United States

Recent work has revealed that in-context learning for large language models exhibits compositional generalization capacity, which can be enhanced by selecting in-context demonstrations similar to test cases to provide contextual information. However, how to exhibit in-context compositional generalization (ICCG) of large vision-language models (LVLMs) is non-trival. Due to the inherent asymmetry between visual and linguistic modalities, ICCG in LVLMs faces an inevitable challenge---redundant information on the visual modality. The redundant information affects in-context learning from two aspects: (1) Similarity calculation may be dominated by redundant information, resulting in sub-optimal demonstration selection. (2) Redundant information in in-context demonstrations brings misleading contextual information to in-context learning. To alleviate these problems, we propose a demonstration selection method to achieve ICCG for LVLMs, by considering two key factors of demonstrations: content and structure, from a multimodal perspective. Specifically, we design a diversity-coverage-based matching score to select demonstrations with maximum coverage, and avoid selecting demonstrations with redundant information via their content redundancy and structural complexity. We build a GQA-ICCG dataset to simulate the ICCG setting, and conduct experiments on GQA-ICCG and the VQA v2 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

EMNLP 2024

In-Context Compositional Generalization for Large Vision-Language Models

bayesian decision

re-ranker

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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 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 Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) may produce outputs that are unfaithful to reality, also known as visual hallucinations (VH), which hinders their application in multimodal understanding and decision-making. In this work, we introduce a novel plug-and-play train-free decoding algorithm named Game and Tree based Hallucination Mitigation (GTHM), designed for mitigating VH. GTHM is inspired by empirical observations that the fuzziness of multi-granularity view perception exacerbates VH. Based on this, GTHM leverages visual information to construct a coarse-to-fine visual view tree (CFTree) that organizes visual objects, attributes, and relationships in a hierarchical manner. Additionally, we innovatively model the optimal visual-token matching process on the CFTree as the cooperative game. Specifically, we define the Tree-based Shapley Value (TSV) for each visual view on the CFTree to assess its significant contribution to the overall visual understanding, thereby determining the optimal visual granularity. Subsequently, we utilize the TSV as guidance to implement adaptive weight contrastive decoding to achieve vision-aware decoding. Extensive experiments on four popular benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our GTHM in alleviating VH across different LVLM families without additional training or post-processing. Our code is published at https://github.com/mengchuang123/GTHM.

Game on Tree: Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Coarse-to-Fine View Tree and Game Theory

Human lexicons contain many different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., *purple* or *magenta* for the same shade of color. On the one hand, studies on language use have explored how speakers adapt their referring expressions to successfully communicate in context, without focusing on properties of the lexical system. On the other hand, studies in language evolution have discussed how competing pressures for informativeness and simplicity shape lexical systems, without tackling in-context communication. We aim at bridging the gap between these traditions, and explore why a soft mapping between referents and words is a good solution for communication, by taking into account both in-context communication and the structure of the lexicon. We propose a simple measure of informativeness for words and lexical systems, grounded in a visual space, and analyze color naming data for English and Mandarin Chinese. We conclude that optimal lexical systems are those where multiple words can apply to the same referent, conveying different amounts of information. Such systems allow speakers to maximize communication accuracy and minimize the amount of information they convey when communicating about referents in contexts.

Why do objects have many names? A study on word informativeness in language use and lexical systems.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices presents significant challenges due to the substantial computational overhead and memory requirements. Activation sparsification can mitigate these resource challenges by reducing the number of activated neurons during inference. Existing methods typically employ thresholding-based sparsification based on the statistics of activation tensors. However, they do not model the impact of activation sparsification on performance, resulting in suboptimal performance degradation. To address the limitations, this paper reformulates the activation sparsification problem to explicitly capture the relationship between activation sparsity and model performance. Then, this paper proposes CHESS, a general activation sparsification approach via CHannel-wise thrEsholding and Selective Sparsification. First, channel-wise thresholding assigns a unique threshold to each activation channel in the feed-forward network (FFN) layers. Then, selective sparsification involves applying thresholding-based activation sparsification to specific layers within the attention modules. Finally, we detail the implementation of sparse kernels to accelerate LLM inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CHESS achieves lower performance degradation over eight downstream tasks while activating fewer parameters than existing methods, thus speeding up the LLM inference by up to 1.27x.

CHESS: Optimizing LLM Inference via Channel-Wise Thresholding and Selective Sparsification

To study the requirements needed for a human-like language to develop, Language Emergence research uses jointly trained artificial agents which communicate to solve a task, the most popular of which is a referential game. The targets that agents refer to typically involve a single entity, which limits their ecological validity and the complexity of the emergent languages. Here, we present a simple multi-entity game in which targets include multiple entities that are spatially related. We ask whether agents dealing with multi-entity targets benefit from the use of graph representations, and explore four different graph schemes. Our game requires more sophisticated analyses to capture the extent to which the emergent languages are compositional, and crucially, what the decomposed features are. We find that emergent languages from our setup exhibit a considerable degree of compositionality, but not over all features.

