United States

The increase in parameter size of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces significant capabilities, particularly multimodal in-context learning, where MLLMs enhance task performance without updating pre-trained parameters. However, this effectiveness hinges on the appropriate selection of in-context examples, a process currently biased towards visual data, overlooking textual information. More importantly, the area of supervised retrievers for retrieval of multimodal in-context learning, crucial for optimal in-context example selection, continues to be investigated. Our study provides an in-depth evaluation of the impact of textual information on the unsupervised selection of in-context examples in multimodal contexts, uncovering a notable sensitivity of retriever performance to the employed modalities. Based on the above finding, we introduce a novel supervised MLLM prompt retriever MSIER that leverages a trained retriever based on MLLM&#39;s confidence to select examples, which enhances multimodal in-context learning efficiency. This approach is validated through extensive testing across three different tasks, demonstrating the method&#39;s effectiveness. Additionally, we investigate the influence of modalities on our supervised retrieval method&#39;s training and explore the transferability of the supervised prompt retriever. This exploration paves the way for future advancements, highlighting the potential for refined in-context learning in MLLMs through the strategic use of multimodal data. The public code is available at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/Multimodal-ICL-Retriever.

EMNLP 2024

How Does the Textual Information Affect the Retrieval of Multimodal In-Context Learning?

diversity coverage

maximum diversity

criteria-based prompting

diversity extraction

recall

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

The increase in parameter size of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces significant capabilities, particularly multimodal in-context learning, where MLLMs enhance task performance without updating pre-trained parameters. However, this effectiveness hinges on the appropriate selection of in-context examples, a process currently biased towards visual data, overlooking textual information. More importantly, the area of supervised retrievers for retrieval of multimodal in-context learning, crucial for optimal in-context example selection, continues to be investigated. Our study provides an in-depth evaluation of the impact of textual information on the unsupervised selection of in-context examples in multimodal contexts, uncovering a notable sensitivity of retriever performance to the employed modalities. Based on the above finding, we introduce a novel supervised MLLM prompt retriever MSIER that leverages a trained retriever based on MLLM's confidence to select examples, which enhances multimodal in-context learning efficiency. This approach is validated through extensive testing across three different tasks, demonstrating the method's effectiveness. Additionally, we investigate the influence of modalities on our supervised retrieval method's training and explore the transferability of the supervised prompt retriever. This exploration paves the way for future advancements, highlighting the potential for refined in-context learning in MLLMs through the strategic use of multimodal data. The public code is available at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/Multimodal-ICL-Retriever.

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.

End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog (TOD) systems typically require extensive training datasets to perform well. In contrast, large language model (LLM) based TOD systems can excel even with limited data due to their ability to learn tasks through in-context exemplars. However, these models lack alignment with the style of responses in training data and often generate comprehensive responses, making it difficult for users to grasp the information quickly. In response, we propose SyncTOD that synergizes LLMs with task-specific hints to improve alignment in low-data settings. SyncTOD employs small auxiliary models to provide hints and select exemplars for in-context prompts. With ChatGPT, SyncTOD achieves superior performance compared to LLM-based baselines and SoTA models in low-data settings, while retaining competitive performance in full-data settings.

Synergizing In-context Learning with Hints for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialog Systems

In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted widespread attention from both industry and academia. Based on the integration position, MLLMs can be categorized into external and internal fusion architectures, with the former being more predominant. However, there remains considerable debate on how to construct the optimal external fusion MLLM architecture, especially regarding the performance of different connectors on tasks with varying granularities. This paper systematically investigates the impact of connectors on MLLM performance. Specifically, we classify connectors into feature-preserving and feature-compressing types. Utilizing a unified classification standard, we categorize sub-tasks from three comprehensive benchmarks, MMBench, MME, and SEED-Bench, into three task types: coarse-grained perception, fine-grained perception, and reasoning, and evaluate the performance from this perspective. Our findings reveal significant performance differences between different types of connectors across various tasks, offering essential guidance for MLLM architecture design and advancing the understanding of MLLM architecture optimization.

