Singapore

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks.
We observe that the LLMs provide effective priors in exploiting $\textit{linguistic shortcuts}$ for temporal and causal reasoning in Video Question Answering (VideoQA).
However, such priors often cause suboptimal results on VideoQA by leading the model to over-rely on questions, $\textit{i.e.}$, $\textit{linguistic bias}$, while ignoring visual content.
This is also known as &#39;ungrounded guesses&#39; or &#39;hallucinations&#39;.
To address this problem while leveraging LLMs&#39; prior on VideoQA, we propose a novel framework, Flipped-VQA, encouraging the model to predict all the combinations of $\langle$V, Q, A$\rangle$ triplet by flipping the source pair and the target label to understand their complex relationships, $\textit{i.e.}$, predict A, Q, and V given a VQ, VA, and QA pairs, respectively.
In this paper, we develop LLaMA-VQA by applying Flipped-VQA to LLaMA, and it outperforms both LLMs-based and non-LLMs-based models on five challenging VideoQA benchmarks.
Furthermore, our Flipped-VQA is a general framework that is applicable to various LLMs (OPT and GPT-J) and consistently improves their performances.
We empirically demonstrate that Flipped-VQA not only enhances the exploitation of linguistic shortcuts but also mitigates the linguistic bias, which causes incorrect answers over-relying on the question.
Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/Flipped-VQA.

EMNLP 2023

Large Language Models are Temporal and Causal Reasoners for Video Question Answering

temporal and causal reasoning

video question answering

large language models

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
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Register here

EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks.
We observe that the LLMs provide effective priors in exploiting $\textit{linguistic shortcuts}$ for temporal and causal reasoning in Video Question Answering (VideoQA).
However, such priors often cause suboptimal results on VideoQA by leading the model to over-rely on questions, $\textit{i.e.}$, $\textit{linguistic bias}$, while ignoring visual content.
This is also known as 'ungrounded guesses' or 'hallucinations'.
To address this problem while leveraging LLMs' prior on VideoQA, we propose a novel framework, Flipped-VQA, encouraging the model to predict all the combinations of $\langle$V, Q, A$\rangle$ triplet by flipping the source pair and the target label to understand their complex relationships, $\textit{i.e.}$, predict A, Q, and V given a VQ, VA, and QA pairs, respectively.
In this paper, we develop LLaMA-VQA by applying Flipped-VQA to LLaMA, and it outperforms both LLMs-based and non-LLMs-based models on five challenging VideoQA benchmarks.
Furthermore, our Flipped-VQA is a general framework that is applicable to various LLMs (OPT and GPT-J) and consistently improves their performances.
We empirically demonstrate that Flipped-VQA not only enhances the exploitation of linguistic shortcuts but also mitigates the linguistic bias, which causes incorrect answers over-relying on the question.
Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/Flipped-VQA.

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

The collection and curation of high-quality training data is crucial for developing text classification models with superior performance, but it is often associated with significant costs and time investment. Researchers have recently explored using large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets as an alternative approach. However, the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data in supporting model training is inconsistent across different classification tasks. To better understand factors that moderate the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data, in this study, we look into how the performance of models trained on these synthetic data may vary with the $\textit{subjectivity}$ of classification. Our results indicate that subjectivity, at both the task level and instance level, is negatively associated with the performance of the model trained on synthetic data. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work on the potential and limitations of leveraging LLM for synthetic data generation.

Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations

*In-context learning* is the paradigm that adapts large language models to downstream tasks by providing a few examples.
*Few-shot selection*---selecting appropriate examples for each test instance separately---is important for in-context learning.
In this paper, we propose **Skill-KNN**, a skill-based few-shot selection method for in-context learning.
The key advantages of Skill-KNN include: (1) it addresses the problem that existing methods based on pre-trained embeddings can be easily biased by surface natural language features that are not important for the target task; (2) it does not require training or fine-tuning of any models, making it suitable for frequently expanding or changing example banks.
The key insight is to optimize the inputs fed into the embedding model, rather than tuning the model itself.
Technically, Skill-KNN generates the skill-based descriptions for each test case and candidate example by utilizing a pre-processing few-shot prompting, thus eliminating unimportant surface features.
Experimental results across five cross-domain semantic parsing datasets and six backbone models show that Skill-KNN significantly outperforms existing methods.

