Thailand

Multimodal knowledge editing represents a critical advancement in enhancing the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Despite its potential, current benchmarks predominantly focus on coarse-grained knowledge, leaving the intricacies of fine-grained (FG) multimodal entity knowledge largely unexplored. This gap presents a notable challenge, as FG entity recognition is pivotal for the practical deployment and effectiveness of MLLMs in diverse real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MIKE, a comprehensive benchmark and dataset specifically designed for the FG multimodal entity knowledge editing. MIKE encompasses a suite of tasks tailored to assess different perspectives, including Vanilla Name Answering, Entity-Level Caption, and Complex-Scenario Recognition. In addition, a new form of knowledge editing, Multi-step Editing, is introduced to evaluate the editing efficiency. Through our extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that the current state-of-the-art methods face significant challenges in tackling our proposed benchmark, underscoring the complexity of FG knowledge editing in MLLMs. Our findings spotlight the urgent need for novel approaches in this domain, setting a clear agenda for future research and development efforts within the community.

ACL 2024

MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editing

multimodal. knowledge editing

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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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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.

The Korean writing system, Hangeul, has a unique character representation rigidly following the invention principles recorded in Hunminjeongeum. However, existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) for Korean have overlooked these principles. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for Korean PLMs called KOMBO, which firstly brings the invention principles of Hangeul to represent character. Our proposed method, KOMBO, exhibits notable experimental proficiency across diverse NLP tasks. In particular, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art Korean PLM by an average of 2.11% in five Korean natural language understanding tasks. Furthermore, extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is suitable for comprehending the linguistic features of the Korean language. Consequently, we shed light on the superiority of using subcharacters over the typical subword-based approach for Korean PLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/SungHo3268/KOMBO.

KOMBO: Korean Character Representations Based on the Combination Rules of Subcharacters

The increasing use of complex and opaque black box models requires the adoption of interpretable measures, one such option is extractive rationalizing models, which serve as a more interpretable alternative. These models, also known as Explain-Then-Predict models, employ an explainer model to extract rationales and subsequently condition the predictor with the extracted information. Their primary objective is to provide precise and faithful explanations, represented by the extracted rationales. In this paper, we take a semi-supervised approach to optimize for the plausibility of extracted rationales. We adopt a pre-trained natural language inference (NLI) model and further fine-tune it on a small set of supervised rationales (10%). The NLI predictor is leveraged as a source of supervisory signals to the explainer via entailment alignment. We show that, by enforcing the alignment agreement between the explanation and answer in a question-answering task, the performance can be improved without access to ground truth labels. We evaluate our approach on the ERASER dataset and show that our approach achieves comparable results with supervised extractive models and outperforms unsupervised approaches by > 100%.

Plausible Extractive Rationalization through Semi-Supervised Entailment Signal

Building a reliable visual question answering (VQA) system across different languages is a challenging problem, primarily due to the lack of abundant samples for training. To address this challenge, recent studies have employed machine translation systems for the cross-lingual VQA task. This involves translating the evaluation samples into a source language (usually English) and using monolingual models (i.e., translate-test). However, our analysis reveals that translated texts contain unique characteristics distinct from human-written ones, referred to as translation artifacts. We find that these artifacts can significantly affect the models, confirmed by extensive experiments across diverse models, languages, and translation processes. In light of this, we present a simple data augmentation strategy that can alleviate the adverse impacts of translation artifacts.

Translation Deserves Better: Analyzing Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Visual Question Answering

Although model editing has shown promise in revising knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs), its impact on the inherent capabilities of LLMs is often overlooked. In this work, we reveal a critical phenomenon: even a single edit can trigger model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks. However, benchmarking LLMs after each edit, while necessary to prevent such collapses, is impractically time-consuming and resource-intensive. To mitigate this, we propose using perplexity as a surrogate metric, validated by extensive experiments demonstrating changes in an edited model's perplexity are strongly correlated with its downstream task performances. We further conduct an in-depth study on sequential editing, a practical setting for real-world scenarios, across various editing methods and LLMs, focusing on hard cases from our previous single edit studies. The results indicate that nearly all examined editing methods result in model collapse after only few edits. To facilitate further research, we have utilized GPT-3.5 to develop a new dataset, HardEdit, based on those hard cases. This dataset aims to establish the foundation for pioneering research in reliable model editing and the mechanisms underlying editing-induced model collapse. We hope this work can draw the community's attention to the potential risks inherent in model editing practices.

The Butterfly Effect of Model Editing: Few Edits Can Trigger Large Language Models Collapse

Language Models (LMs) acquire factual knowledge during pre-training and store it in the parameters, which can be valuable for downstream tasks. As world evolves, some facts may be incorrectly induced or become obsolete over time. Various model editing methods have been proposed to modify specific examples in LMs. However, existing training-based methods still suffer from sub-optimal locality, where irrelevant neighborhood examples can be adversely influenced. Model's gradients are still struggling to identify the appropriate direction when updating the parameters. To address this issue, we find that directing the hidden state of the edit example towards spaces where semantics are sparse tends to help preserve the semantics of irrelevant neighborhood examples. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a novel metric, named SSS, to evaluate the degree of sparsity around a sentence embedding in the semantic space without any human or machine annotation. Subsequently, we incorporate SSS into the original loss function of the existing training-based methods to enhance locality. Experiments conducted on two datasets across various models demonstrate that SSS is effective in improving both locality and reasoning capability.