From Coarse to Fine: Impacts of Feature-Preserving and Feature-Compressing Connectors on Perception in Multimodal Models

We present a novel approach to modeling fictional narratives. The proposed model creates embeddings that represent a story such that similar narratives, that is, reformulations of the same story, will result in similar embeddings. We showcase the prowess of our narrative-focused embeddings on various datasets, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance on multiple retrieval tasks. The embeddings also show promising results on a narrative understanding task. Additionally, we perform an annotation-based evaluation to validate that our introduced computational notion of narrative similarity aligns with human perception. The approach can help to explore vast datasets of stories, with potential applications in recommender systems and in the computational analysis of literature.

Story Embeddings — Narrative-Focused Representations of Fictional Stories

Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) has enhanced the performance of various downstream tasks in visual-language understanding. Most existing approaches encode images and videos into separate feature spaces, which are then fed as inputs to large language models. However, due to the lack of unified tokenization for images and videos, namely misalignment before projection, it becomes challenging for a Large Language Model (LLM) to learn multi-modal interactions from several poor projection layers.

In this work, we unify visual representation into the language feature space to advance the foundational LLM towards a unified LVLM. As a result, we establish a simple but robust LVLM baseline, Video-LLaVA, which learns from a mixed dataset of images and videos, mutually enhancing each other.

As a result, Video-LLaVA outperforms Video-ChatGPT by 5.8%, 9.9%, 18.6%, and 10.1% on MSRVTT, MSVD, TGIF, and ActivityNet, respectively. Additionally, our Video-LLaVA also achieves superior performances on a broad range of 9 image benchmarks.

Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that Video-LLaVA mutually benefits images and videos within a unified visual representation, outperforming models designed specifically for images or videos. We aim for this work to provide modest insights into the multi-modal inputs for the LLM.

Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection

Language models strongly rely on frequency information because they maximize the likelihood of tokens during pre-training. As a consequence, language models tend to not generalize well to tokens that are seldom seen during training. Moreover, maximum likelihood training has been discovered to give rise to anisotropy: representations of tokens in a model tend to cluster tightly in a high-dimensional cone, rather than spreading out over their representational capacity.

Our work introduces a method for quantifying the frequency bias of a language model by assessing sentence-level perplexity with respect to token-level frequency. We then present a method for reducing the frequency bias of a language model by inducing a syntactic prior over token representations during pre-training. Our Syntactic Smoothing method adjusts the maximum likelihood objective function to distribute the learning signal to syntactically similar tokens. This approach results in better performance on infrequent English tokens and a decrease in anisotropy. We empirically show that the degree of anisotropy in a model correlates with its frequency bias.

Mitigating Frequency Bias and Anisotropy in Language Model Pre-Training with Syntactic Smoothing

Ensuring the verifiability of model answers is a fundamental challenge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in the question answering (QA) domain. Recently, self-citation prompting was proposed to make large language models (LLMs) generate citations to supporting documents along with their answers. However, self-citing LLMs often struggle to match the required format, refer to non-existent sources, and fail to faithfully reflect LLMs' context usage throughout the generation. In this work, we present MIRAGE -- Model Internals-based RAG Explanations -- a plug-and-play approach using model internals for faithful answer attribution in RAG applications. MIRAGE detects context-sensitive answer tokens and pairs them with retrieved documents contributing to their prediction via saliency methods. We evaluate our proposed approach on a multilingual extractive QA dataset, finding high agreement with human answer attribution. On open-ended QA, MIRAGE achieves citation quality and efficiency comparable to self-citation while also allowing for a finer-grained control of attribution parameters. Our qualitative evaluation highlights the faithfulness of MIRAGE's attributions and underscores the promising application of model internals for RAG answer attribution. Code and data released at https://github.com/Betswish/MIRAGE.

