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Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of natural language processing, demonstrating remarkable abilities across various complex tasks. However, their stateless nature limits the capability to retain information across interactions, hindering performance in scenarios requiring historical context recall. To mitigate this, current approaches primarily use explicit memory to allow LLMs to store useful information, which is accessible, readable, and interpretable. Nevertheless, explicit memory lacks the reliable learning mechanisms of implicit memory, which can be optimized end-to-end. To harness the benefits of both, we introduce $\mathrm{EM}^{2}$, a novel framework enhancing explicit memory updates via the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. $\mathrm{EM}^{2}$ treats memory as a latent variable, ensuring continual learning and improvement during updates. Experimental results on streaming inference tasks demonstrate that $\mathrm{EM}^{2}$ outperforms existing methods without memory or with static external memory. Our in-depth analysis highlights that $\mathrm{EM}^{2}$ significantly enhances performance across various backbones and memory strategies, providing a robust solution for advancing LLM memory management and enabling explicit memory to learn and improve similarly to implicit memory.

EMNLP 2024

Explicit Memory Learning with Expectation Maximization

multi-llm

tool learning

fine-tuning

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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.

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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.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents significantly extend the capabilities of standalone LLMs, empowering them to interact with external tools (e.g., APIs, functions) and complete various tasks in a self-directed fashion. The challenge of tool use demands that LLMs not only understand user queries and generate answers accurately but also excel in task planning, tool invocation, and result summarization. While traditional works focus on training a single LLM with all these capabilities, performance limitations become apparent, particularly with smaller models. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. Each component is implemented by a single LLM that focuses on a specific capability and collaborates with others to accomplish the task. This modular framework facilitates individual updates and the potential use of smaller LLMs for building each capability. To effectively train this framework, we introduce a two-stage training paradigm. First, we fine-tune a backbone LLM on the entire dataset without discriminating sub-tasks, providing the model with a comprehensive understanding of the task. Second, the fine-tuned LLM is used to instantiate the planner, caller, and summarizer respectively, which are continually fine-tuned on respective sub-tasks. Evaluation across various tool-use benchmarks illustrates that our proposed multi-LLM framework surpasses the traditional single-LLM approach, highlighting its efficacy and advantages in tool learning.

Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent

Model editing is a technique that edits the large language models (LLMs) with updated knowledge to alleviate hallucinations without resource-intensive retraining. While current model editing methods can effectively modify a model’s behavior within a specific area of interest, they often overlook the potential unintended side effects on the general abilities of LLMs such as reasoning, natural language inference, and question answering. In this paper, we raise concerns that model editing’s improvements on factuality may come at the cost of a significant degradation of the model’s general abilities. We systematically analyze the side effects by evaluating four popular editing methods on three LLMs across eight representative tasks. Our extensive empirical experiments show that it is challenging for current editing methods to simultaneously improve factuality of LLMs and maintain their general abilities. Our analysis reveals that the side effects are caused by model editing altering the original model weights excessively, leading to overfitting to the edited facts. To mitigate this, a method named RECT is proposed to regularize the edit update weights by imposing constraints on their complexity based on the RElative Change in weighT. Evaluation results show that RECT can significantly mitigate the side effects of editing while still maintaining over 94% editing performance.

Model Editing Harms General Abilities of Large Language Models: Regularization to the Rescue

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable fluency across various tasks. However, their unethical applications, such as disseminating disinformation, have become a growing concern. Although recent works have proposed a number of LLM detection methods, their robustness and reliability remain unclear. In this paper, we present RAFT: a grammar error-free black-box attack against existing LLM detectors. In contrast to previous attacks for language models, our method exploits the transferability of LLM embeddings at the word-level while preserving the original text quality. We leverage an auxiliary embedding to greedily select candidate words to perturb against the target detector. Experiments reveal that our attack effectively compromises all detectors in the study across various domains by up to 99%, and are transferable across source models. Manual human evaluation studies show our attacks are realistic and indistinguishable from original human-written text. We also show that examples generated by RAFT can be used to train adversarially robust detectors. Our work shows that current LLM detectors are not adversarially robust, underscoring the urgent need for more resilient detection mechanisms.

RAFT: Realistic Attacks to Fool Text Detectors

Information flows by routes inside the network via mechanisms implemented in the model. These routes can be represented as graphs where nodes correspond to token representations and edges to computations. We automatically build these graphs in a top-down manner, for each prediction leaving only the most important nodes and edges. In contrast to the existing workflows relying on activation patching, we do this through attribution: this allows us to efficiently uncover existing circuits with just a single forward pass. Unlike with patching, we do not need a human to carefully design prediction templates, and we can extract information flow routes for any prediction (not just the ones among the allowed templates). As a result, we can analyze model behavior in general, for specific types of predictions, or different domains. We experiment with Llama 2 and show that some attention head roles are overall important, e.g. previous token heads and subword merging heads. Next, we find similarities in Llama 2 behavior when handling tokens of the same part of speech. Finally, we show that some model components can be specialized on domains such as coding or multilingual texts.