Skill-Based Few-Shot Selection for In-Context Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are popular for their impressive abilities, but the need for model-specific fine-tuning or task-specific prompt engineering can hinder their generalization. We propose UPRISE (Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving zero-Shot Evaluation), which tunes a lightweight and versatile retriever that automatically retrieves prompts for a given zero-shot task input. Specifically, we demonstrate universality in a cross-task and cross-model scenario: the retriever is tuned on diverse tasks, but tested on unseen task types; we use a small frozen LLM, GPT-Neo-2.7B, for tuning the retriever, but test the retriever on different LLMs of much larger scales, such as BLOOM-7.1B, OPT-66B and GPT3-175B. Additionally, we show that UPRISE mitigates the hallucination problem in our experiments with ChatGPT, suggesting its potential to improve even the strongest LLMs. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

UPRISE: Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving Zero-Shot Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities on various tasks. However, fundamentally improving them depends on high-quality datasets or computationally expensive fine-tuning. On the contrary, humans can easily improve themselves by self-thinking and memory, without external resources. In this paper, we propose a framework, **MoT**, to let the LLM self-improve through **M**emory **o**f **T**houghts, without annotated datasets and parameter updates. Specifically, MoT is divided into two stages: 1. before the test stage, the LLM pre-thinks on the unlabeled dataset and saves the high-confidence thoughts as external memory; 2. During the test stage, given a test question, the LLM recalls relevant memory to help itself reason and answer it. Experimental results show that MoT can help ChatGPT significantly improve its abilities in arithmetic reasoning, commonsense reasoning, factual reasoning, and natural language inference. Further analyses show that each component contributes critically to the improvements and MoT can lead to consistent improvements across various CoT methods and LLMs.

MoT: Memory-of-Thought Enables ChatGPT to Self-Improve

Although large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving various tasks, they can quickly be outdated after deployment. Maintaining their up-to-date status is a pressing concern in the current era. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent advances in aligning deployed LLMs with the ever-changing world knowledge. We categorize research works systemically and provide in-depth comparisons and discussions. We also discuss existing challenges and highlight future directions to facilitate research in this field.

How Do Large Language Models Capture the Ever-changing World Knowledge? A Review of Recent Advances

Instruction-tuning can be substantially optimized through enhanced diversity, resulting in models capable of handling a broader spectrum of tasks. However, existing data employed for such tuning often exhibit an inadequate coverage of individual domains, limiting the scope for nuanced comprehension and interactions within these areas. To address this deficiency, we propose Explore-Instruct, a novel approach to enhance the data coverage to be used in domain-specific instruction-tuning through active exploration via Large Language Models (LLMs). Built upon representative domain use cases, Explore-Instruct explores a multitude of variations or possibilities by implementing a search algorithm to obtain diversified and domain-focused instruction-tuning data. Our data-centric analysis validates the effectiveness of this proposed approach in improving domain-specific instruction coverage. Moreover, our model's performance demonstrates considerable advancements over multiple baselines, including those utilizing domain-specific data enhancement. Our findings offer a promising opportunity to improve instruction coverage, especially in domain-specific contexts, thereby advancing the development of adaptable language models. Our code, model weights, and data are public at \url{https://github.com/fanqiwan/Explore-Instruct}.

