Mexico

Numerous works are proposed to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents to better fulfill instructions, ensuring they are trustful and helpful. Nevertheless, some human instructions are often malicious or misleading and following them will lead to untruthful and unsafe responses. Previous work rarely focused on understanding how LLMs manage instructions based on counterfactual premises, referred to here as inductive instructions, which may stem from users&#39; false beliefs or malicious intents. In this paper, we aim to reveal the behaviors of LLMs towards inductive instructions and enhance their truthfulness and helpfulness accordingly. Specifically, we first introduce a benchmark of Inductive Instructions (INDust), where the false knowledge is incorporated into instructions in multiple different styles. After extensive human and automatic evaluations, we uncovered a universal vulnerability among LLMs in processing inductive instructions. Additionally, we identified that different inductive styles affect the models&#39; ability to identify the same underlying errors, and the complexity of the underlying assumptions also influences the model&#39;s performance. Motivated by these results, we propose Dual-critique prompting to improve LLM robustness against inductive instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that Dual-critique prompting significantly bolsters the robustness of a diverse array of LLMs, even when confronted with varying degrees of inductive instruction complexity and differing inductive styles.

NAACL 2024

Enhancing Large Language Models Against Inductive Instructions with Dual-critique Prompting

inductive instructions

dual-critique prompting

llm safety

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. 
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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.

Numerous works are proposed to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents to better fulfill instructions, ensuring they are trustful and helpful. Nevertheless, some human instructions are often malicious or misleading and following them will lead to untruthful and unsafe responses. Previous work rarely focused on understanding how LLMs manage instructions based on counterfactual premises, referred to here as inductive instructions, which may stem from users' false beliefs or malicious intents. In this paper, we aim to reveal the behaviors of LLMs towards inductive instructions and enhance their truthfulness and helpfulness accordingly. Specifically, we first introduce a benchmark of Inductive Instructions (INDust), where the false knowledge is incorporated into instructions in multiple different styles. After extensive human and automatic evaluations, we uncovered a universal vulnerability among LLMs in processing inductive instructions. Additionally, we identified that different inductive styles affect the models' ability to identify the same underlying errors, and the complexity of the underlying assumptions also influences the model's performance. Motivated by these results, we propose Dual-critique prompting to improve LLM robustness against inductive instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that Dual-critique prompting significantly bolsters the robustness of a diverse array of LLMs, even when confronted with varying degrees of inductive instruction complexity and differing inductive styles.

poster

## 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.
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We study the ability of neural and hybrid models to generalize logical reasoning patterns. We created a series of tests for analyzing various aspects of generalization in the context of language and reasoning, focusing on compositionality and recursiveness. We used them to study the syllogistic logic in hybrid models, where the network assists in premise selection. We analyzed feed-forward, recurrent, convolutional, and transformer architectures. Our experiments demonstrate that even though the models can capture elementary aspects of the meaning of logical terms, they learn to generalize logical reasoning only to a limited degree.

Testing the limits of logical reasoning in neural and hybrid models

In e-commerce, opinion summarization is the process of summarizing the consensus opinions found in product reviews. However, the potential of additional sources such as product description and question-answers (QA) has been considered less often. Moreover, the absence of any supervised training data makes this task challenging. To address this, we propose a novel synthetic dataset creation (SDC) strategy that leverages information from reviews as well as additional sources for selecting one of the reviews as a pseudo-summary to enable supervised training. Our Multi-Encoder Decoder framework for Opinion Summarization (MEDOS) employs a separate encoder for each source, enabling effective selection of information while generating the summary. For evaluation, due to the unavailability of test sets with additional sources, we extend the Amazon, Oposum+, and Flipkart test sets and leverage ChatGPT to annotate summaries. Experiments across nine test sets demonstrate that the combination of our SDC approach and MEDOS model achieves on average a 14.5% improvement in ROUGE-1 F1 over the SOTA. Moreover, comparative analysis underlines the significance of incorporating additional sources for generating more informative summaries. Human evaluations further indicate that MEDOS scores relatively higher in coherence and fluency with 0.41 and 0.5 (−1 to 1) respectively, compared to existing models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to generate opinion summaries leveraging additional sources in a self-supervised setting.

