United States

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to generate text with citations to evidence sources can mitigate hallucinations and enhance verifiability in information-seeking systems. However, improving this capability requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive. Inspired by recent advances in self-improvement that enhance LLMs without manual annotation, we present START, a Self-Taught AttRibuTion framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of LLMs. First, to prevent models from stagnating due to initially insufficient supervision signals, START leverages the model to self-construct synthetic training data for warming up. To further self-improve the model&#39;s attribution ability, START iteratively utilizes fine-grained preference supervision signals constructed from its sampled responses to encourage robust, comprehensive, and attributable generation. Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets, covering long-form QA and multi-step reasoning, demonstrate significant performance gains of 25.13% on average without relying on human annotations and more advanced models. Further analysis reveals that START excels in aggregating information across multiple sources.

EMNLP 2024

Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving

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## 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. 
 
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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 
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NAACL 2024

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

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to generate text with citations to evidence sources can mitigate hallucinations and enhance verifiability in information-seeking systems. However, improving this capability requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive. Inspired by recent advances in self-improvement that enhance LLMs without manual annotation, we present START, a Self-Taught AttRibuTion framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of LLMs. First, to prevent models from stagnating due to initially insufficient supervision signals, START leverages the model to self-construct synthetic training data for warming up. To further self-improve the model's attribution ability, START iteratively utilizes fine-grained preference supervision signals constructed from its sampled responses to encourage robust, comprehensive, and attributable generation. Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets, covering long-form QA and multi-step reasoning, demonstrate significant performance gains of 25.13% on average without relying on human annotations and more advanced models. Further analysis reveals that START excels in aggregating information across multiple sources.

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.

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.

Translation systems, including foundation models capable of translation, can produce errors that result in gender mistranslation, and such errors can be especially harmful. To measure the extent of such potential harms when translating into and out of English, we introduce a dataset, MiTTenS, covering 26 languages from a variety of language families and scripts, including several traditionally under-represented in digital resources. The dataset is constructed with handcrafted passages that target known failure patterns, longer synthetically generated passages, and natural passages sourced from multiple domains. We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset by evaluating both neural machine translation systems and foundation models, and show that all systems exhibit gender mistranslation and potential harm, even in high resource languages.

MiTTenS: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender Mistranslation

Hate speech (HS) on social media exacerbates misinformation and baseless prejudices. Evidence-supported counterspeech (CS) is crucial for correcting misinformation and reducing prejudices through facts. Existing methods for generating evidence-supported CS often lack clear guidance with a core claim for organizing evidence and do not adequately address factuality and faithfulness hallucinations in CS within anti-hate contexts. In this paper, to mitigate the aforementioned, we propose F$^2$RL, a Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning framework for generating claim-guided and evidence-supported CS. Firstly, we generate counter-claims based on hate speech and design a self-evaluation mechanism to select the most appropriate one. Secondly, we propose a coarse-to-fine evidence retrieval method. This method initially generates broad queries to ensure the diversity of evidence, followed by carefully reranking the retrieved evidence to ensure its relevance to the claim. Finally, we design a reinforcement learning method with a triplet-based factuality reward model and a multi-aspect faithfulness reward model. The method rewards the generator to encourage greater factuality, more accurate refutation of hate speech, consistency with the claim, and better utilization of evidence. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves excellent performance in CS generation, with strong factuality and faithfulness.

F$^2$RL: Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning Framework for Claim-Guided Evidence-Supported Counterspeech Generation

Program-of-Thought (PoT) replaces natural language-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT) as the most popular method in Large Language Models (LLMs) mathematical reasoning tasks by utilizing external tool calls to circumvent computational errors. However, our evaluation of the GPT-4 and Llama series reveals that using PoT introduces more reasoning errors, such as incorrect formulas or flawed logic, compared to CoT. To address this issue, we propose Human-Think Language (HTL), which leverages a suite of strategies that help integrate PoT and CoT, encompassing: (1) a new generation paradigm that uses full CoT reasoning to control code generation. (2) Focus Attention, that directs model attention to the CoT reasoning during PoT to generate more logical code. (3) reinforcement learning that utilizes the accuracy of both CoT and PoT responses as rewards to prevent repetitive reasoning steps in LLMs when solving difficult math problems. Our method achieves an average improvement of 6.5% on the Llama-Base model and 4.3% on the Mistral-Base model across 8 mathematical calculation datasets. It also shows significant effectiveness on five out-of-domain datasets by controlling the model's information flow, exhibiting strong transferability. Additionally, HTL shows the most significant improvement in non-mathematical natural language inference task, contributing to a unified reasoning task framework.

How Do Humans Write Code? Large Models Do It the Same Way Too

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has significantly improved performance in various vision-language tasks by expanding the dataset with image-text pairs obtained from the web. This paper further explores CLIP from the perspectives of data and model architecture. To mitigate the impact of the noise data and enhance the quality of large-scale image-text data crawled from the internet, we introduce a diverse description generation framework that can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to combine and refine information from web-based image-text pairs, synthetic captions, and detection tags. Additionally, we propose RWKV-CLIP, the first RWKV-driven vision-language representation learning model that combines the effective parallel training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. Extensive experiments across different model scales and pre-training datasets demonstrate that RWKV-CLIP is a robust vision-language representation learner and it achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks, including linear probing, zero-shot classification, and zero-shot image-text retrieval. To facilitate future research, the code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/deepglint/RWKV-CLIP.