SSS: Editing Factual Knowledge in Language Models towards Semantic Sparse Space

Recent research has explored methods for updating and modifying factual knowledge in large language models, often focusing on specific multi-layer perceptron blocks. This study expands on this work by examining the effectiveness of existing knowledge editing methods across languages and delving into the role of attention mechanisms in this process. Drawing from the insights gained, we propose Mass-Editing Memory with Attention in Transformers (MEMAT), a method that achieves significant improvements in all metrics while requiring minimal parameter modifications. MEMAT delivers a remarkable 10% increase in magnitude metrics, benefits languages not included in the training data and also demonstrates a high degree of portability. Our code and data are at https://github.com/dtamayo-nlp/MEMAT.

Mass-Editing Memory with Attention in Transformers: A cross-lingual exploration of knowledge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable versatility in recent years, offering potential applications across specialized domains such as healthcare and medicine. Despite the availability of various open-source LLMs tailored for health contexts, adapting general-purpose LLMs to the medical domain presents significant challenges.
In this paper, we introduce BioMistral, an open-source LLM tailored for the biomedical domain, utilizing Mistral as its foundation model and further pre-trained on PubMed Central. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of BioMistral on a benchmark comprising 10 established medical question-answering (QA) tasks in English. We also explore lightweight models obtained through quantization and model merging approaches. Our results demonstrate BioMistral's superior performance compared to existing open-source medical models and its competitive edge against proprietary counterparts. Finally, to address the limited availability of data beyond English and to assess the multilingual generalization of medical LLMs, we automatically translated and evaluated this benchmark into 7 other languages. This marks the first large-scale multilingual evaluation of LLMs in the medical domain. Datasets, multilingual evaluation benchmarks, scripts, and all the models obtained during our experiments are freely released.

BioMistral: A Collection of Open-Source Pretrained Large Language Models for Medical Domains

We introduce a novel dataset tailored for code generation, aimed at aiding developers in common tasks. Our dataset provides examples that include a clarified intent, code snippets associated, and an average of three related unit tests. It encompasses a range of libraries such as \texttt{Pandas}, \texttt{Numpy}, and \texttt{Regex}, along with more than 70 standard libraries in Python code derived from Stack Overflow. Comprising 3,402 crafted examples by Python experts, our dataset is designed for both model finetuning and standalone evaluation. To complete unit tests evaluation, we categorize examples in order to get more fine grained analysis, enhancing the understanding of models' strengths and weaknesses in specific coding tasks. The examples have been refined to reduce data contamination, a process confirmed by the performance of three leading models: Mistral 7B, CodeLLAMA 13B, and Starcoder 15B. We further investigate data-contamination testing GPT-4 performance on a part of our dataset. The benchmark can be accessed at \texttt{anonymized address}.

CodeInsight: A Curated Dataset of Practical Coding Solutions from Stack Overflow

For multilingual training, we present CrossInit, an initialization method that initializes embeddings into similar geometrical structures across languages in an unsupervised manner. CrossInit leverages a common cognitive linguistic mechanism, Zipf’s law, which indicates that similar concepts across languages have similar word ranks or frequencies in their monolingual corpora. Instead of considering point-to-point alignments based on ranks, CrossInit considers the same span of consecutive ranks in each language as the Positive pairs for alignment, while others out of the span are used as Negative pairs. CrossInit then employs Contrastive Learning to iteratively refine randomly initialized embeddings for similar geometrical structures across languages. Our experiments on Unsupervised NMT, XNLI, and MLQA showed significant gains in low-resource and dissimilar languages after applying CrossInit.

Zero-shot Cross-lingual Alignment for Embedding Initialization

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are an extension of Large Language Models (LLMs) that facilitate processing both image and text inputs, expanding AI capabilities. However, LVLMs struggle with object hallucinations due to their reliance on text cues and learned object co-occurrence biases. While most research quantifies these hallucinations, mitigation strategies are still lacking. Our study introduces a Language Contrastive Decoding (LCD) algorithm that adjusts LVLM outputs based on LLM distribution confidence levels, effectively reducing object hallucinations. We demonstrate the advantages of LCD in leading LVLMs, showing up to \%4 improvement in POPE F1 scores and up to \%36 reduction in CHAIR scores on the COCO validation set, while also improving captioning quality scores. Our method effectively improves LVLMs without needing complex post-processing or retraining, and is easily applicable to different models. Our findings highlight the potential of further exploration of LVLM-specific decoding algorithms.

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KOMBO: Korean Character Representations Based on the Combination Rules of Subcharacters

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