Thailand

Since the remarkable generation performance of large language models raised ethical and legal concerns, approaches to detect machine-generated text by embedding watermarks are being developed.
However, we discover that the existing works fail to function appropriately in code generation tasks due to the task&#39;s nature of having low entropy.
Extending a logit-modifying watermark method, we propose Selective WatErmarking via Entropy Thresholding (SWEET), which enhances detection ability and mitigates code quality degeneration by removing low-entropy segments at generating and detecting watermarks.
Our experiments show that SWEET significantly improves code quality preservation while outperforming all baselines, including post-hoc detection methods, in detecting machine-generated code text.
Our code is available in
https://github.com/hongcheki/sweet-watermark.

ACL 2024

Who Wrote this Code? Watermarking for Code Generation

code

watermarking

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Since the remarkable generation performance of large language models raised ethical and legal concerns, approaches to detect machine-generated text by embedding watermarks are being developed.
However, we discover that the existing works fail to function appropriately in code generation tasks due to the task's nature of having low entropy.
Extending a logit-modifying watermark method, we propose Selective WatErmarking via Entropy Thresholding (SWEET), which enhances detection ability and mitigates code quality degeneration by removing low-entropy segments at generating and detecting watermarks.
Our experiments show that SWEET significantly improves code quality preservation while outperforming all baselines, including post-hoc detection methods, in detecting machine-generated code text.
Our code is available in
https://github.com/hongcheki/sweet-watermark.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Code synthesis, which requires a deep understanding of complex natural language (NL) problem descriptions, generation of code instructions for complex algorithms and data structures, and the successful execution of comprehensive unit tests, presents a significant challenge. Thus, while large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in natural language processing (NLP), their performance in code generation tasks remains limited. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to code generation tasks leveraging the multi-agent prompting that uniquely replicates the full cycle of program synthesis as observed in human developers. Our framework, MapCoder, consists of four LLM agents specifically designed to emulate the stages of this cycle: recalling relevant examples, planning, code generation, and debugging. After conducting thorough experiments, with multiple LLMs ablations and analyses across eight challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks—MapCoder showcases remarkable code generation capabilities, achieving their new state-of-the-art (pass@1) results—(HumanEval 93.9%, MBPP 83.1%, APPS 22.0%, CodeContests 28.5%, and xCodeEval 45.3%). Moreover, our method consistently delivers superior performance across various programming languages and varying problem difficulties. We open-source our framework at https://github.com/Md-Ashraful-Pramanik/MapCoder.

MapCoder: Multi-Agent Code Generation for Competitive Problem Solving

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has delivered success on complex reasoning tasks, which aims at designing a simple prompt like “Let’s think step by step” or multiple in-context exemplars with well-designed rationales to elicit Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate intermediate reasoning steps. However, the generated rationales often come with hallucinations, making unfactual and unfaithful reasoning chains. To mitigate this brittleness, we propose a novel Chain-of-Knowledge (CoK) prompting, where we aim at eliciting LLMs to generate explicit pieces of knowledge evidence in the form of structure triple. This is inspired by our human behaviors, i.e., we can draw a mind map or knowledge map as the reasoning evidence in the brain before answering a complex question. Benefiting from CoK, we additionally introduce an F2-Verification method to estimate the reliability of the reasoning chains in terms of factuality and faithfulness. For the unreliable response, the wrong evidence can be indicated to prompt the LLM to rethink. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can further improve the performance of commonsense, factual, symbolic, and arithmetic reasoning tasks.

Boosting Language Models Reasoning with Chain-of-Knowledge Prompting

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has increasingly drawn attention to the use of LLMs for human-like planning. Existing work on LLM-based planning either focuses on leveraging the inherent language generation capabilities of LLMs to produce free-style plans, or employs reinforcement learning approaches to learn decision-making for a limited set of actions within restricted environments. However, both approaches exhibit significant discrepancies from the open and executable requirements in real-world planning. In this paper, we propose a new planning task--open grounded planning. The primary objective of open grounded planning is to ask the model to generate an executable plan based on a variable action set, thereby ensuring the executability of the produced plan. To this end, we establishes a benchmark for open grounded planning spanning a wide range of domains. Then we test current state-of-the-art LLMs along with five planning approaches, revealing that existing LLMs and methods still struggle to address the challenges posed by grounded planning in open domains. The outcomes of this paper define and establish a foundational dataset for open grounded planning, and shed light on the potential challenges and future directions of LLM-based planning.

Open Grounded Planning: Challenges and Benchmark Construction

Recent work demonstrates that, after instruction tuning, Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) can obtain impressive capabilities to address a wide range of code-related tasks. However, current instruction tuning methods for Code LLMs mainly focus on the traditional code generation task, resulting in poor performance in complex multi-task scenarios. In this paper, we concentrate on multiple code-related tasks and present WaveCoder, a series of Code LLMs trained with Widespread And Versatile Enhanced instruction data. To enable the models to tackle complex code-related tasks, we propose a method to stably generate diverse, high-quality instruction data from open source code dataset in multi-task scenarios and obtain CodeOcean, a dataset comprising 19,915 instruction instances across 4 code-related tasks, which is aimed at improving the generalization ability of Code LLM. Our experiments demonstrate that WaveCoder models significantly outperform other open-source models in terms of the generalization ability across different code-related tasks. Moreover, WaveCoder-Ultra-6.7B presents the state-of-the-art generalization abilities on a wide range of code-related tasks.