RWKV-CLIP: A Robust Vision-Language Representation Learner

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC), which aims to ground a local visual region via natural language, is a task that heavily relies on multimodal alignment. Most existing methods utilize powerful pre-trained models to transfer visual/linguistic knowledge by full fine-tuning. However, full fine-tuning the entire backbone not only breaks the rich prior knowledge embedded in the pre-training, but also incurs significant computational costs. Motivated by the recent emergence of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) methods, we aim to solve the REC task in an effective and efficient manner. Directly applying these PETL methods to the REC task is inappropriate, as they lack the specific-domain abilities for precise local visual perception and visual-language alignment. Therefore, we propose a novel framework of Multimodal Prior-guided Parameter Efficient Tuning, namely MaPPER. Specifically, MaPPER comprises Dynamic Prior Adapters guided by a aligned prior, and Local Convolution Adapters to extract precise local semantics for better visual perception. Moreover, the Prior-Guided Text module is proposed to further utilize the prior for facilitating the cross-modal alignment. Experimental results on three widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that MaPPER achieves the best accuracy compared to the full fine-tuning and other PETL methods with only 1.41% tunable backbone parameters.

MaPPER: Multimodal Prior-guided Parameter Efficient Tuning for Referring Expression Comprehension

Having been trained on massive pretraining data, large language models have shown excellent performance on many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, pretraining data tends to contain misleading and even conflicting information, and it is intriguing to understand how LLMs handle these noisy data during training. In this study, we systematically analyze LLMs’ learning preferences for data with conflicting knowledge. We find that pretrained LLMs establish learning preferences similar to humans, i.e., preferences towards formal texts and texts with fewer spelling errors, resulting in faster learning and more favorable treatment of knowledge in data with such features when facing conflicts. This finding is generalizable across models and languages and is more evident in larger models. An in-depth analysis reveals that LLMs tend to trust data with features that signify consistency with the majority of data, and it is possible to instill new preferences and erase old ones by manipulating the degree of consistency with the majority data.

Formality Favored: Unraveling the Learning Preferences of Large Language Models on Data with Conflicting Knowledge

Long sequence modeling has gained broad interest as large language models (LLMs) continue to advance. Recent research has identified that a large portion of hidden states within the key-value caches of Transformer models can be discarded (also termed evicted) without
affecting the perplexity performance in generating long sequences. However, we show that these methods, despite preserving perplexity performance, often drop information that is important for solving downstream tasks, a problem which we call information neglect. To address this issue, we introduce Chunked Instruction-aware State Eviction (CItruS), a novel modeling technique that integrates the attention preferences useful for a downstream task into the eviction process of hidden states. In addition, we design a method for chunked sequence processing to further improve efficiency. Our training-free method exhibits superior performance on long sequence comprehension and retrieval tasks over several strong baselines under the same memory budget, while preserving language modeling perplexity. The code and data have been released at https://github.com/ybai-nlp/CItruS.

CItruS: Chunked Instruction-aware State Eviction for Long Sequence Modeling

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in sentences. Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit robust capabilities and are widely applied in various tasks, their performance on CSC is often unsatisfactory. We find that LLMs fail to meet the Chinese character-level constraints of the CSC task, namely equal length and phonetic similarity, leading to a performance bottleneck. Further analysis reveals that this issue stems from the granularity of tokenization, as current mixed character-word tokenization struggles to satisfy these character-level constraints. To address this issue, we propose C-LLM, a Large Language Model-based Chinese Spell Checking method that learns to check errors Character by Character. Character-level tokenization enables the model to learn character-level alignment, effectively mitigating issues related to character-level constraints. Furthermore, CSC is simplified to replication-dominated and substitution-supplemented tasks. Experiments on two CSC benchmarks demonstrate that C-LLM achieves a 2.1% enhancement in general scenarios and a significant 12% improvement in vertical domain scenarios compared to existing methods, establishing state-of-the-art performance.

C-LLM: Learn to Check Chinese Spelling Errors Character by Character

As large vision-language models (LVLMs) evolve rapidly, the demand for high-quality and diverse data to align these models becomes increasingly crucial.
However, the creation of such data with human supervision proves costly and time-intensive.
In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of AI feedback to scale supervision for aligning LVLMs.
We introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset, comprising over 82K multi-modal instructions and comprehensive rationales generated by off-the-shelf models without human annotations.
To evaluate the effectiveness of AI feedback for vision-language alignment, we train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization on VLFeedback.
Silkie showcases exceptional performance regarding helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics. It outperforms its base model by 6.9\% and 9.5\% in perception and cognition tasks, reduces hallucination issues on MMHal-Bench, and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks.
Furthermore, our analysis underscores the advantage of AI feedback, particularly in fostering preference diversity to deliver more comprehensive improvements. Our dataset, training code and models are available at \url{https://vlf-silkie.github.io}.

VLFeedback: A Large-Scale AI Feedback Dataset for Large Vision-Language Models Alignment

This study explores the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating personalized "mirror stories" that reflect and resonate with individual readers' identities, addressing the significant lack of diversity in literature. We present MirrorStories, a corpus of 1,500 personalized short stories generated by integrating elements such as name, gender, age, ethnicity, reader interest, and story moral. We demonstrate that LLMs can effectively incorporate diverse identity elements into narratives, with human evaluators identifying personalized elements in the stories with high accuracy. Through a comprehensive evaluation involving 26 diverse human judges, we compare the effectiveness of MirrorStories against generic narratives. We find that personalized LLM-generated stories not only outscore generic human-written and LLM-generated ones across all metrics of engagement (with average ratings of 4.22 versus 3.37 on a 5-point scale), but also achieve higher textual diversity while preserving the intended moral. We also provide analyses that include bias assessments and a study on the potential for integrating images into personalized stories.

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MiTTenS: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender Mistranslation

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