United States

The era of Large Language Models (LLMs) raises new demands for automatic evaluation metrics, which should be adaptable to various application scenarios while maintaining low cost and effectiveness. Traditional metrics for automatic text evaluation are often tailored to specific scenarios, while LLM-based evaluation metrics are costly, requiring fine-tuning or rely heavily on the generation capabilities of LLMs. 
Besides, previous LLM-based metrics ignore the fact that, within the space of LLM representations, there exist direction vectors that indicate the estimation of text quality. To this end, we introduce RepEval, a metric that leverages the projection of LLM representations for evaluation. Through simple prompt modifications, RepEval can easily transition to various tasks, requiring only minimal sample pairs for direction vector construction. Results on fourteen datasets across two evaluation tasks demonstrate the high effectiveness of our method, which exhibits a higher correlation with human judgments than previous methods, even in complex evaluation scenarios involving pair-wise selection under nuanced aspects. Our work underscores the richness of information regarding text quality embedded within LLM representations, offering insights for the development of new metrics.

EMNLP 2024

RepEval: Effective Text Evaluation with LLM Representation

medical decision trees; information extraction; generative 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

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

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)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

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.

Knights and knaves problems represent a classic genre of logical puzzles where characters either tell the truth or lie. The objective is to logically deduce each character's identity based on their statements. The challenge arises from the truth-telling or lying behavior, which influences the logical implications of each statement. Solving these puzzles requires not only direct deductions from individual statements, but the ability to assess the truthfulness of statements by reasoning through various hypothetical scenarios. As such, knights and knaves puzzles serve as compelling examples of suppositional reasoning. In this paper, we introduce $\textit{TruthQuest}$, a benchmark for suppositional reasoning based on the principles of knights and knaves puzzles. Our benchmark presents problems of varying complexity, considering both the number of characters and the types of logical statements involved. Evaluations on $\textit{TruthQuest}$ show that large language models like Llama 3 and Mixtral-8x7B exhibit significant difficulties solving these tasks. A detailed error analysis of the models' output reveals that lower-performing models exhibit a diverse range of reasoning errors, frequently failing to grasp the concept of truth and lies. In comparison, more proficient models primarily struggle with accurately inferring the logical implications of potentially false statements.

Liar, Liar, Logical Mire: A Benchmark for Suppositional Reasoning in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional reasoning, tool usage, and memory capabilities. As their applications expand into multi-agent environments, there arises a need for a comprehensive evaluation framework that captures LLMs' reasoning, planning, collaboration, and other social abilities. This work introduces a novel competition-based benchmark framework specifically designed to assess LLMs within multi-agent settings, providing quantitative metrics to evaluate their judgment, reasoning, deception, self-awareness, cooperation, coordination, and rationality.
We utilize two social deduction games alongside three game-theory scenarios to create diverse environments.
Our frame is fortified with the probabilistic graphic modeling (PGM) method, enhancing the LLMs' capabilities in navigating complex social and cognitive dimensions. We evaluate seven LLMs, quantitatively highlighting a significant capability gap of over threefold between the strongest, GPT o1, and the weakest, Llama-2-70B. It also confirms that our PGM enhancement boosts the abilities of all selected models by an average of 37\%. Our data and code can be found here https://github.com/cathyxl/MAgIC.

MAgIC: Investigation of Large Language Model Powered Multi-Agent in Cognition, Adaptability, Rationality and Collaboration

Large language models are able to generate code for visualisations in response to simple user requests.
This is a useful application and an appealing one for NLP research because plots of data provide grounding for language.
However, there are relatively few benchmarks, and those that exist may not be representative of what users do in practice.
This paper investigates whether benchmarks reflect real-world use through an empirical study comparing benchmark datasets with code from public repositories.
Our findings reveal a substantial gap, with evaluations not testing the same distribution of chart types, attributes, and actions as real-world examples.
One dataset is representative, but requires extensive modification to become a practical end-to-end benchmark. 
This shows that new benchmarks are needed to support the development of systems that truly address users' visualisation needs.
These observations will guide future data creation, highlighting which features hold genuine significance for users.

Do Text-to-Vis Benchmarks Test Real Use of Visualizations?

Recent developments in large speech foundation models like Whisper have led to their widespread use in many automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications. These systems incorporate 'special tokens' in their vocabulary, such as $<|\texttt{endoftext}|>$, to guide their language generation process. However, we demonstrate that these tokens can be exploited by adversarial attacks to manipulate the model's behavior. We propose a simple yet effective method to learn a universal acoustic realization of Whisper's $<|\texttt{endoftext}|>$ token, which, when prepended to any speech signal, encourages the model to ignore the speech and only transcribe the special token, effectively 'muting' the model. Our experiments demonstrate that the same, universal 0.64-second adversarial audio segment can successfully mute a target Whisper ASR model for over 97% of speech samples. Moreover, we find that this universal adversarial audio segment often transfers to new datasets and tasks. Overall this work demonstrates the vulnerability of Whisper models to `muting' adversarial attacks, where such attacks can pose both risks and potential benefits in real-world settings: for example the attack can be used to bypass speech moderation systems, or conversely the attack can also be used to protect private speech data.

Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Models

Planning, as the core module of agents, is crucial in various fields such as embodied agents, web navigation, and tool using. With the development of large language models (LLMs), some researchers treat large language models as intelligent agents to stimulate and evaluate their planning capabilities. However, the planning mechanism is still unclear. In this work, we focus on exploring the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations. First, we study how planning is done internally by analyzing the multi-layer perception (MLP) and multi-head self-attention (MHSA) components at the last token. We find that the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token can directly decode the decision to some extent. Based on this discovery, we further trace the source of MHSA by information flow, and we reveal that MHSA extracts information from spans of the goal states and recent steps. According to information flow, we continue to study what information is encoded within it. Specifically, we explore whether future decisions have been considered in advance in the representation of flow. We demonstrate that the middle and upper layers encode a few short-term future decisions. Overall, our research analyzes the look-ahead planning mechanisms of LLMs, facilitating future research on LLMs performing planning tasks.

Unlocking the Future: Exploring Look-Ahead Planning Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models

While recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology produce natural and expressive speech, they lack the option for users to select emotion and control intensity. We propose EmoKnob, a framework that allows fine-grained emotion control in speech synthesis with few-shot demonstrative samples of arbitrary emotion. Our framework leverages the expressive speaker representation space made possible by recent advances in foundation voice cloning models. Based on the few-shot capability of our emotion control framework, we propose two methods to apply emotion control on emotions described by open-ended text, enabling an intuitive interface for controlling a diverse array of nuanced emotions. To facilitate a more systematic emotional speech synthesis field, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics designed to rigorously assess the faithfulness and recognizability of emotion control frameworks. Through objective and subjective evaluations, we show that our emotion control framework effectively embeds emotions into speech and surpasses emotion expressiveness of commercial TTS services.

EmoKnob: Enhance Voice Cloning with Fine-Grained Emotion Control

The popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) have unleashed a new age of Language Agents for solving a diverse range of tasks. While contemporary frontier LLMs are capable enough to power reasonably good Language agents, the closed-API model makes it hard to improve in cases they perform sub-optimally. To address this, recent works have explored techniques to improve their performance using self reflection and prompt optimization techniques. While techniques like self reflection work well in an online setup, contemporary prompt optimization techniques are designed to work on simpler tasks. To address this, we introduce METAREFLECTION, a novel offline reinforcement learning technique that enhances the performance of Language Agents by augmenting a semantic memory based on experiential learnings from past trials. We demonstrate the efficacy of METAREFLECTION by evaluating across multiple domains, including complex logical reasoning, biomedical semantic similarity, open world question answering, and vulnerability threat detection, in Infrastructure-as-Code, with different agent design. METAREFLECTION boosts Language agents’ performance by 4 % to 16.82 % over the raw GPT-4 baseline and performs on par with existing state-of-the-art prompt optimization techniques while requiring fewer LLM calls.

MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections

Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of pre-trained language models to adversarial attacks. Adversarial defense techniques have been proposed to reconstruct adversarial examples within feature or text spaces. However, these methods struggle to effectively repair the semantics in adversarial examples, resulting in unsatisfactory defense performance. To repair the semantics in adversarial examples, we introduce a novel approach named Reactive Perturbation Defocusing (Rapid), which employs an adversarial detector to identify the fake labels of adversarial examples and leverages adversarial attackers to repair the semantics in adversarial examples. Our extensive experimental results, conducted on four public datasets, demonstrate the consistent effectiveness of Rapid in various adversarial attack scenarios. For easy evaluation, we provide a click-to-run demo of Rapid at https://tinyurl.com/22ercuf8.

The Best Defense is Attack: Repairing Semantics in Textual Adversarial Examples

*Uncertainty expressions* such as 'probably' or 'highly unlikely' are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions, there has been little inquiry into the abilities of language models in the same context. In this paper, we investigate how language models map linguistic expressions of uncertainty to numerical responses. Our approach assesses whether language models can employ theory of mind in this setting: understanding the uncertainty of another agent about a particular statement, independently of the model's own certainty about that statement. We find that 7 out of 10 models are able to map uncertainty expressions to probabilistic responses in a human-like manner. However, we observe systematically different behavior depending on whether a statement is actually true or false. This sensitivity indicates that language models are substantially more susceptible to bias based on their prior knowledge (as compared to humans). These findings raise important questions and have broad implications for human-AI and AI-AI communication.

Perceptions of Linguistic Uncertainty by Language Models and Humans

The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about the transparency and fair use of the data used in their pretraining. Detecting such content is challenging due to the scale of the data and limited exposure of each instance during training. We propose ReCaLL (Relative Conditional Log-Likelihood), a novel membership inference attack (MIA) to detect LLMs' pretraining data by leveraging their conditional language modeling capabilities. ReCaLL examines the relative change in conditional log-likelihoods when prefixing target data points with non-member context. Our empirical findings show that conditioning member data on non-member prefixes induces a larger decrease in log-likelihood compared to non-member data. We conduct comprehensive experiments and show that ReCaLL achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WikiMIA dataset, even with random and synthetic prefixes, and can be further improved using an ensemble approach. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth analysis of LLMs' behavior with different membership contexts, providing insights into how LLMs leverage membership information for effective inference at both the sequence and token level.

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