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The quadratic complexity of the attention module makes it gradually become the bulk of compute in Transformer-based LLMs during generation. Moreover, the excessive key-value cache that arises when dealing with long inputs also brings severe issues on memory footprint and inference latency. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play approach that is able to incrementally compress the intermediate activation of a specified span of tokens into compact ones, thereby reducing both memory and computational cost when processing subsequent context. 
Experiments on both in-domain language modeling and zero-shot open-ended document generation demonstrate the advantage of our approach over sparse attention baselines in terms of fluency, n-gram matching, and semantic similarity. At last, we comprehensively profile the benefit of context compression on improving the system throughout. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/DRSY/KV_Compression}.

EMNLP 2023

Context Compression for Auto-regressive Transformers with Sentinel Tokens | VIDEO

key-value cache optimization

context compression

language model acceleration

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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

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

It has been known to be difficult to generate adequate sports updates from a sequence of vast amounts of diverse live tweets, although the live sports viewing experience with tweets is gaining the popularity. In this paper, we focus on soccer matches and work on building a system to generate live updates for soccer matches from tweets so that users can instantly grasp a match’s progress and enjoy the excitement of the match from raw tweets. Our proposed system is based on a large pre-trained language model and incorporates a mechanism to control the number of updates and a mechanism to reduce the redundancy of duplicate and similar updates.

Transformer-based Live Update Generation for Soccer Matches from Microblog Posts | VIDEO

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by finetuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLM-Adapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and can execute these adapter-based PEFT methods of LLMs for different tasks. The framework includes state-of-the-art open-access LLMs such as LLaMA, BLOOM, and GPT-J, as well as widely used adapters such as Series adapters, Parallel adapter, Prompt-based learning and Reparametrization-based methods. Moreover, we conduct extensive empirical studies on the impact of adapter types, placement locations, and hyper-parameters to the best design for each adapter-based methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of the adapters on fourteen datasets from two different reasoning tasks, Arithmetic Reasoning and Commonsense Reasoning. The results demonstrate that using adapter-based PEFT in smaller-scale LLMs (7B) with few extra trainable parameters yields comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to powerful LLMs (175B) in zero-shot inference on simple math reasoning datasets.

LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models | VIDEO

This paper introduces the \textbf{C}hinese \textbf{E}ssay \textbf{D}iscourse \textbf{C}oherence \textbf{C}orpus (\textbf{CEDCC}), a multi-task dataset for assessing discourse coherence. Existing research tends to focus on isolated dimensions of discourse coherence, a gap which the CEDCC addresses by integrating coherence grading, topical continuity, and discourse relations. This approach, alongside detailed annotations, captures the subtleties of real-world texts and stimulates progress in Chinese discourse coherence analysis. Our contributions include the development of the CEDCC, the establishment of baselines for further research, and the demonstration of the impact of coherence on discourse relation recognition and automated essay scoring. The dataset and related codes is available at \url{https://github.com/cubenlp/CEDCC_corpus}.

A Multi-Task Dataset for Assessing Discourse Coherence in Chinese Essays: Structure, Theme, and Logic Analysis

The underlying mechanism of neural networks in capturing precise knowledge has been the subject of consistent research efforts. In this work, we propose a theoretical approach based on Neural Tangent Kernels (NTKs) to investigate such mechanisms. Specifically, considering the infinite network width, we hypothesize the learning dynamics of target models may intuitively unravel the features they acquire from training data, deepening our insights into their internal mechanisms. We apply our approach to several fundamental models and reveal how these models leverage statistical features during gradient descent and how they are integrated into final decisions. We also discovered that the choice of activation function can affect feature extraction. For instance, the use of the ReLU activation function could potentially introduce a bias in features, providing a plausible explanation for its replacement with alternative functions in recent pre-trained language models. Additionally, we find that while self-attention and CNN models may exhibit limitations in learning n-grams, multiplication-based models seem to excel in this area. We verify these theoretical findings through experiments and find that they can be applied to analyze language modeling tasks, which can be regarded as a special variant of classification. Our work may offer insights into the roles and capacities of fundamental modules within deep neural networks including large language models.