Product Description and QA Assisted Self-Supervised Opinion Summarization

In the constant updates of the product dialogue systems, we need to retrain the natural language understanding (NLU) model as new data from the real users would be merged into the existing data accumulated in the last updates. Within the newly added data, new intents would emerge and might have semantic entanglement with the existing intents, e.g. new intents that are semantically too specific or generic are actually a subset or superset of some existing intents in the semantic space, thus impairing the robustness of the NLU model. As the first attempt to solve this problem, we setup a new benchmark consisting of 4 Dialogue Version Control dataSets (DialogVCS). We formulate the intent detection with imperfect data in the system update as a multi-label classification task with positive but unlabeled intents, which asks the models to recognize all the proper intents, including the ones with semantic entanglement, in the inference. We also propose comprehensive baseline models and conduct in-depth analyses for the benchmark, showing that the semantically entangled intents can be effectively recognized with an automatic workflow. Our code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/Zefan-Cai/DialogVCS}.

DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade

We present Conformal Intent Classification and Clarification (CICC), a framework for fast and accurate intent classification for task-oriented dialogue systems. The framework turns heuristic uncertainty scores of any intent classifier into a clarification question that is guaranteed to contain the true intent at a pre-defined confidence level. By disambiguating between a small number of likely intents, the user query can be resolved quickly and accurately. Additionally, we propose to augment the framework for out-of-scope detection. In a comparative evaluation using seven intent recognition datasets we find that CICC generates small clarification questions and is capable of out-of-scope detection. CICC can help practitioners and researchers substantially in improving the user experience of dialogue agents with specific clarification questions.

Conformal Intent Classification and Clarification for Fast and Accurate Intent Recognition

The proliferation of online misinformation has posed significant threats to public interest. While numerous online users actively participate in the combat against misinformation, many of such responses can be characterized by the lack of politeness and supporting facts. As a solution, text generation approaches are proposed to automatically produce counter-misinformation responses. Nevertheless, existing methods are often trained end-to-end without leveraging external knowledge, resulting in subpar text quality and excessively repetitive responses. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented response generation for online misinformation (RARG), which collects supporting evidence from scientific sources and generates counter-misinformation responses based on the evidences. In particular, our RARG consists of two stages: (1) evidence collection, where we design a retrieval pipeline to retrieve and rerank evidence documents using a database comprising over 1M academic articles; (2) response generation, in which we align large language models (LLMs) to generate evidence-based responses via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We propose a reward function to maximize the utilization of the retrieved evidence while maintaining the quality of the generated text, which yields polite and factual responses that clearly refutes misinformation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we study the case of COVID-19 and perform extensive experiments with both in- and cross-domain datasets, where RARG consistently outperforms baselines by generating high-quality counter-misinformation responses.

Evidence-Driven Retrieval Augmented Response Generation for Online Misinformation

By allowing models to predict without task-specific training, in-context learning (ICL) with pretrained LLMs has enormous potential in NLP. However, a number of problems persist in ICL. In particular, its performance is sensitive to the choice and order of in-context examples. Given the same set of in-context examples with different orderings, model performance may vary from near random to near state-of-the-art. In this work, we formulate in-context example ordering as an optimization problem. We examine three problem settings that differ in the assumptions they make about what is known about the task. Inspired by the idea of learning from label proportions, we propose two principles for in-context example ordering guided by model's probability predictions. We apply our proposed principles to thirteen text classification datasets and nine different autoregressive LLMs with 700M to 13B parameters. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baselines by improving the classification accuracy, reducing model miscalibration, and also by selecting better in-context examples.

