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As concern for privacy rights has grown and the size of language model training datasets has expanded, research into machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) has become crucial. Before the era of LLMs, research on machine unlearning mainly focused on classification tasks in small parameter models. However, as parameter sizes have grown and unlearning targets have become more complex, unlearning has become more challenging, especially in scenarios involving generation instead of classification, as the output space of such models is significantly larger and more diverse. Existing methods based on gradient ascent and its variants often struggle with balancing forget quality and model utility, leading to either over unlearning or partial unlearning. To address this challenge, we propose Reverse KL-Divergence based Knowledge Distillation for Unlearning (RKLU), a novel unlearning method for LLMs. RKLU focuses on precisely unlearning the components of the token distribution related to the unlearning target, allowing us to achieve significant forget quality while maintaining model utility in our experiments.

NAACL 2025

Balancing Forget Quality and Model Utility: A Reverse KL-Divergence Knowledge Distillation Approach for Better Unlearning in LLMs

unlearn

knowledge distillation

privacy

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

Low-resource relation extraction aims to identify semantic relationships between entities using scarce labeled data. Recent studies exploit large language models to recognize relations based on retrieved examplars, yielding promising results. However, the reliability of predictions from these methods is constrained by the presence of irrelevant context within demonstrations and the inherent flaws of large language models in producing undesired outputs. Inspired by the precision and generalization of abstract logic, in this paper, we propose distilling logical rules to uniformly represent task knowledge sourced from distinct origins and facilitate deductive reasoning. We develop a collaborative annotating framework that iteratively integrates high-confidence predictions of rule-enhanced relation extractors with varying scales, efficiently obtaining reliable pseudo annotations from massive unlabeled samples without human supervision. Experiments under two inference settings show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets in few-shot scenarios.

Improving Data Annotation for Low-Resource Relation Extraction with Logical Rule-Augmented Collaborative Language Models

Flow matching offers a robust and stable approach to training diffusion models. However, directly applying flow matching to neural vocoders can result in subpar audio quality. In this work, we present WaveFM, a reparameterized flow matching model for mel-spectrogram conditioned speech synthesis, designed to enhance both sample quality and generation speed for diffusion vocoders. Since mel-spectrograms represent the energy distribution of waveforms, WaveFM adopts a mel-conditioned prior distribution instead of a standard Gaussian prior to minimize unnecessary transportation costs during synthesis. Moreover, while most diffusion vocoders rely on a single loss function, we argue that incorporating auxiliary losses, including a refined multi-resolution STFT loss, can further improve audio quality. To speed up inference without degrading sample quality significantly, we introduce a tailored consistency distillation method for WaveFM. Experiment results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance in both quality and efficiency compared to previous diffusion vocoders, while enabling waveform generation in a single inference step.

WaveFM: A High-Fidelity and Efficient Vocoder Based on Flow Matching

Books, while often rich in cultural insights, can also mirror societal biases of their eras—biases that Large Language Models (LLMs) may learn and perpetuate during training. We introduce a novel method to trace and quantify these biases using fine-tuned LLMs. We develop BookPAGE, a corpus comprising 593 fictional books across seven decades (1950-2019), to track bias evolution. By fine-tuning LLMs on books from each decade and using targeted prompts, we examine shifts in biases related to gender, sexual orientation, race, and religion. Our findings indicate that LLMs trained on decade-specific books manifest biases reflective of their times, with both gradual trends and notable shifts. For example, model responses showed a progressive increase in the portrayal of women in leadership roles (from 8% to 22%) from the 1950s to 2010s, with a significant uptick in the 1990s (from 4% to 12%), possibly aligning with third-wave feminism. Same-sex relationship references increased markedly from the 1980s to 2000s (from 0% to 10%), mirroring growing LGBTQ+ visibility. Concerningly, negative portrayals of Islam rose sharply in the 2000s (26% to 38%), likely reflecting post-9/11 sentiments. Importantly, we demonstrate that these biases stem mainly from the books' content and not the models' architecture or initial training. Our study offers a new perspective on societal bias trends by bridging AI, literary studies, and social science research.

