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Document structure editing involves manipulating localized textual, visual, and layout components in document images based on the user&#39;s requests. Past works have shown that multimodal grounding of user requests in the document image and identifying the accurate structural components and their associated attributes remain key challenges for this task. To address these, we introduce the DocEditAgent, a novel framework that performs end-to-end document editing by leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). It consists of three novel components -- (1) Doc2Command to simultaneously localize edit regions of interest (RoI) and disambiguate user edit requests into edit commands. (2) LLM-based Command Reformulation prompting to tailor edit commands originally intended for specialized software into edit instructions suitable for generalist LMMs. (3) Moreover, DocEditAgent processes these outputs via Large Multimodal Models like GPT-4V and Gemini, to parse the document layout, execute edits on grounded Region of Interest (RoI), and generate the edited document image. Extensive experiments on the DocEdit dataset show that DocEditAgent significantly outperforms strong baselines on edit command generation (2-33%), RoI bounding box detection (12-31%), and overall document editing (1-12%) tasks.

EMNLP 2024

DocEditAgent: Document Structure Editing Via Multimodal LLM Grounding

low resource method for nlp

reward modeling

model merging

**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.

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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.

Document structure editing involves manipulating localized textual, visual, and layout components in document images based on the user's requests. Past works have shown that multimodal grounding of user requests in the document image and identifying the accurate structural components and their associated attributes remain key challenges for this task. To address these, we introduce the DocEditAgent, a novel framework that performs end-to-end document editing by leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). It consists of three novel components -- (1) Doc2Command to simultaneously localize edit regions of interest (RoI) and disambiguate user edit requests into edit commands. (2) LLM-based Command Reformulation prompting to tailor edit commands originally intended for specialized software into edit instructions suitable for generalist LMMs. (3) Moreover, DocEditAgent processes these outputs via Large Multimodal Models like GPT-4V and Gemini, to parse the document layout, execute edits on grounded Region of Interest (RoI), and generate the edited document image. Extensive experiments on the DocEdit dataset show that DocEditAgent significantly outperforms strong baselines on edit command generation (2-33%), RoI bounding box detection (12-31%), and overall document editing (1-12%) tasks.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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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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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.

In-Context-learning and few-shot prompting are viable methods compositional output generation. However, these methods can be very sensitive to the choice of support examples used. Retrieving good supports from the training data for a given test query is already a difficult problem, but in some cases solving this may not even be enough. We consider the setting of grounded language learning problems where finding relevant supports in the same or similar states as the query may be difficult. We design an agent which instead generates possible supports inputs and targets current state of the world, then uses them in-context-learning to solve the test query. We show substantially improved performance on a previously unsolved compositional generalization test without a loss of performance in other areas. The approach is general and can even scale to instructions expressed in natural language.

Generating Demonstrations for In-Context Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning

Large language models (LLMs) embed extensive knowledge and utilize it to perform exceptionally well across various tasks. Nevertheless, outdated knowledge or factual errors within LLMs can lead to misleading or incorrect responses, causing significant issues in practical applications. To rectify the fatal flaw without the necessity for costly model retraining, various model editing approaches have been proposed to correct inaccurate information within LLMs in a cost-efficient way. To evaluate these model editing methods, previous work introduced a series of datasets. However, most of the previous datasets only contain fabricated data in a single format, which diverges from real-world model editing scenarios, raising doubts about their usability in practice. To facilitate the application of model editing in real-world scenarios, we propose the challenge of practicality. To resolve such challenges and effectively enhance the capabilities of LLMs, we present FAME, an authentic, comprehensive, and multi-task dataset, which is designed to enhance the practicality of model editing. We then propose SKEME, a model editing method that uses a novel caching mechanism to ensure synchronization with the real world. The experiments demonstrate that our method performs excellently across various tasks and scenarios, confirming its practicality.

FAME: Factual Multi-task Model Editing Benchmark

Large language models (LLMs) have recently experienced remarkable progress, where the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has endowed LLMs with visual capabilities, leading to impressive performances in various multi-modal tasks. However, those powerful MLLMs such as GPT-4V still fail spectacularly when presented with certain image and text inputs. In this paper, we identify a typical class of inputs that baffles MLLMs, which consist of images that are highly relevant but inconsistent with answers, causing MLLMs to suffer from visual illusion. To quantify the effect, we propose CorrelationQA, the first benchmark that assesses the visual illusion level given spurious images. This benchmark contains 7,308 text-image pairs across 13 categories. Based on the proposed CorrelationQA, we conduct a thorough analysis on 9 mainstream MLLMs, illustrating that they universally suffer from this instinctive bias to varying degrees. We hope that our curated benchmark and evaluation results aid in better assessments of the MLLMs’ robustness in the presence of misleading images. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/MasaiahHan/CorrelationQA.

The Instinctive Bias: Spurious Images lead to Hallucination in MLLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous success in understanding language and processing text. 
However, question-answering (QA) on lengthy documents faces challenges of resource constraints and a high propensity for errors, even for the most advanced models such as GPT-4 and Claude2.
In this paper, we introduce _LongAgent_, a multi-agent collaboration method that enables efficient and effective QA over $128k$-token-long documents. _LongAgent_ adopts a _divide-and-conquer_ strategy, breaking down lengthy documents into shorter, more manageable text chunks. 
A leader agent comprehends the user's query and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks, reasoning a final answer through multiple rounds of discussion.
Due to members' hallucinations, it's difficult to guarantee that every response provided by each member is accurate.
To address this, we develop an _inter-member communication_ mechanism that facilitates information sharing, allowing for the detection and mitigation of hallucinatory responses.
Experimental results show that a LLaMA-2 7B driven by _LongAgent_ can effectively support QA over $128k$-token documents, achieving $16.42\%$ and $1.63\%$ accuracy gains over GPT-4 on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings, respectively.

LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration

Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of "long-context'', defined simply by the total length of the model's input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.

Is It Really Long Context if All You Need Is Retrieval? Towards Genuinely Difficult Long Context NLP

Despite recent advances demonstrating vision- language models’ (VLMs) abilities to describe complex relationships among objects in images using natural language, their capability to quantitatively reason about object sizes and distances remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce a manually annotated benchmark of 241 questions across five categories specifically designed for quantitative spatial reasoning, and systematically investigate the performance of SoTA VLMs on this task. Our analysis reveals that questions involving reasoning about distances between objects are particularly challenging for SoTA VLMs; however, some VLMs perform significantly better at this task than others, with an almost 40 points gap between the two best performing models. We also make the surprising observation that the success rate of the top-performing VLM increases by 19 points when a reasoning path using a reference object emerges naturally in the response. Inspired by this observation, we develop a zero-shot prompting technique, SpatialPrompt, that encourages VLMs to answer quantitative spatial questions using references objects as visual cues. Specifically, we demonstrate that instruct- ing VLMs to use reference objects in their reasoning paths significantly improves their quantitative spatial reasoning performance, bypassing the need for external data, architectural modifications, or fine-tuning. Remarkably, by solely using SpatialPrompt, Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4V, and GPT-4o improve by 56.2, 28.5, and 6.7 points on average in Q-Spatial Bench without the need for more data, model architectural modifications, or fine-tuning.

Reasoning Paths with Reference Objects Elicit Quantitative Spatial Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models

A critical component of the current generation of language models is preference alignment, which aims to precisely control the model's behavior to meet human needs and values. The most notable among such methods is Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) and its offline variant Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), both of which seek to maximize a reward model based on human preferences. In particular, DPO derives reward signals directly from the offline preference data, but in doing so overfits the reward signals and generates suboptimal responses that may contain human biases in the dataset. In this work, we propose a practical application of a diversity-seeking RL algorithm called GFlowNet-DPO (GDPO) in an offline preference alignment setting to curtail such challenges. Empirical results show GDPO can generate far more diverse responses than the baseline methods that are still relatively aligned with human values in dialog generation and summarization tasks.

GDPO: Learning to Align Language Models with Diversity Using GFlowNets

Resolving knowledge conflicts is a crucial challenge in Question Answering (QA) tasks, as the internet contains numerous conflicting facts and opinions. While some research has made progress in tackling ambiguous settings where multiple valid answers exist, these approaches often neglect to provide source citations, leaving users to evaluate the factuality of each answer. On the other hand, existing work on citation generation has focused on unambiguous settings with single answers, failing to address the complexity of real-world scenarios. Despite the importance of both aspects, no prior research has combined them, leaving a significant gap in the development of QA systems. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing the novel task of QA with source citation in ambiguous settings, where multiple valid answers exist. To facilitate research in this area, we create a comprehensive framework consisting of: (1) five novel datasets, obtained by augmenting three existing reading comprehension datasets with citation meta-data across various ambiguous settings, such as distractors and paraphrasing; (2) the first ambiguous multi-hop QA dataset featuring real-world, naturally occurring contexts; (3) two new metrics to evaluate models’ performances; and (4) several strong baselines using rule-based, prompting, and finetuning approaches over five large language models. We hope that this new task, datasets, metrics, and baselines will inspire the community to push the boundaries of QA research and develop more trustworthy and interpretable systems.

Adaptive Question Answering: Enhancing Language Model Proficiency for Addressing Knowledge Conflicts with Source Citations

Semantic similarity between two sentences is inherently subjective and can vary significantly based on the specific aspects emphasized. Consequently, traditional sentence encoders must be capable of generating conditioned sentence representations that account for diverse conditions or aspects. In this paper, we propose a novel yet efficient framework based on transformer-style language models that facilitates advanced conditioned sentence representation while maintaining model parameters and computational efficiency. Empirical evaluations on the Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity and Knowledge Graph Completion tasks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework.

Varying Sentence Representations via Condition-Specified Routers

Emojis have gained immense popularity on social platforms, serving as a common means to supplement or replace text. However, existing data mining approaches generally either completely ignore or simply treat emojis as ordinary Unicode characters, which may limit the model's ability to grasp the rich semantic information in emojis and the interaction between emojis and texts. Thus, it is necessary to release the emoji's power in social media data mining. To this end, we first construct a heterogeneous graph consisting of three types of nodes, i.e. post, word and emoji nodes to improve the representation of different elements in posts. The edges are also well-defined to model how these three elements interact with each other. To facilitate the sharing of information among post, word and emoji nodes, we propose a graph pre-train framework for text and emoji co-modeling, which contains two graph pre-training tasks: node-level graph contrastive learning and edge-level link reconstruction learning. Extensive experiments on the Xiaohongshu and Twitter datasets with two types of downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach proves significant improvement over previous strong baseline methods.

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Generating Demonstrations for In-Context Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning

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