Mexico

Today’s large language models (LLMs) typically train on short text segments (e.g., &lt;4K tokens) due to the quadratic complexity of their Transformer architectures. As a result, their performance suffers drastically on inputs longer than those encountered during training, substantially limiting their applications in real-world tasks involving long contexts such as encod- ing scientific articles, code repositories, or long dialogues. Through both theoretical analysis and empirical investigation, this work identifies three major factors contributing to this length generalization failure. Our theoretical analysis reveals that commonly used techniques like using a sliding-window attention pattern or relative positional encodings are inadequate to address them. Answering these challenges, we propose LM-Infinite, a simple and effective method for enhancing LLMs’ capabilities of handling long contexts. LM-Infinite is highly flexible and can be used with most modern LLMs off-the-shelf. Without any parameter updates, it allows LLMs pre-trained with 2K or 4K-long segments to generalize to up to 200M length inputs while retaining perplexity. It also improves performance on downstream tasks such as Passkey Retrieval and Qasper in the zero-shot setting. LM-Infinite brings substantial efficiency improvements: it achieves 2.7× decoding speed up and 7.5× memory saving over the original model. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.

NAACL 2024

LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models

language model theory

language model analysis & interpretability

long-context language models

efficiency

Today’s large language models (LLMs) typically train on short text segments (e.g., <4K tokens) due to the quadratic complexity of their Transformer architectures. As a result, their performance suffers drastically on inputs longer than those encountered during training, substantially limiting their applications in real-world tasks involving long contexts such as encod- ing scientific articles, code repositories, or long dialogues. Through both theoretical analysis and empirical investigation, this work identifies three major factors contributing to this length generalization failure. Our theoretical analysis reveals that commonly used techniques like using a sliding-window attention pattern or relative positional encodings are inadequate to address them. Answering these challenges, we propose LM-Infinite, a simple and effective method for enhancing LLMs’ capabilities of handling long contexts. LM-Infinite is highly flexible and can be used with most modern LLMs off-the-shelf. Without any parameter updates, it allows LLMs pre-trained with 2K or 4K-long segments to generalize to up to 200M length inputs while retaining perplexity. It also improves performance on downstream tasks such as Passkey Retrieval and Qasper in the zero-shot setting. LM-Infinite brings substantial efficiency improvements: it achieves 2.7× decoding speed up and 7.5× memory saving over the original model. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.

poster

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), aligning LLMs with human values and societal norms to ensure their reliability and safety has become crucial. Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI (CAI) have been proposed for LLM alignment. However, these methods require either heavy human annotations or explicitly pre-defined constitutions, which are labor-intensive and resource-consuming. To overcome these drawbacks, we study constitution-based LLM alignment and propose a data-driven constitution discovery and self-alignment framework called IterAlign. IterAlign leverages red teaming to unveil the weaknesses of an LLM and automatically discovers new constitutions using a stronger LLM. These constitutions are then used to guide self-correction of the base LLM. Such a constitution discovery pipeline can be run iteratively and automatically to discover new constitutions that specifically target the alignment gaps in the current LLM. Empirical results on several safety benchmark datasets and multiple base LLMs show that IterAlign successfully improves truthfulness, helpfulness, harmlessness and honesty, improving the LLM alignment by up to $13.5\%$ in harmlessness.

IterAlign: Iterative Constitutional Alignment of Large Language Models

Red-teaming is a common practice for mitigating unsafe behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs), which involves thoroughly assessing LLMs to identify potential flaws and addressing them with responsible and accurate responses. While effective, manual red-teaming is costly, and existing automatic red-teaming typically discovers safety risks without addressing them. In this paper, we propose a Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming (MART) method, which incorporates both automatic adversarial prompt writing and safe response generation, significantly increasing red-teaming scalability and the safety of the target LLM. Specifically, an adversarial LLM and a target LLM interplay with each other in an iterative manner, where the adversarial LLM aims to generate challenging prompts that elicit unsafe responses from the target LLM, while the target LLM is fine-tuned with safety aligned data on these adversarial prompts. In each round, the adversarial LLM crafts better attacks on the updated target LLM, while the target LLM also improves itself through safety fine-tuning. On adversarial prompt benchmarks, the violation rate of an LLM with limited safety alignment reduces up to 84.7% after 4 rounds of MART, achieving comparable performance to LLMs with extensive adversarial prompt writing. Notably, model helpfulness on non-adversarial prompts remains stable throughout iterations, indicating the target LLM maintains strong performance on instruction following.

MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming

Longstanding data labeling practices in machine learning involve collecting and aggregating labels from multiple annotators. But what should we do when annotators disagree? Though annotator disagreement has long been seen as a problem to minimize, new perspectivist approaches challenge this assumption by treating disagreement as a valuable source of information. In this position paper, we examine practices and assumptions surrounding the causes of disagreement--some challenged by perspectivist approaches, and some that remain to be addressed--as well as practical and normative challenges for work operating under these assumptions. We conclude with recommendations for the data labeling pipeline and avenues for future research engaging with subjectivity and disagreement.

The Perspectivist Paradigm Shift: Assumptions and Challenges of Capturing Human Labels

Unraveling the intricate details of events in natural language necessitates a subtle understanding of temporal dynamics. Despite the adeptness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in discerning patterns and relationships from data, their inherent comprehension of temporal dynamics remains a formidable challenge. This research meticulously explores these intrinsic challenges within LLMs, with a specific emphasis on evaluating the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models in the analysis of temporal data. Employing two distinct prompt types, namely Question Answering (QA) format and Textual Entailment (TE) format, our analysis probes into both implicit and explicit events. The findings underscore noteworthy trends, revealing disparities in the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Notably, biases toward specific temporal relationships come to light, with GPT-3.5 demonstrating a preference for "AFTER'' in the QA format for both implicit and explicit events, while GPT-4 leans towards "BEFORE''. Furthermore, a consistent pattern surfaces wherein GPT-3.5 tends towards "TRUE'', and GPT-4 exhibits a preference for "FALSE'' in the TE format for both implicit and explicit events. This persistent discrepancy between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in handling temporal data highlights the intricate nature of inductive bias in LLMs, suggesting that the evolution of these models may not merely mitigate bias but may introduce new layers of complexity.

Unveiling Divergent Inductive Biases of LLMs on Temporal Data

Bias in reporting can influence the public's opinion on relevant societal issues. Examples include informational bias (selective presentation of content) and lexical bias (specific framing of content through linguistic choices). The recognition of media bias is arguably an area where NLP can contribute to the "social good". Traditional NLP models have shown good performance in classifying media bias, but require careful model design and extensive tuning. In this paper, we ask how well prompting of large language models can recognize media bias. Through an extensive empirical study including a wide selection of pre-trained models, we find that prompt-based techniques can deliver comparable performance to traditional models with greatly reduced effort and that, similar to traditional models, the availability of context substantially improves results. We further show that larger models can leverage different kinds of context simultaneously, obtaining further performance improvements.

Media Bias Detection Across Families of Language Models

Modern large language models (LLMs) exhibit a remarkable capacity for role-playing, enabling them to embody not only human characters but also non-human entities. This versatility allows them to simulate complex human-like interactions and behaviors within various contexts, as well as to emulate specific objects or systems. While these capabilities have enhanced user engagement and introduced novel modes of interaction, the influence of role-playing on LLMs' reasoning abilities remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a strategically designed role-play prompting methodology and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting across twelve diverse reasoning benchmarks. Our empirical results illustrate that role-play prompting consistently surpasses the standard zero-shot approach across most datasets. Notably, in experiments conducted using ChatGPT, accuracy on AQuA rises from 53.5\% to 63.8\%, and on Last Letter from 23.8\% to 84.2\%. Upon further comparison with the Zero-Shot-CoT technique, which prompts the model to "think step by step'', our study demonstrates that role-play prompting acts as a more effective trigger for the CoT process. This highlights its potential to augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We release our code at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/Role-Play-Prompting.

Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks significantly, but finetuning PLMs on low-resource datasets poses significant challenges such as instability and overfitting. Previous methods tackle these issues by finetuning a strategically chosen subnetwork on a downstream task, while keeping the remaining weights fixed to the pretrained weights. However, they rely on a suboptimal criteria for sub-network selection, leading to suboptimal solutions. To address these limitations, we propose a regularization method based on attention-guided weight mixup for finetuning PLMs. Our approach represents each network weight as a mixup of task-specific weight and pretrained weight, controlled by a learnable attention parameter, providing finer control over sub-network selection. Furthermore, we employ a bi-level optimization (BLO) based framework on two separate splits of the training dataset, improving generalization and combating overfitting. We validate the efficacy of our proposed method through extensive experiments, demonstrating its superiority over previous methods, particularly in the context of finetuning PLMs on low-resource datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sai-Ashish/Attention_guided_weight_mixup_BLO.

Generalizable and Stable Finetuning of Pretrained Language Models on Low-Resource Texts

Prompt tuning, which freezes all parameters of a pre-trained model and only trains a soft prompt, has emerged as a parameter-efficient approach. For the reason that the prompt initialization becomes sensitive when the model size is small, the prompt transfer that uses the trained prompt as an initialization for the target task has recently been introduced. Since previous works have compared tasks in large categories (e.g., summarization, sentiment analysis), the factors that influence prompt transfer have not been sufficiently explored. In this paper, we characterize the question answering task based on features such as answer format and empirically investigate the transferability of soft prompts for the first time. We analyze the impact of initialization during prompt transfer and find that the train dataset size of source and target tasks have the influence significantly. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach for measuring catastrophic forgetting and investigate how it occurs in terms of the amount of evidence. Our findings can help deeply understand transfer learning in prompt tuning.

Is Prompt Transfer Always Effective? An Empirical Study of Prompt Transfer for Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful models for generation tasks, but they may not generate good quality outputs in their first attempt. Apart from model fine-tuning, existing approaches to improve prediction accuracy and quality typically involve LLM self-improvement / self-reflection that incorporate feedback from models themselves. Despite their effectiveness, these methods are hindered by their high computational cost and lack of scalability. In this work, we propose CERET, a method for refining text generations by considering semantic stability, entailment and inter-sample uncertainty measures. Experimental results show that CERET outperforms Self-consistency and Self-rerank baselines consistently under various task setups, by 1.6% in Rouge-1 for abstractive summarization and 3.5% in hit rate for question answering. Compared to LLM Self-rerank method, our approach only requires 9.4% of its latency and is more cost-effective.

CERET: Cost-Effective Extrinsic Refinement for Text Generation

The pervasive influence of social biases in language data has sparked the need for benchmark datasets that capture and evaluate these biases in Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing efforts predominantly focus on English language and the Western context, leaving a void for a reliable dataset that encapsulates India’s unique socio-cultural nuances. To bridge this gap, we introduce IndiBias, a comprehensive benchmarking dataset designed specifically for evaluating social biases in the Indian context. We filter and translate the existing CrowS-Pairs dataset to create a benchmark dataset suited to the Indian context in Hindi language. Additionally, we leverage LLMs including ChatGPT and InstructGPT to augment our dataset with diverse societal biases and stereotypes prevalent in India. The included bias dimensions encompass gender, religion, caste, age, region, physical appearance, and occupation. We also build a resource to address intersectional biases along three intersectional dimensions. Our dataset contains 800 sentence pairs and 300 tuples for bias measurement across different demographics. The dataset is available in English and Hindi, providing a size comparable to existing benchmark datasets. Furthermore, using IndiBias we compare ten different language models on multiple bias measurement metrics. We observed that the language models exhibit more bias across a majority of the intersectional groups. All the scripts utilized and datasets created in this study are publicly available.

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LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models

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