WaveCoder: Widespread And Versatile Enhancement For Code Large Language Models By Instruction Tuning

Hateful memes have emerged as a significant concern on the Internet. Detecting hateful memes requires the system to jointly understand the visual and textual modalities. Our investigation reveals that the embedding space of existing CLIP-based systems lacks sensitivity to subtle differences in memes that are vital for correct hatefulness classification. We propose constructing a hatefulness-aware embedding space through retrieval-guided contrastive training. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HatefulMemes dataset with an AUROC of 87.0, outperforming much larger fine-tuned large multimodal models. We demonstrate a retrieval-based hateful memes detection system, which is capable of identifying hatefulness based on data unseen in training. This allows developers to update the hateful memes detection system by simply adding new examples without retraining — a desirable feature for real services in the constantly evolving landscape of hateful memes on the Internet.

Improving Hateful Meme Detection through Retrieval-Guided Contrastive Learning

Recommender systems are widely used to suggest engaging content, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have given rise to generative recommenders. Such systems can directly generate items, including for open-set tasks like question suggestion. While the world knowledge of LLMs enables good recommendations, improving the generated content through user feedback is challenging as continuously fine-tuning LLMs is prohibitively expensive. We present a training-free approach for optimizing generative recommenders by connecting user feedback loops to LLM-based optimizers. We propose a generative explore-exploit method that can not only exploit generated items with known high engagement, but also actively explore and discover hidden population preferences to improve recommendation quality. We evaluate our approach on question generation in two domains (e-commerce and general knowledge), and model user feedback with Click Through Rate (CTR). Experiments show our LLM-based explore-exploit approach can iteratively improve recommendations and consistently increase CTR. Ablation analysis shows that generative exploration is key to learning user preferences, avoiding the pitfalls of greedy exploit-only approaches. A human evaluation strongly supports our quantitative findings.

Generative Explore-Exploit: Training-free Optimization of Generative Recommender Systems using LLM Optimizers

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, even stronger LLMs are susceptible to acquiring erroneous or obsolete information from the training corpus. Direct secondary fine-tuning with data containing new knowledge may be ineffective in updating knowledge due to the conflict between old and new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning (Forgetting before Learning), which employs parametric arithmetic to facilitate the forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed F-Learning can obviously improve the knowledge updating performance of both full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning, simultaneously outperforming the existing baselines in most cases. Moreover, we have also discovered that forgetting old knowledge by subtracting the parameters of LoRA can yield a similar effect to subtracting the parameters of full fine-tuning, and occasionally even surpass it significantly.

Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excellently generate human-like text, but also raise concerns about misuse in fake news and academic dishonesty. Decoding-based watermark, particularly the watermark based on the GumbelMax trick (GM watermark), is a standout solution for safeguarding machine-generated texts due to its notable detectability. However, GM watermark encounters a major challenge with generation diversity, always yielding identical outputs for the same prompt, negatively impacting generation diversity and user experience. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new type of GM watermark, the Logits-Addition watermark, as well as three variants that aim to enhance diversity, particularly the GumbelSoft watermark (i.e., the softmax variant of the Logits-Addition watermark). When assessed for detectability in high diversity settings, our Gumbelsoft demonstrates superior performance, with its AUROC score exceeding those of the two alternative variants by a margin of 0.1 to 0.3 and outperforming other decoding-based watermarking methods by a minimum of 0.1.

GumbelSoft: Diversified Language Model Watermarking via the GumbelMax-trick

Recently, the powerful large language models (LLMs) have been instrumental in propelling the progress of recommender systems (RS). However, while these systems have flourished, their susceptibility to security threats has been largely overlooked. In this work, we reveal that the introduction of LLMs into recommendation models presents new security vulnerabilities due to their emphasis on the textual content of items. We demonstrate that attackers can significantly boost an item's exposure by merely altering its textual content during the testing phase, without requiring direct interference with the model's training process. Additionally, the attack is notably stealthy, as it does not affect the overall recommendation performance and the modifications to the text are subtle, making it difficult for users and platforms to detect. Our comprehensive experiments across four mainstream LLM-based recommendation models demonstrate the superior efficacy and stealthiness of our approach. Our work unveils a significant security gap in LLM-based recommendation systems and paves the way for future research on protecting these systems.

Stealthy Attack on Large Language Model based Recommendation

The widespread use of large language models (LLMs) has sparked concerns about the potential misuse of AI-generated text, as these models can produce content that closely resembles human-generated text. Current detectors for AI-generated text (AIGT) lack robustness against adversarial perturbations, with even minor changes in characters or words causing a reversal in distinguishing between human-created and AI-generated text. This paper investigates the robustness of existing AIGT detection methods and introduces a novel detector, the Siamese Calibrated Reconstruction Network (SCRN). The SCRN employs a reconstruction network to add and remove noise from text, extracting a semantic representation that is robust to local perturbations. We also propose a siamese calibration technique to train the model to make equally confident predictions under different noise, which improves the model's robustness against adversarial perturbations. Experiments on four publicly available datasets show that the SCRN outperforms all baseline methods, achieving 6.5\%-18.25\% absolute accuracy improvement over the best baseline method under adversarial attacks. Moreover, it exhibits superior generalizability in cross-domain, cross-genre, and mixed-source scenarios. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/CarlanLark/Robust-AIGC-Detector}.

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Next from ACL 2024

MapCoder: Multi-Agent Code Generation for Competitive Problem Solving

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Low-Entropy Watermark Detection via Bayes’ Rule Derived Detector