Unraveling Feature Extraction Mechanisms in Neural Networks | VIDEO

By routing input tokens to only a few split experts, Sparse Mixture-of-Experts has enabled efficient training of large language models. Recent findings suggest that fixing the routers can achieve competitive performance by alleviating the collapsing problem, where all experts eventually learn similar representations. However, this strategy has two key limitations: (i) the policy derived from random routers might be sub-optimal, and (ii) it requires extensive resources during training and evaluation, leading to limited efficiency gains. This work introduces \texttt{HyperRouter}, which dynamically generates the router's parameters through a fixed hypernetwork and trainable embeddings to achieve a balance between training the routers and freezing them to learn an improved routing policy. Extensive experiments across a wide range of tasks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency gains of \texttt{HyperRouter} compared to existing routing methods. Our implementation is publicly available at {\url{{https://github.com/giangdip2410/HyperRouter}}}.

HyperRouter: Towards Efficient Training and Inference of Sparse Mixture of Experts

Few-shot classification is a powerful technique,
but training requires substantial computing
power and data. We propose an efficient
method with small model sizes and less training
data with only 2-8 training instances per class.
Our proposed method, AncSetFit, targets low data
scenarios by anchoring the task and label
information through sentence embeddings in
fine-tuning a Sentence Transformer model. It
uses contrastive learning and a triplet loss to enforce
training instances of a class to be closest
to its own textual semantic label information
in the embedding space - and thereby learning
to embed different class instances more distinct.
AncSetFit obtains strong performance
in data-sparse scenarios compared to existing
methods across SST-5, Emotion detection, and
AG News data, even with just two examples
per class.

Anchoring Fine-tuning of Sentence Transformer with Semantic Label Information for Efficient Truly Few-shot Classification

Prototype learning, a popular machine learning method designed for inherently interpretable decisions, leverages similarities to learned prototypes for classifying new data. While it is mainly applied in computer vision, in this work, we build upon prior research and further explore the extension of prototypical networks to natural language processing. We introduce a learned weighted similarity measure that enhances the similarity computation by focusing on informative dimensions of pre-trained sentence embeddings. 
Additionally, we propose a post-hoc explainability mechanism that extracts prediction-relevant words from both the prototype and input sentences. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that our proposed method not only improves predictive performance on the AG News and RT Polarity datasets over a previous prototype-based approach, but also improves the faithfulness of explanations compared to rationale-based recurrent convolutions.

This Reads Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Natural Language Processing

In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided context remains under-explored. In this paper, we investigate the working mechanism of ICL through an information flow lens. Our findings reveal that label words in the demonstration examples function as anchors: (1) semantic information aggregates into label word representations during the shallow computation layers' processing; (2) the consolidated information in label words serves as a reference for LLMs' final predictions. Based on these insights, we introduce an anchor re-weighting method to improve ICL performance, a demonstration compression technique to expedite inference, and an analysis framework for diagnosing ICL errors in GPT2-XL. The promising applications of our findings again validate the uncovered ICL working mechanism and pave the way for future studies.

Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning

When training a neural network, it will quickly memorise some source-target mappings from your dataset but never learn some others.
Yet, memorisation is not easily expressed as a binary feature that is good or bad: individual datapoints lie on a memorisation-generalisation continuum.
What determines a datapoint's position on that spectrum, and how does that spectrum influence neural models' performance?
We address these two questions for neural machine translation (NMT) models. We use the counterfactual memorisation metric to
(1) build a resource that places 5M NMT datapoints on a memorisation-generalisation map,
(2) illustrate how the datapoints' surface-level characteristics and a models' per-datum training signals are predictive of memorisation in NMT,
(3) and describe the influence that subsets of that map have on NMT systems' performance.

Memorisation Cartography: Mapping out the Memorisation-Generalisation Continuum in Neural Machine Translation

Mathematical reasoning in large language models (LMs) has garnered significant attention in recent work, but there is a limited understanding of how these models process and store information related to arithmetic tasks within their architecture.
In order to improve our understanding of this aspect of language models, we present a mechanistic interpretation of Transformer-based LMs on arithmetic questions using a causal mediation analysis framework.
By intervening on the activations of specific model components and measuring the resulting changes in predicted probabilities, we identify the subset of parameters responsible for specific predictions.
This provides insights into how information related to arithmetic is processed by LMs.
Our experimental results indicate that LMs process the input by transmitting the information relevant to the query from mid-sequence early layers to the final token using the attention mechanism. Then, this information is processed by a set of MLP modules, which generate result-related information that is incorporated into the residual stream.
To assess the specificity of the observed activation dynamics, we compare the effects of different model components on arithmetic queries with other tasks, including number retrieval from prompts and factual knowledge questions.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Transformer-based Live Update Generation for Soccer Matches from Microblog Posts | VIDEO

Similar lecture

Reducing Peak Memory Usage for Modern Multimodal Large Language Model Pipelines

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads