United States

Language agents, built on top of language models (LMs), are systems that can interact with complex environments, such as the open web. In this work, we examine whether such agents can perform realistic and time-consuming tasks on the web, e.g., monitoring real-estate markets or locating relevant nearby businesses. We introduce AssistantBench, a challenging new benchmark consisting of 214 realistic tasks that can be automatically evaluated, covering different scenarios and domains. We find that AssistantBench exposes the limitations of current systems, including language models and retrieval-augmented language models, as no model reaches an accuracy of more than 25 points. While closed-book LMs perform well in terms of accuracy, they exhibit low precision and tend to hallucinate facts. State-of-the-art web agents reach a score of near zero. Additionally, we introduce SeePlanAct (SPA), a new web agent that significantly outperforms previous agents, and an ensemble of SPA and closed-book models reaches the best overall performance. Moreover, we analyze failures of current systems and highlight that open web navigation remains a major challenge.

EMNLP 2024

AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?

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security

### 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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ACL 2024

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.

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.
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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.

While there has been significant development of models for Plain Language Summarization (PLS), evaluation remains a challenge. PLS lacks a dedicated assessment metric, and the suitability of text generation evaluation metrics is unclear due to the unique transformations involved (e.g., adding background explanations, removing jargon). To address these questions, our study introduces a granular meta-evaluation testbed, APPLS, designed to evaluate metrics for PLS. We identify four PLS criteria from previous work---informativeness, simplification, coherence, and faithfulness---and define a set of perturbations corresponding to these criteria that sensitive metrics should be able to detect. We apply these perturbations to extractive hypotheses for two PLS datasets to form our testbed. Using APPLS, we assess performance of 14 metrics, including automated scores, lexical features, and LLM prompt-based evaluations. Our analysis reveals that while some current metrics show sensitivity to specific criteria, no single method captures all four criteria simultaneously. We therefore recommend a suite of automated metrics be used to capture PLS quality along all relevant criteria. This work contributes the first meta-evaluation testbed for PLS and a comprehensive evaluation of existing metrics.

APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization

We introduce a language generation dataset grounded in a popular video game. KNUDGE (**KN**owledge Constrained **U**ser-NPC **D**ialogue **GE**neration) requires models to produce trees of dialogue between video game characters that accurately reflect quest and entity specifications stated in natural language. KNUDGE is constructed from side quest dialogues drawn directly from game data of Obsidian Entertainment’s _The Outer Worlds_, leading to real-world complexities in generation: (1) utterances must remain faithful to the game lore, including character personas and backstories; (2) a dialogue must accurately reveal new quest details to the human player; and (3) dialogues are large trees as opposed to linear chains of utterances. We report results for a set of neural generation models using supervised and in-context learning techniques; we find competent performance but room for future work addressing the challenges of creating realistic, game-quality dialogues.

Ontologically Faithful Generation of Non-Player Character Dialogues

Intermediate task transfer learning can greatly improve model performance. If, for example, one has little training data for emotion detection, first fine-tuning a language model on a sentiment classification dataset may improve performance strongly. But which task to choose for transfer learning? Prior methods producing useful task rankings are infeasible for large source pools, as they require forward passes through all source language models. We overcome this by introducing Embedding Space Maps (ESMs), light-weight neural networks that approximate the effect of fine-tuning a language model. We conduct the largest study on NLP task transferability and task selection with 12k source-target pairs. We find that applying ESMs on a prior method reduces execution time and disk space usage by factors of 10 and 278, respectively, while retaining high selection performance (avg. regret@5 score of 2.95).

Less is More: Parameter-Efficient Selection of Intermediate Tasks for Transfer Learning

Previous studies have examined the syntactic capabilities of large pre-trained language models, such as BERT, by using stimuli from psycholinguistic studies. Studying well-known processing errors, such as NPI illusive effects can reveal whether a model prioritizes linear or hierarchical information when processing language. Recent experiments have found that BERT is mildly susceptible to Negative Polarity Item (NPI) illusion effects (Shin et al., 2023; Vu and Lee, 2022). We expand on these results by examining the effect of distance on the illusive effect, using and modifying stimuli from Parker and Phillips (2016). We also further tease apart whether the model is more affected by hierarchical distance or linear distance. We find that BERT is highly sensitive to syntactic hierarchical information: added hierarchical layers affected its processing capabilities compared to added linear distance.

The effects of distance on NPI illusive effects in BERT

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) have excelled in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including summarization, question answering, and translation. However, LLMs pose significant security risks due to their tendency to memorize training data, leading to potential privacy breaches and copyright infringement. Therefore, accurate measurement of the memorization is essential to evaluate and mitigate these potential risks. However, previous attempts to characterize memorization are constrained by either using prefixes only or by prepending a constant soft prompt to the prefixes, which cannot react to changes in input. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method for estimating LLM memorization using dynamic, prefix-dependent soft prompts. Our approach involves training a transformer-based generator to produce soft prompts that adapt to changes in input, thereby enabling more accurate extraction of memorized data. Our method not only addresses the limitations of previous methods but also demonstrates superior performance in diverse experimental settings compared to state-of-the-art techniques. In particular, our method can achieve the maximum relative improvement of 135.3% and 39.8% over the vanilla baseline on average in terms of *discoverable memorization rate* for the text generation task and code generation task, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/wangger/llm-memorization-dsp.