In-Context Example Ordering Guided by Label Distributions

Emergent Large Language Models (LLMs) use their extraordinary performance and powerful deduction capacity to discern from traditional language models. However, the expenses of computational resources and storage for these LLMs are stunning, quantization then arises as a trending conversation. To address accuracy decay caused by quantization, two streams of works in post-training quantization methods stand out. One uses other weights to compensate existing quantization error, while the other transfers the quantization difficulty to other parts in the model. Combining both merits, we introduce Learnable Singular value Increment (LSI) as an advanced solution. LSI uses Singular Value Decomposition to extract singular values of the weights and make them learnable to help weights compensate each other conditioned on activation. Incorporating LSI with existing techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse quantization settings, no matter in weight-only, weight-activation or extremely low bit scenarios. By unleashing the potential of LSI, efficient finetuning on quantized model is no longer a prohibitive problem.

Compensate Quantization Errors: Make Weights Hierarchical to Compensate Each Other

To comprehensively gauge the capacity of current models for complex reasoning, it is crucial to assess their step-by-step reasoning in a scalable manner. Established reference-based evaluation metrics rely on human-annotated reasoning chains as references to assess the model-derived chains. However, such ``gold-standard'' human-written reasoning chains may not be unique and their acquisition is often labor-intensive. Existing reference-free reasoning evaluation metrics, while eliminating the need for human-crafted reasoning chains as references, often require fine-tuning with human-derived chains before evaluation, complicating the process and questioning their adaptability to other datasets. To address these challenges, we harness GPT-4 to automatically evaluate reasoning chain quality, thereby removing the dependency on human-written reasoning chains for both model fine-tuning and evaluative purposes. Leveraging the Socratic method, we develop SocREval (**Soc**ratic Method-Inspired **R**easoning **Eval**uation), a novel approach for prompt design in reference-free reasoning evaluation. Empirical results from four human annotated datasets reveal that SocREval significantly improves GPT-4's performance, surpassing existing reference-free and reference-based reasoning evaluation metrics. Beyond its demonstrated efficacy, SocREval, proves to be both cost-efficient and robust to prompt writing and example selection, as substantiated by our in-depth analysis.

SocREval: Large Language Models with the Socratic Method for Reference-free Reasoning Evaluation

Recently, the tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) that integrate with external Python interpreters have significantly enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities for open-source LLMs. However, these models fall short in demonstrating the calculation process, which compromises user-friendliness and understanding of problem-solving steps. Conversely, while tool-free methods offer a clear display of the problem-solving process, their accuracy leaves room for improvement. These tool-free methods typically employ a somewhat narrow range of augmentation techniques such as rephrasing and difficulty enhancement to boost performance. In response to this issue, we have amalgamated and further refined these strengths while broadening the scope of augmentation methods to construct a **mu**lti-perspective augmentation dataset for **math**ematics---termed **MuMath** ($\mu$-Math) Dataset. Subsequently, we finetune LLaMA-2 on the MuMath dataset to derive the MuMath model. Our experiments indicate that our MuMath-70B model achieves new state-of-the-art performance among tool-free methods---achieving 88.3\% on GSM8K and 34.5\% on MATH . We release the MuMath dataset along with its corresponding models and code for public use.

MuMath: Multi-perspective Data Augmentation for Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Topic modeling is a widely used approach for analyzing and exploring large document collections. Recent research efforts have incorporated pre-trained contextualized language models, such as BERT embeddings, into topic modeling. However, they often neglect the intrinsic informational value conveyed by mutual dependencies between words. In this study, we introduce GINopic, a topic modeling framework based on graph isomorphism networks to capture the correlation between words. By conducting intrinsic (quantitative as well as qualitative) and extrinsic evaluations on diverse benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of GINopic compared to existing topic models and highlight its potential for advancing topic modeling.

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Testing the limits of logical reasoning in neural and hybrid models

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A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models