Information Flow Routes: Automatically Interpreting Language Models at Scale

Large language models (LLMs) have enhanced the capacity of vision-language models to caption visual text. This generative approach to image caption enrichment further makes textual captions more descriptive, improving alignment with the visual context. However, while many studies focus on the benefits of generative caption enrichment (GCE), are there any negative side effects? We compare standard-format captions and recent GCE processes from the perspectives of gender bias and hallucination, showing that enriched captions suffer from increased gender bias and hallucination. Furthermore, models trained on these enriched captions amplify gender bias by an average of 30.9% and increase hallucination by 59.5%. This study serves as a caution against the trend of making captions more descriptive.

From Descriptive Richness to Bias: Unveiling the Dark Side of Generative Image Caption Enrichment

Gender bias in machine translation (MT) is recognized as an issue that can harm people and society. And yet, advancements in the field rarely involve people, the final MT users, or inform how they might be impacted by biased technologies. Current evaluations are often restricted to automatic methods, which offer an opaque estimate of what the downstream impact of gender disparities might be. We conduct an extensive human-centered study to examine if and to what extent bias in MT brings harms with tangible costs, such as quality of service gaps across women and men. To this aim, we collect behavioral data from ~90 participants, who post-edited MT outputs to ensure correct gender translation. Across multiple datasets, languages, and types of users, our study shows that feminine post-editing demands significantly more technical and temporal effort, also corresponding to higher financial costs. Existing bias measurements, however, fail to reflect the found disparities. Our findings advocate for human-centered approaches that can inform the societal impact of bias.

What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Study

We introduce an evaluation methodology for reading comprehension tasks based on the intuition that certain examples, by the virtue of their linguistic complexity, consistently yield lower scores regardless of model size or architecture. We capitalize on semantic frame annotation for characterizing this complexity, and study seven complexity factors that may account for model's difficulty. We first deploy this methodology on a carefully annotated French reading comprehension benchmark showing that two of those complexity factors are indeed good predictors of models' failure, while others are less so. We further deploy our methodology on a well studied English benchmark by using chatGPT as a proxy for semantic annotation.

Our study reveals that fine-grained linguistically-motivated automatic evaluation of a reading comprehension task is not only possible, but helps understand models' abilities to handle specific linguistic characteristics of input examples. It also shows that current state-of-the-art models fail with some for those characteristics which suggests that adequately handling them requires more than merely increasing model size.

A linguistically-motivated evaluation methodology for unraveling model's abilities in reading comprehension tasks

This study identifies the potential vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to 'jailbreak' attacks, specifically focusing on the Arabic language and its various forms. While most research has concentrated on English-based prompt manipulation, our investigation broadens the scope to investigate the Arabic language. We initially tested the AdvBench benchmark in Standardized Arabic, finding that even with prompt manipulation techniques like prefix injection, it was insufficient to provoke LLMs into generating unsafe content. However, when using Arabic transliteration and chatspeak (or arabizi), we found that unsafe content could be produced on platforms like OpenAI GPT-4 and Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet. Our findings suggest that using Arabic and its various forms could expose information that might remain hidden, potentially increasing the risk of jailbreak attacks. We hypothesize that this exposure could be due to the model's learned connection to specific words, highlighting the need for more comprehensive safety training across all language forms.

Jailbreaking LLMs with Arabic Transliteration and Arabizi

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to propagate and amplify harmful stereotypes, particularly those that disproportionately affect marginalised communities. To understand the effect of these stereotypes more comprehensively, we introduce GlobalBias, a dataset of 876k sentences incorporating 40 distinct gender-by-ethnicity groups alongside descriptors typically used in bias literature, which enables us to study a broad set of stereotypes from around the world. We use GlobalBias to directly probe a suite of LMs via perplexity, which we use as a proxy to determine how certain stereotypes are represented in the model's internal representations. Following this, we generate character profiles based on given names and evaluate the prevalence of stereotypes in model outputs. We find that the demographic groups associated with various stereotypes remain consistent across model likelihoods and model outputs. Furthermore, larger models consistently display higher levels of stereotypical outputs, even when explicitly instructed not to.

Who is better at math, Jenny or Jingzhen? Uncovering Stereotypes in Large Language Models

Next-token prediction serves as the dominant component in current neural language models.
During the training phase, the model employs teacher forcing, which predicts tokens based on all preceding ground truth tokens.
However, this approach has been found to create shortcuts, utilizing the revealed prefix to spuriously fit future tokens, potentially compromising the accuracy of the next-token predictor.
In this paper, we introduce Semformer, a novel method of training a Transformer language model that explicitly models the semantic planning of response.
Specifically, we incorporate a sequence of planning tokens into the prefix, guiding the planning token representations to predict the latent semantic representations of the response, which are induced by an autoencoder.
In a minimal planning task (i.e., graph path-finding), our model exhibits near-perfect performance and effectively mitigates shortcut learning, a feat that standard training methods and baseline models have been unable to accomplish.
Furthermore, we pretrain Semformer from scratch with 125M parameters, demonstrating its efficacy through measures of perplexity, in-context learning, and fine-tuning on summarization tasks.

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Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent

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