Explore-Instruct: Enhancing Domain-Specific Instruction Coverage through Active Exploration | VIDEO

Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be very superior to conventional methods in various tasks.
However, their expensive computations and high memory requirements are prohibitive for deployment.
Model quantization is an effective method for reducing this overhead. The problem is that in most
previous works, the quantized model was calibrated using few samples from the training data, which
might affect the generalization of the quantized LLMs to unknown cases and tasks. Hence in this work,
we explore an important question: Can we design a data-independent quantization method for LLMs to
guarantee its generalization performance?
In this work, we propose EasyQuant, a training-free and data-independent weight-only quantization
algorithm for LLMs. Our observation indicates that two factors: outliers in the weight and quantization
ranges, are essential for reducing the quantization error. Therefore, in EasyQuant, we leave the outliers
(less than 1%) unchanged and optimize the quantization range to reduce the reconstruction error. With
these methods, we surprisingly find that EasyQuant achieves comparable performance to the original model.
Since EasyQuant does not depend on any training data, the generalization performance of quantized
LLMs is safely guaranteed. Moreover, EasyQuant can be implemented in parallel so that the quantized
model could be attained in a few minutes even for LLMs over 100B. To our best knowledge, we are the
first work that achieves almost lossless quantization performance for LLMs under a data-independent
setting and our algorithm runs over 10 times faster than the data-dependent methods.

EasyQuant: An Efficient Data-free Quantization Algorithm for LLMs

Language models have graduated from being research prototypes to commercialized products offered as web APIs, and recent works have highlighted the multilingual capabilities of these products. The API vendors charge their users based on usage, more specifically on the number of ``tokens'' processed or generated by the underlying language models. What constitutes a token, however, is training data and model dependent with a large variance in the number of tokens required to convey the same information in different languages. In this work, we analyze the effect of this non-uniformity on the fairness of an API's pricing policy across languages. We conduct a systematic analysis of the cost and utility of OpenAI's language model API on multilingual benchmarks in 22 typologically diverse languages. We show evidence that speakers of a large number of the supported languages are overcharged while obtaining poorer results. These speakers tend to also come from regions where the APIs are less affordable, to begin with. Through these analyses, we aim to increase transparency around language model APIs' pricing policies and encourage the vendors to make them more equitable.

Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Models

Despite the ability to train capable LLMs, the methodology for maintaining their relevancy and rectifying errors remains elusive. 
To this end, the past few years have witnessed a surge in techniques for editing LLMs, the objective of which is to alter the behavior of LLMs \textbf{efficiently} within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. This paper embarks on a deep exploration of the problems, methods, and opportunities related to model editing for LLMs. 
In particular, we provide an exhaustive overview of the task definition and challenges associated with model editing, along with an in-depth empirical analysis of the most progressive methods currently at our disposal. We also build a new benchmark dataset to facilitate a more robust evaluation and pinpoint enduring issues intrinsic to existing techniques. 
Our objective is to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness and feasibility of each editing technique, thereby assisting the community in making informed decisions on the selection of the most appropriate method for a specific task or context\footnote{Code and datasets are in the supplementary and will be released.}.

Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities | VIDEO

Previous studies have revealed that vanilla pre-trained language models (PLMs) lack the capacity to handle knowledge-intensive NLP tasks alone; thus, several works have attempted to integrate external knowledge into PLMs. However, despite the promising outcome, we empirically observe that PLMs may have already encoded rich knowledge in their pre-trained parameters but fails to fully utilize them when applying to knowledge-intensive tasks. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm dubbed \textbf{Knowledge Rumination} to help the pre-trained language model utilize that related latent knowledge without retrieving them from the external corpus. By simply adding a prompt like \emph{``As far as I know''} to the PLMs, we try to review related latent knowledge and inject them back into the model for knowledge consolidation. We apply the proposed knowledge rumination to various language models, including RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and GPT-3. Experimental results on six commonsense reasoning tasks and GLUE benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which proves that the knowledge stored in PLMs can be better exploited to enhance performance\footnote{Code is in the supplementary and will be released.}.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations

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Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges

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