Singapore

Fine-tuning all parameters of large language models (LLMs) requires significant computational resources and is time-consuming. Recent parameter-efficient tuning methods such as Adapter tuning, Prefix tuning, and LoRA allow for updating a small subset of parameters in large language models. However, they can only save approximately 30\% of the training memory requirements, due to the problem that gradient computation and backpropagation are still necessary for these methods. This paper proposes a novel parameter-efficient tuning method for LLMs without calculating their gradients. Leveraging the discernible similarities between the parameter-efficient modules of the same task learned by both large and small language models, we put forward a strategy for transferring the parameter-efficient modules, originally derived from small language models to much larger ones. To ensure a smooth and effective adaptation process, we further introduce a Bridge model to guarantee dimensional consistency while also stimulating a dynamic interaction between the models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using the T5 and GPT-2 series of language models on the SuperGLUE benchmark. Our method achieves comparable performance to both fine-tuning and parameter-efficient tuning on large language models without needing gradient-based optimization. Additionally, our method achieves up to 5.7x memory reduction compared to parameter-efficient tuning.

EMNLP 2023

Parameter-efficient Tuning for Large Language Model without Calculating Its Gradients | VIDEO

gradient-free optimization

parameter-efficient tuning

language models

**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.

poster

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can be expensive to train, deploy, and use for specific natural language generation tasks such as text summarization and for certain domains. A promising alternative is to fine-tune relatively smaller language models (LMs) on a particular task using high-quality, in-domain datasets. However, it can be prohibitively expensive to get such high-quality training data. This issue has been mitigated by generating weakly supervised data via knowledge distillation (KD) of LLMs. We propose a three-step approach to distill ChatGPT and fine-tune smaller LMs for summarizing forum conversations. More specifically, we design a method to selectively sample a large unannotated corpus of forum conversation using a semantic similarity metric. Then, we use the same metric to retrieve suitable prompts for ChatGPT from a small annotated validation set in the same domain. The generated dataset is then filtered to remove low-quality instances. Our proposed select-prompt-filter KD approach leads to significant improvements of up to 6.6 ROUGE-2 score by leveraging sufficient in-domain pseudo-labeled data over a standard KD approach given the same size of training data.

Select, Prompt, Filter: Distilling Large Language Models for Summarizing Conversations

Computational inefficiency in transformers has been a long-standing challenge, hindering the deployment in resource-constrained or real-time applications. One promising approach to mitigate this limitation is to progressively remove less significant tokens, given that the sequence length strongly contributes to the inefficiency. However, this approach entails a potential risk of losing crucial information due to the irrevocable nature of token removal. In this paper, we introduce Leap-of-Thought (LoT), a novel token reduction approach that dynamically routes tokens within layers. Unlike previous work that irrevocably discards tokens, LoT enables tokens to `leap' across layers. This ensures that all tokens remain accessible in subsequent layers while reducing the number of tokens processed within layers. We achieve this by pairing the transformer with dynamic token routers, which learn to selectively process tokens essential for the task. Evaluation results clearly show that LoT achieves a substantial improvement in computational efficiency. Specifically, LoT attains up to 25x faster inference time without a significant loss in accuracy

Leap-of-Thought: Accelerating Transformers via Dynamic Token Routing | VIDEO

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has shown its effectiveness in adapting the pre-trained language models to downstream tasks while only updating a small number of parameters. Despite the success, most existing methods independently adapt to each task without considering knowledge transfer between tasks and are limited to low-data regimes. To overcome this issue, we propose Prototype-based HyperAdapter (PHA), a novel framework built on the adapter-tuning and hypernetwork. It introduces an instance-dense retriever and a prototypical hypernetwork to generate the conditional modules in a sample-efficient manner. This leads to comparable performance improvements against existing PEFT methods on multi-task learning and few-shot transfer learning. More importantly, when the available data size gets smaller, our method outperforms other strong baselines by a large margin. Based on our extensive empirical experiments across various datasets, we demonstrate that PHA strikes a better trade-off between trainable parameters, accuracy on stream tasks, and sample efficiency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Bumble666/PHA

Prototype-based HyperAdapter for Sample-Efficient Multi-task Tuning

We study whether linguistic information in pre-trained multilingual language models can be accessed by human language: So far, there is no easy method to directly obtain linguistic information and gain insights into the linguistic principles encoded in such models. We use the technique of prompting and formulate linguistic tasks to test the LM’s access to explicit grammatical principles and study how effective this method is at providing access to linguistic features. Our experiments on German, Icelandic and Spanish show that some linguistic properties can in fact be accessed through prompting, whereas others are harder to capture.

A Study on Accessing Linguistic Information in Pre-Trained Language Models by Using Prompts

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable advancements in the field of natural language generation. However, the propensity of LLMs to generate inaccurate or non-factual content, termed "hallucinations", remains a significant challenge. Current hallucination detection methods often necessitate the retrieval of great numbers of relevant evidence, thereby increasing response times. We introduce a unique framework that leverages statistical decision theory and Bayesian sequential analysis to optimize the trade-off between costs and benefits during the hallucination detection process. This approach does not require a predetermined number of observations. Instead, the analysis proceeds in a sequential manner, enabling an expeditious decision towards "belief" or "disbelief" through a stop-or-continue strategy. Extensive experiments reveal that this novel framework surpasses existing methods in both efficiency and precision of hallucination detection. Furthermore, it requires fewer retrieval steps on average, thus decreasing response times.

Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models by Bayesian Sequential Estimation

A hallmark of modern large language models (LLMs) is their impressive general zero-shot and few-shot abilities, often elicited through in-context learning (ICL) via prompting. However, while highly coveted and being the most general, zero-shot performances in LLMs are still typically weaker due to the lack of guidance and the difficulty of applying existing automatic prompt design methods in general tasks when ground-truth labels are unavailable. In this study, we address this by presenting Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (USP), an automatic prompt design approach specifically tailored for zero-shot learning (while compatible with few-shot). Requiring only a small amount of unlabeled data and an inference-only LLM, USP is highly versatile: to achieve universal prompting, USP categorizes a possible NLP task into one of the three possible task types and then uses a corresponding selector to select the most suitable queries and zero-shot model-generated responses as pseudo-demonstrations, thereby generalizing ICL to the zero-shot setup in a fully automated way. We evaluate USP with PaLM and PaLM 2 models and demonstrate performances that are considerably stronger than standard zero-shot baselines and often comparable to or even superior to few-shot baselines across more than 40 natural language understanding, natural language generation, and reasoning tasks.

Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting

Toeplitz Neural Networks (TNNs) have exhibited outstanding performance in various sequence modeling tasks. They outperform commonly used Transformer-based models while benefiting from log-linear space-time complexities. On the other hand, State Space Models (SSMs) achieve lower performance than TNNs in language modeling but offer the advantage of constant inference complexity. In this paper, we aim to combine the strengths of TNNs and SSMs by converting TNNs to SSMs during inference, thereby enabling TNNs to achieve the same constant inference complexities as SSMs.
To accomplish this, we formulate the conversion process as an optimization problem and provide a closed-form solution. We demonstrate how to transform the target equation into a Vandermonde linear system problem, which can be efficiently solved using the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT).
Notably, our method requires no training and maintains numerical stability. It can be also applied to any LongConv-based model. To assess its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on language modeling tasks across various settings. Additionally, we compare our method to other gradient-descent solutions, highlighting the superior numerical stability of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/ETSC-Exact-Toeplitz-to-SSM-Conversion.

Accelerating Toeplitz Neural Network with Constant-time Inference Complexity | VIDEO

As commonly-used methods for debiasing natural language understanding (NLU) models, dataset refinement approaches heavily rely on manual data analysis, and thus maybe unable to cover all the potential biased features. In this paper, we propose IBADR, an Iterative Bias-Aware Dataset Refinement framework, which debiases NLU models without predefining biased features. We maintain an iteratively expanded sample pool. Specifically, at each iteration, we first train a shallow model to quantify the bias degree of samples in the pool. Then, we pair each sample with a bias indicator representing its bias degree, and use these extended samples to train a sample generator. In this way, this generator can effectively learn the correspondence relationship between bias indicators and samples. Furthermore, we employ the generator to produce pseudo samples with fewer biased features by feeding specific bias indicators. Finally,
we incorporate the generated pseudo samples into the pool. Experimental results and in-depth analyses on two NLU tasks show that IBADR not only significantly outperforms existing dataset refinement approaches, achieving SOTA, but also is compatible with model-centric methods.

IBADR: an Iterative Bias-Aware Dataset Refinement Framework for Debiasing NLU models

During remote conversations, communication breakdowns often occur when a listener misses certain statements. Our objective is to prevent such breakdowns by identifying Statements Crucial for Awareness of Interpretive Nonsense (SCAINs). If a listener misses a SCAIN, s/he may interpret subsequent statements differently from the speaker's intended meaning. To identify SCAINs, we adopt a unique approach where we create a dialogue by omitting two consecutive statements from the original dialogue and then generate text to make the following statement more specific. The novelty of the proposed method lies in simulating missing information by processing text with omissions. We validate the effectiveness of SCAINs through evaluation using a dialogue dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SCAINs cannot be identified as merely important statements, highlighting the uniqueness of our proposed method.

Identifying Statements Crucial for Awareness of Interpretive Nonsense to Prevent Communication Breakdowns

Representations from large language models (LLMs) are known to be dominated by a small subset of dimensions with exceedingly high variance. Previous works have argued that although ablating these outlier dimensions in LLM representations hurts downstream performance, outlier dimensions are detrimental to the representational quality of embeddings. In this study, we investigate how fine-tuning impacts outlier dimensions and show that 1) outlier dimensions that occur in pre-training persist in fine-tuned models and 2) a single outlier dimension can complete downstream tasks with a minimal error rate. Our results suggest that outlier dimensions can encode crucial task-specific knowledge and that the value of a representation in a single outlier dimension drives downstream model decisions.

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Select, Prompt, Filter: Distilling Large Language Models for Summarizing Conversations

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Select, Prompt, Filter: Distilling Large Language Models for Summarizing Conversations

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APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models | VIDEO

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