Fine-Tuned LLMs are ''Time Capsules'' for Tracking Societal Bias Through Books

Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) approach. In practice, human feedback often comes in a format of a ranked list over multiple responses to amortize the cost of reading prompt. Multiple responses can also be ranked by reward models or AI feedback. There lacks such a thorough study on directly fitting upon a list of responses. In this work, we formulate the LM alignment as a listwise ranking problem and describe the LiPO framework, where the policy can potentially learn more effectively from a ranked list of plausible responses given the prompt. This view draws an explicit connection to Learning-to-Rank (LTR), where most existing preference optimization work can be mapped to existing ranking objectives. Following this connection, we provide an examination of ranking objectives that are not well studied for LM alignment, with DPO and SLiC as special cases when list size is two. In particular, we highlight a specific method, LiPO-$\lambda$, which leverages a state-of-the-art listwise ranking objective and weights each preference pair in a more advanced manner. We show that LiPO-$\lambda$ can outperform DPO variants and SLiC by a clear margin on several preference alignment tasks with both curated and real rankwise preference data.

LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization through Learning-to-Rank

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences, often achieved through fine-tuning based on human feedback, is essential for ensuring safe and responsible AI behaviors. However, the process typically requires substantial data and computation resources. Recent studies have revealed that alignment might be attainable at lower costs through simpler methods, such as in-context learning. This leads to the question: Is alignment predominantly superficial? In this paper, we delve into this question and provide a quantitative analysis. We formalize the concept of superficial knowledge, defining it as knowledge that can be acquired through easily token restyling, without affecting the model’s ability to capture underlying causal relationships between tokens. We propose a method to extract and isolate those superficial knowledge from aligned models, focusing on the shallow modifications to the final token selection process. By comparing models augmented only with superficial knowledge to fully aligned models, we quantify the superficial portion of alignment. Our findings reveal that while superficial knowledge constitutes a significant portion of alignment, particularly in safety and detoxification tasks, it is not the whole story. Tasks requiring reasoning and contextual understanding still rely on deeper knowledge. Additionally, we demonstrate two practical advantages of isolated superficial knowledge: (1) it can be transferred between models, enabling efficient offsite alignment of larger models using extracted superficial knowledge from smaller models, and (2) it is recoverable, allowing for the restoration of alignment in compromised models without sacrificing performance.

Extracting and Understanding the Superficial Knowledge in Alignment

Flowcharts are typically presented as images, driving the trend of using vision-language models (VLMs) for end-to-end flowchart understanding. However, two key challenges arise: (i) Limited controllability—users have minimal influence over the downstream task, as they can only modify input images, while the training of VLMs is often out of reach for most researchers. (ii) Lack of explainability—it is difficult to trace VLM errors to specific causes, such as failures in visual encoding or reasoning. We propose TextFlow, addressing aforementioned issues with two stages: (i) Vision Textualizer—which generates textual representations from flowchart images; and (ii) Textual Reasoner—which performs question-answering based on the text representations. TextFlow offers three key advantages: (i) users can select the type of text representations (e.g., Graphviz, Mermaid, PlantUML), or further convert them into executable graph object to call tools, enhancing performance and controllability; (ii) it improves explainability by helping to attribute errors more clearly to visual or textual processing components; and (iii) it promotes the modularization of the solution, such as allowing advanced LLMs to be used in the reasoner stage when VLMs underperform in end-to-end fashion. Experiments on the FlowVQA and FlowLearn benchmarks demonstrate TextFlow's state-of-the-art performance as well as its robustness. All code and data are publicly available.