The Emergence of Compositional Languages in Multi-entity Referential Games: from Image to Graph Representations

Zero-shot temporal action localization (TAL) aims to temporally localize actions in videos without prior training examples. To address the challenges of TAL, we offer GRIZAL, a model that uses multimodal embeddings and dynamic motion cues to localize actions effectively. GRIZAL achieves sample diversity by using large-scale generative models such as GPT-4 for generating textual augmentations and DALL-E for generating image augmentations. Our model integrates vision-language embeddings with optical flow insights, optimized through a blend of supervised and self-supervised loss functions. On ActivityNet, Thumos14 and Charades-STA datasets, GRIZAL greatly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TAL models, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability across a wide range of video content. We will make all the models and code publicly available by open-sourcing them.

GRIZAL: Generative Prior-guided Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization

The emergence of personalized generation has made it possible to create texts or images that meet the unique needs of users. Recent advances mainly focus on style or scene transfer based on given keywords. However, in e-commerce and recommender systems, it is almost an untouched area to explore user historical interactions, automatically mine user interests with semantic associations, and create item representations that closely align with user individual interests.

In this paper, we propose a brand new framework called **I**nterest-**A**ugmented **M**ultimodal **G**enerator (**I-AM-G**). The framework first extracts tags from the multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with, and the most frequently occurred ones are extracted to rewrite the text description of the item. Then, the framework uses a decoupled text-to-text and image-to-image retriever to search for the top-$K$ similar item text and image embeddings from the item pool. Finally, the Attention module for user interests fuses the retrieved information in a cross-modal manner and further guides the personalized generation process in collaboration with the rewritten text.

We conducted extensive and comprehensive experiments to demonstrate that our framework can effectively generate results aligned with user preferences, which potentially provides a new paradigm of **Rewrite and Retrieve** for personalized generation.

I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization

Iterative data generation and model re-training can effectively align large language models~(LLMs) to human preferences. The process of data sampling is crucial, as it significantly influences the success of policy improvement. Repeated random sampling is a widely used method that independently queries the model multiple times to generate outputs. In this work, we propose a more effective sampling method, named Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling (PRS). Unlike random sampling, PRS employs a tree-based generation framework to enable more efficient sampling. It leverages adaptive self-refinement techniques to better explore the sampling space. By specifying user preferences in natural language, PRS can further optimize response generation according to these preferences. As a result, PRS can align models to diverse user preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that PRS generates higher-quality responses with significantly higher rewards. On AlpacaEval and Arena-Hard, PRS substantially outperforms repeated random sampling in best-of-$N$ sampling. Moreover, PRS shows strong performance when applied in iterative offline RL training.

Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling for Aligning Language Models

Ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as they become integral to applications like translation and question answering. Current alignment methods struggle with dynamic user intentions and complex objectives, making models vulnerable to generating harmful content. We propose Safety Arithmetic, a training-free framework enhancing LLM safety across different scenarios: Base models, Supervised fine-tuned models (SFT), and Edited models. Safety Arithmetic involves Harm Direction Removal to avoid harmful content and Safety Alignment to promote safe responses. Additionally, we present NoIntentEdit, a dataset highlighting edit instances that could compromise model safety if used unintentionally. Our experiments show that Safety Arithmetic significantly improves safety measures, reduces over-safety, and maintains model utility, outperforming existing methods in ensuring safe content generation.

Safety Arithmetic: A Framework for Test-time Safety Alignment of Language Models by Steering Parameters and Activations

In recent years, there has been a significant rise in the phenomenon of hate against women on social media platforms, particularly through the use of misogynous memes. These memes often target women with subtle and obscure cues, making their detection a challenging task for automated systems. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in reasoning using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to generate the intermediate reasoning chains as the rationale to facilitate multimodal tasks, but often neglect cultural diversity and key aspects like emotion and contextual knowledge hidden in the visual modalities. To address this gap, we introduce a **M**ultimodal **M**ulti-hop CoT (M3Hop-CoT) framework for **M**isogynous meme identification, combining a CLIP-based classifier and a multimodal CoT module with entity-object-relationship integration. M3Hop-CoT employs a three-step multimodal prompting principle to induce emotions, target awareness, and contextual knowledge for meme analysis. Our empirical evaluation, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis, validates the efficacy of the M3Hop-CoT framework on the SemEval-2022 Task 5 (**MAMI task**) dataset, highlighting its strong performance in the macro-F1 score. Furthermore, we evaluate the model's generalizability by evaluating it on various benchmark meme datasets, offering a thorough insight into the effectiveness of our approach across different datasets. Codes are available at this link: https://github.com/Gitanjali1801/LLM_CoT

M3Hop-CoT: Misogynous Meme Identification with Multimodal Multi-hop Chain-of-Thought

Large language models have emerged as a significant phenomenon due to their ability to produce natural text across various applications. However, the proliferation of generated text raises concerns regarding its potential misuse in fraudulent activities such as academic dishonesty, spam dissemination, and misinformation propagation. Prior studies have detected the generation of non-analogous text, which manifests numerous differences between original and generated text. We have observed that the similarity between the original text and its generation is notably higher than that between the generated text and its subsequent regeneration. To address this, we propose a novel approach named SimLLM, aimed at estimating the similarity between an input sentence and its generated counterpart to detect analogous machine-generated sentences that closely mimic human-written ones. Our empirical analysis demonstrates SimLLM's superior performance compared to existing methods.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Game on Tree: Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Coarse-to-Fine View Tree and Game Theory

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Diverse Demonstrations Improve In-context Compositional Generalization