Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, leading to an expectation for LLMs to be trustworthy ---- both accurate and well-calibrated (the prediction confidence should align with its ground truth correctness likelihood). Nowadays, fine-tuning has become the most popular method for adapting a model to practical usage by significantly increasing accuracy on downstream tasks. Despite the great accuracy it achieves, we found fine-tuning is still far away from satisfactory trustworthiness due to "tuning-induced mis-calibration". In this paper, we delve deeply into why and how mis-calibration exists in fine-tuned models, and how distillation can alleviate the issue. Then we further propose a brand new method named Efficient Trustworthy Distillation (FIRST), which utilizes a small portion of teacher's knowledge to obtain a reliable language model in a cost-efficient way. Specifically, we identify the "concentrated knowledge" phenomenon during distillation, which can significantly reduce the computational burden. Then we apply a "trustworthy maximization" process to optimize the utilization of this small portion of concentrated knowledge before transferring it to the student. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where better accuracy (+2.3%) and less mis-calibration (-10%) are achieved on average across both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, indicating better trustworthiness.

FIRST: Teach A Reliable Large Language Model Through Efficient Trustworthy Distillation

The deployment of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has brought forth a unique vulnerability: susceptibility to malicious attacks through visual inputs. This paper investigates the novel challenge of defending MLLMs against such attacks. Compared to large language models (LLMs), MLLMs include an additional image modality. We discover that images act as a "foreign language" that is not considered during safety alignment, making MLLMs more prone to producing harmful responses. Unfortunately, unlike the discrete tokens considered in text-based LLMs, the continuous nature of image signals presents significant alignment challenges, which poses difficulty to thoroughly cover all possible scenarios. This vulnerability is exacerbated by the fact that most state-of-the-art MLLMs are fine-tuned on limited image-text pairs that are much fewer than the extensive text-based pretraining corpus, which makes the MLLMs more prone to catastrophic forgetting of their original abilities during safety fine-tuning. To tackle these challenges, we introduce MLLM-Protector, a plug-and-play strategy that solves two subtasks: 1) identifying harmful responses via a lightweight harm detector, and 2) transforming harmful responses into harmless ones via a detoxifier. This approach effectively mitigates the risks posed by malicious visual inputs without compromising the original performance of MLLMs. Our results demonstrate that MLLM-Protector offers a robust solution to a previously unaddressed aspect of MLLM security.

MLLM-Protector: Ensuring MLLM's Safety without Hurting Performance

Main conference posters, Findings, Industry track and Demos are being presented during this session.

Virtual Poster Session 2

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

Language Modeling • Ethics, Bias, and Fairness • Discourse and Pragmatics • Multilinguality and Language Diversity • Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation • Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

Jianshu Zhang

2

Presentations

FIRST: Teach A Reliable Large Language Model Through Efficient Trustworthy Distillation

MLLM-Protector: Ensuring MLLM's Safety without Hurting Performance

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