Beyond End-to-End VLMs: Leveraging Intermediate Text Representations for Superior Flowchart Understanding

Large language models are known to hallucinate, but the underlying mechanism that govern how models hallucinate are not yet fully understood. In this work, we find that unfamiliar examples in the models' finetuning data -- those that introduce concepts beyond the base model's scope of knowledge -- are crucial in shaping these errors. In particular, we find that an LLM's hallucinated predictions tend to mirror the responses associated with its unfamiliar finetuning examples. This suggests that by modifying how unfamiliar finetuning examples are supervised, we can influence a model's responses to unfamiliar queries (e.g., say ''I don't know''). We empirically validate this observation in a series of controlled experiments involving SFT, RL, and reward model finetuning on TriviaQA and MMLU. Our work further investigates RL finetuning strategies for improving the factuality of long-form model generations. We find that, while hallucinations from the reward model can significantly undermine the effectiveness of RL factuality finetuning, strategically controlling how reward models hallucinate can minimize these negative effects. Leveraging our previous observations on controlling hallucinations, we propose an approach for learning more reliable reward models, and show that they improve the efficacy of RL factuality finetuning in long-form biography and book/movie plot generation tasks.

Unfamiliar Finetuning Examples Control How Language Models Hallucinate

We introduce CluSanT, a novel text sanitization framework based on Metric Local Differential Privacy (MLDP). Our framework consists of three components: token clustering, cluster embedding, and token sanitization. For the first, CluSanT employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to create---a set of potential substitute tokens which we meaningfully cluster. Then, we develop a parameterized cluster embedding that balances the trade-off between privacy and utility. Lastly, we propose a MLDP algorithm which sanitizes/substitutes sensitive tokens in a text with the help of our embedding. Notably, our MLDP-based framework can be tuned with parameters such that (1) existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) token sanitization algorithms can be described---and improved---via our framework with extremal values of our parameters, and (2) by varying our parameters, we allow for a whole spectrum of privacy-utility tradeoffs between the two SOTA. Our experiments demonstrate CluSanT's balance between privacy and semantic coherence, highlighting its capability as a valuable framework for privacy-preserving text sanitization.

CluSanT: Differentially Private and Semantically Coherent Text Sanitization

There are more than 300 documented signed languages worldwide, which are indispensable avenues for computational linguists to study cross-cultural and cross-linguistic factors that affect automatic sign understanding and generation. Yet, these are studied under critically low-resource settings, especially when examining multiple signed languages simultaneously. In this work, we hypothesize that a linguistically informed alignment algorithm can improve the results of sign-to-sign translation models. To this end, we first conduct a qualitative analysis of similarities and differences across three signed languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Chinese Sign Language (CSL), and German Sign Language (DGS). We then introduce a novel generation and alignment algorithm for translating one sign language to another, exploring Large Language Models (LLMs) as intermediary translators and paraphrasers. We also compile a dataset of sign-to-sign translation pairs between these signed languages. Our model trained on this dataset performs well on automatic metrics for sign-to-sign translation and generation. Our code and data will be available for the camera-ready version of the paper.

How to Align Multiple Signed Language Corpora for Better Sign-to-Sign Translations?

Prompt tuning (PT) offers a cost-effective alternative to fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), requiring only a few parameters in soft prompt tokens added before the input text. However, existing PT approaches face two significant issues: {i} They overlook intrinsic semantic associations between soft prompt tokens, leading to high discreteness and limited interactions, thus reducing the model's comprehension and effectiveness in complex tasks. {ii} Due to the complexity of downstream tasks, long soft prompt is necessitated to improve performance, but prompt length correlates positively with memory usage and computational costs. Achieving high efficiency and performance remains an ongoing challenge. To address these issues, we propose a novel Low-parameters Prompt Tuning (LAMP) method, which leverages prompt decomposition and compressed outer product. Specifically, the prompt decomposition module employs Truncated SVD to reduce training parameters and significantly lower the dimensionality of the soft prompt parameter space. It then utilizes a compressed outer product module to facilitate multiple interactions among prompt tokens, exploring their intrinsic associations to enhance knowledge representation. Finally, LAMP uses average pooling to reduce memory usage and training/inference time. Extensive experiments across six architectures and eight datasets demonstrate that LAMP outperforms state-of-the-art PT-based and LoRA-based methods in performance and efficiency.

Balancing Forget Quality and Model Utility: A Reverse KL-Divergence Knowledge Distillation Approach for Better Unlearning in LLMs

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Improving Data Annotation for Low-Resource Relation Extraction with Logical Rule-Augmented Collaborative Language Models

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