Unlocking Memorization in Large Language Models with Dynamic Soft Prompting

While language model (LM)-powered chatbots and generative search engines excel at answering concrete queries, discovering information in the terrain of unknown unknowns remains challenging for users. To emulate the common educational scenario where children/students learn by listening to and participating in conversations of their parents/teachers, we create Collaborative STORM (Co-STORM). Unlike QA systems that require users to ask all the questions, Co-STORM lets users observe and occasionally steer the discourse among several LM agents. The agents ask questions on the user's behalf, allowing the user to discover unknown unknowns serendipitously. To facilitate user interaction, Co-STORM assists users in tracking the discourse by organizing the uncovered information into a dynamic mind map, ultimately generating a comprehensive report as takeaways. For automatic evaluation, we construct the WildSeek dataset by collecting real information-seeking records with user goals. Co-STORM outperforms baseline methods on both discourse trace and report quality. In a further human evaluation, 70% of participants prefer Co-STORM over a search engine, and 78% favor it over a RAG chatbot.

Into the Unknown Unknowns: Engaged Human Learning through Participation in Language Model Agent Conversations

Neural speech codecs aim to compress input signals into minimal bits while maintaining content quality in a low-latency manner. However, existing neural codecs often trade model complexity for reconstruction performance. These codecs primarily use convolutional blocks for feature transformation, which are not inherently suited for capturing the local redundancies in speech signals. To compensate, they require either adversarial discriminators or a large number of model parameters to enhance audio quality. In response to these challenges, we introduce the Efficient Speech Codec (ESC), a lightweight, parameter-efficient speech codec based on a cross-scale residual vector quantization scheme and transformers. Our model employs mirrored hierarchical window transformer blocks and performs step-wise decoding from coarse-to-fine feature representations. To enhance bitrate efficiency, we propose a novel combination of vector quantization techniques along with a pre-training paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ESC can achieve high-fidelity speech reconstruction with significantly lower model complexity, making it a promising alternative to existing convolutional audio codecs.

ESC: Efficient Speech Coding with Cross-Scale Residual Vector Quantized Transformers

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has helped extend speech technologies to more languages by reducing the need for labeled data. However, models are still far from supporting the world's 7000+ languages. We propose XEUS, a Cross-lingual Encoder for Universal Speech, trained on over 1 million hours of data across 4057 languages, extending the language coverage of SSL models 4-fold. We combine 1 million hours of speech from existing publicly accessible corpora with a newly created corpus of 7400+ hours from 4057 languages, which will be publicly released. To handle the diverse conditions of multilingual speech data, we augment the typical SSL masked prediction approach with a novel dereverberation objective, increasing robustness. We evaluate XEUS on several benchmarks, and show that it consistently outperforms or achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art (SOTA) SSL models across a variety of tasks. XEUS sets a new SOTA on the ML-SUPERB benchmark: it outperforms MMS 1B and w2v-BERT 2.0 v2 by 0.8% and 4.4% respectively, despite having less parameters or pre-training data. Checkpoints, code, and data are found in https://www.wavlab.org/activities/2024/xeus/.

Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages

As a promising paradigm to collaboratively train models with decentralized data, Federated Learning (FL) can be exploited to fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs correspond to huge size, the scale of the training data significantly increases, which leads to tremendous amounts of computation and communication costs. The training data is generally non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID), which requires adaptive data processing within each device. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) can significantly reduce the scale of parameters to update in the fine-tuning process, it still takes unaffordable time to transfer the low-rank parameters of all the layers in LLMs. In this paper, we propose a Fisher Information-based Efficient Curriculum Federated Learning framework (FibecFed) with two novel methods, i.e., adaptive federated curriculum learning and efficient sparse parameter update. First, we propose a fisher information-based method to adaptively sample data within each device to improve the effectiveness of the FL fine-tuning process. Second, we dynamically select the proper layers for global aggregation and sparse parameters for local update with LoRA so as to improve the efficiency of the FL fine-tuning process. Extensive experimental results based on 10 datasets demonstrate that FibecFed yields excellent performance (up to 45.35% in terms of accuracy) and superb fine-tuning speed (up to 98.61% faster) compared with 17 baseline approaches).

Fisher Information-based Efficient Curriculum Federated Learning with Large Language Models

Recent work shows that causal facts can be effectively extracted from LLMs through prompting, facilitating the creation of causal graphs for causal inference tasks. However, it is unclear if this success is limited to explicitly-mentioned causal facts in the pretraining data which the model can memorize. Thus, this work investigates: Can LLMs infer causal relations from other relational data in text? To disentangle the role of memorized causal facts vs inferred causal relations, we finetune LLMs on synthetic data containing temporal, spatial and counterfactual relations, and measure whether the LLM can then infer causal relations. We find that: (a) LLMs are susceptible to inferring causal relations from the order of two entity mentions in text (e.g. X mentioned before Y implies X causes Y); (b) if the order is randomized, LLMs still suffer from the post hoc fallacy, i.e. X occurs before Y (temporal relation) implies X causes Y. We also find that while LLMs can correctly deduce the absence of causal relations from temporal and spatial relations, they have difficulty inferring causal relations from counterfactuals, questioning their understanding of causality.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization

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