Collecting high-quality labeled data for model training is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive for various NLP tasks. While copious solutions, such as active learning for small language models (SLMs) and prevalent in-context learning in the era of large language models (LLMs), have been proposed and alleviate the labeling burden to some extent, their performances are still subject to human intervention. It is still underexplored how to reduce the annotation cost in the LLMs era. To bridge this, we revolutionize traditional active learning and propose an innovative collaborative learning framework FreeAL to interactively distill and filter the task-specific knowledge from LLMs. During collaborative training, an LLM serves as an active annotator inculcating its coarse-grained knowledge, while a downstream SLM is incurred as a student to filter out high-quality in-context samples to feedback LLM for the subsequent label refinery. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FreeAL largely enhances the zero-shot performances for both SLM and LLM without any human supervision.

FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models

In recent years, large language models (LLMs), such as GPTs, have attained great impact worldwide.
However, how to adapt these LLMs to better suit the vertical domain-specific tasks by utilizing external knowledge remains not completely solved.
Indeed, there have emerged a few works on this line where most of them rely on an alignment heuristic that is built to inject the corresponding knowledge tuple into the associated text sample.

However, despite the promise, we identify a pivotal problem in this work ubiquitously.
Simply put, we find that injecting unaligned (i.e., random) knowledge tuple into the LLMs achieves comparable (and sometimes better) results than the aligned knowledge being injected.
We therefore take a thorough investigation of this frustrating finding on a variety of related prior work and further provide a chain of potential interpretations for the phenomenon.
Based on all that, we offer a simple remediated technique.
Briefly, the core of this technique roots in an ideological emphasis on the pruning and purification of the external knowledge base to be injected into LLMs.
At last, we show that by integrating this technique into most (if not all) knowledge injection frameworks and recent LLMs, it manages to overcome the aforementioned sanity problem and further pushes the boundary of the performance of the domain-adaptive LLMs.

Revisiting the Knowledge Injection Frameworks

The prompt-based learning paradigm, which bridges the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot settings. Despite being widely applied, prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. 
Textual backdoor attacks are designed to introduce targeted vulnerabilities into models by poisoning a subset of training samples through trigger injection and label modification. However, they suffer from flaws such as abnormal natural language expressions resulting from the trigger and incorrect labeling of poisoned samples. In this study, we propose ProAttack, a novel and efficient method for performing clean-label backdoor attacks based on the prompt, which uses the prompt itself as a trigger. Our method does not require external triggers and ensures correct labeling of poisoned samples, improving the stealthy nature of the backdoor attack. With extensive experiments on rich-resource and few-shot text classification tasks, we empirically validate ProAttack's competitive performance in textual backdoor attacks. Notably, in the rich-resource setting, ProAttack achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates in the clean-label backdoor attack benchmark without external triggers.

Prompt as Triggers for Backdoor Attack: Examining the Vulnerability in Language Models

Theme Track: Large Language Models and the Future of NLP 2

technical paper

**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.

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Junbo Zhao

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FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models

Revisiting the Knowledge Injection Frameworks

Prompt as Triggers for Backdoor Attack: Examining the Vulnerability in Language Models

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