive Attacks Break Defenses Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM Agents

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various natural language generation (NLG) tasks, but their performance in automatic text evaluation is not yet ready as human replacements. In this paper, we propose SEEval (Self-Explanation in Evaluation), a novel prompt-based text evaluator. Inspired by educational psychology, SEEval incorporates self-explanation, a metacognitive strategy, to enhance automatic text evaluation. Our experimental results show that SEEval, without probability normalization, is able to achieve competitive and often superior performance compared to the two state-of-the-art baselines -- G-Eval and Analyze-Rate -- across all evaluation dimensions and is 20 times more efficient in terms of run-time. The SEEval method is also generalizable as its results are consistent across three other selected LLMs -- Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Command R+, and Mistral-Large 2.

SEEval: Advancing LLM Text Evaluation Efficiency and Accuracy through Self-Explanation Prompting

Hallucination has been a popular topic in natural language generation (NLG). In real-world applications, unfaithful content can result in poor data quality or loss of trust from end users. Thus, it is crucial to fact-check before adopting NLG for production usage, which can be expensive if done manually. In this paper, we investigate automated faithfulness evaluation in guided NLG. We developed a rubric template and used large language models (LLMs) to score the generation on quantifiable scales. We compared popular LLMs as well as widely adopted natural language inference (NLI) models in scoring quality and sensitivity. In addition, we developed methods for the generation of synthetic unfaithful data, as well as heuristics to quantify the percentage of hallucination. Our results on 4 travel-domain industry dataset show that GPT-4 can provide accurate judgement and explanation of whether a source and a generation are factually consistent. Furthermore, we found that tuning NLI models on synthetic data can improve performance. Lastly, we present insights on the latency and cost of deploying such a system.

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Linguistically Grounded Analysis of Language Models using Shapley Head Values

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