Model Internals-based Answer Attribution for Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Significant advancements have recently been made in large language models, represented by GPT models.
Users frequently have multi-round private conversations with cloud-hosted GPT models for task optimization.
Yet, this operational paradigm introduces additional attack surfaces, particularly in custom GPTs and hijacked chat sessions.
In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet potent Conversation Reconstruction Attack.
This attack targets the contents of previous conversations between GPT models and benign users, i.e., the benign users' input contents during their interaction with GPT models.
The adversary could induce GPT models to leak such contents by querying them with designed malicious prompts.
Our comprehensive examination of privacy risks during the interactions with GPT models under this attack reveals GPT-4's considerable resilience.
We present two advanced attacks targeting improved reconstruction of past conversations, demonstrating significant privacy leakage across all models under these advanced techniques.
Evaluating various defense mechanisms, we find them ineffective against these attacks.
Our findings highlight the ease with which privacy can be compromised in interactions with GPT models, urging the community to safeguard against potential abuses of these models' capabilities.

Reconstruct Your Previous Conversations! Comprehensively Investigating Privacy Leakage Risks in Conversations with GPT Models

In the ten years since the development of the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) formalism, substantial progress has been made on AMR-related tasks such as parsing and alignment. Still, the engineering applications of AMR are not fully understood. In this survey, we categorize and characterize more than 100 papers which use AMR for downstream tasks— the first survey of this kind for AMR. Specifically, we highlight (1) the range of applications for which AMR has been harnessed, and (2) the techniques for incorporating AMR into those applications. We also detect broader AMR engineering patterns and outline areas of future work that seem ripe for AMR incorporation. We hope that this survey will be useful to those interested in using AMR and that it sparks discussion on the role of symbolic representations in the age of neural-focused NLP research.

A Survey of AMR Applications

Language Language Models (LLMs) face safety concerns due to potential misuse by malicious users. Recent red-teaming efforts have identified adversarial suffixes capable of jailbreaking LLMs using the gradient-based search algorithm Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG). However, GCG struggles with computational inefficiency, limiting further investigations regarding suffix transferability and scalability across models and data. In this work, we bridge the connection between search efficiency and suffix transferability. We propose a two-stage transfer learning framework, DeGCG, which decouples the search process into behavior-agnostic pre-searching and behavior-relevant post-searching. Specifically, we employ direct first target token optimization in pre-searching to facilitate the search process. We apply our approach to cross-model, cross-data, and self-transfer scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce an interleaved variant of our approach, i-DeGCG, which iteratively leverages self-transferability to accelerate the search process. Experiments on HarmBench demonstrate the efficiency of our approach across various models and domains. Notably, our i-DeGCG outperforms the baseline on Llama2-chat-7b with ASRs of $43.9$ ($+ 22.2$) and $39.0$ ($+19.5$) on valid and test sets, respectively. Further analysis on cross-model transfer indicates the pivotal role of first target token optimization in leveraging suffix transferability for efficient searching.

Advancing Adversarial Suffix Transfer Learning on Aligned Large Language Models

The applications of large language models (LLMs) have expanded well beyond the confines of text processing, signaling a new era where LLMs are envisioned as generalist agents capable of operating within complex environments. These environments are often highly expansive, making it impossible for the LLM to process them within its short-term memory. Motivated by recent research on extending the capabilities of LLMs with tools, we seek to investigate the intriguing potential of tools to augment LLMs in handling such complexity by introducing a novel class of tools, termed *middleware*, to aid in the proactive exploration within these massive environments. Such specialized tools can serve as a middleware layer shielding the LLM from environmental complexity. In two representative complex environments---knowledge bases (KBs) and databases---we demonstrate the significant potential of augmenting language agents with tools in complex environments. Notably, equipped with the middleware, GPT-4 achieves **2.8**X the performance of the best baseline in tasks requiring access to database content and **2.2**X in KB tasks. Our findings illuminate the path for advancing language agents in real-world applications.

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Synergizing In-context Learning with Hints for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialog Systems

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Learning to Retrieve In-Context Examples for Large Language Models