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Table reasoning tasks have shown remarkable progress with the development of large language models (LLMs), which involve interpreting and drawing conclusions from tabular data based on natural language (NL) questions. Existing solutions mainly tested on smaller tables face scalability issues and struggle with complex queries due to incomplete or dispersed data across different table sections. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TAP4LLM as a versatile pre-processor suite for leveraging LLMs in table-based tasks effectively. It covers several distinct components: (1) table sampling to decompose large tables into manageable sub-tables based on query semantics, (2) table augmentation to enhance tables with additional knowledge from external sources or models, and (3) table packing \&amp; serialization to convert tables into various formats suitable for LLMs&#39; understanding. In each module, we design and compare several common methods for usage in various scenarios, aiming to shed light on the best practices for leveraging LLMs for table-reasoning tasks. Our experiments show that our method improves LLMs&#39; reasoning capabilities in various tabular tasks and enhances the interaction between LLMs and tabular data by employing effective pre-processing.

EMNLP 2024

TAP4LLM: Table Provider on Sampling, Augmenting, and Packing Semi-structured Data for Large Language Model Reasoning

role-playing

personality

negotiation

### 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.

Table reasoning tasks have shown remarkable progress with the development of large language models (LLMs), which involve interpreting and drawing conclusions from tabular data based on natural language (NL) questions. Existing solutions mainly tested on smaller tables face scalability issues and struggle with complex queries due to incomplete or dispersed data across different table sections. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TAP4LLM as a versatile pre-processor suite for leveraging LLMs in table-based tasks effectively. It covers several distinct components: (1) table sampling to decompose large tables into manageable sub-tables based on query semantics, (2) table augmentation to enhance tables with additional knowledge from external sources or models, and (3) table packing \& serialization to convert tables into various formats suitable for LLMs' understanding. In each module, we design and compare several common methods for usage in various scenarios, aiming to shed light on the best practices for leveraging LLMs for table-reasoning tasks. Our experiments show that our method improves LLMs' reasoning capabilities in various tabular tasks and enhances the interaction between LLMs and tabular data by employing effective pre-processing.

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.

In visual speech processing, context modeling capability is one of the most important requirements due to the ambiguous nature of lip movements. For example, homophenes, words that share identical lip movements but produce different sounds, can be distinguished by considering the context. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely Visual Speech Processing incorporated with LLMs (VSP-LLM), to maximize the context modeling ability by bringing the overwhelming power of LLMs. Specifically, VSP-LLM is designed to perform multi-tasks of visual speech recognition and translation, where the given instructions control the type of task. The input video is mapped to the input latent space of an LLM by employing a self-supervised visual speech model. Focused on the fact that there is redundant information in input frames, we propose a novel deduplication method that reduces the embedded visual features by employing visual speech units. Through the proposed deduplication and low rank adaptation, VSP-LLM can be trained in a computationally efficient manner. In the translation dataset, the MuAViC benchmark, we demonstrate that VSP-LLM trained on just 30 hours of labeled data can more effectively translate compared to the recent model trained with 433 hours of data.

Where Visual Speech Meets Language: VSP-LLM Framework for Efficient and Context-Aware Visual Speech Processing

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to simulate human-like decision-making, yet the impact of psychological pressures on their decision-making processes remains underexplored. To understand how psychological pressures influence decision-making in LLMs, we tested LLMs on various high-level tasks, using both explicit and implicit pressure prompts. Moreover, we examined LLM responses under different personas to compare with human behavior under pressure. Our findings show that pressures significantly affect LLMs' decision-making, varying across tasks and models. Persona-based analysis suggests some models exhibit human-like sensitivity to pressure, though with some variability. Furthermore, by analyzing both the responses and reasoning patterns, we identified the values LLMs prioritize under specific social pressures. These insights deepen our understanding of LLM behavior and demonstrate the potential for more realistic social simulation experiments.

Will LLMs Sink or Swim? Exploring Decision-Making Under Pressure

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being employed by end-users for various tasks, including sensitive ones such as health counseling, disregarding potential safety concerns. It is thus necessary to understand how adequately LLMs perform in such domains. We conduct a case study on ChatGPT in nutrition counseling, a popular use-case where the model supports a user with their dietary struggles. We crowd-source real-world diet-related struggles, then work with nutrition experts to generate supportive text using ChatGPT. Finally, experts evaluate the safety and text quality of ChatGPT's output. The result is the HAI-coaching dataset, containing ~2.4K crowdsourced dietary struggles and ~97K corresponding ChatGPT-generated and expert-annotated supportive texts. We analyse ChatGPT's performance, discovering potentially harmful behaviours, especially for sensitive topics like mental health. Finally, we use HAI-coaching to test open LLMs on various downstream tasks, showing that even the latest models struggle to achieve good performance. HAI-coaching is available at https://github.com/uccollab/\\hai-coaching/

Ask the experts: sourcing a high-quality nutrition counseling dataset through Human-AI collaboration

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English; hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds other languages. To our knowledge, we are the first to collect and translate a large collection of texts, instructions, and benchmarks and train, evaluate, and release open-source LLMs tailored for Romanian. We evaluate our methods on four different categories, including academic benchmarks, MT-Bench (manually translated), and a professionally built historical, cultural, and social benchmark adapted to Romanian. We argue for the usefulness and high performance of RoLLMs by obtaining state-of-the-art results across the board. We publicly release all resources (i.e., data, training and evaluation code, models) with the goal of supporting and encouraging research on Romanian LLMs while concurrently creating a generalizable recipe adequate for other low or less-resourced languages.

Vorbești Românește? A Recipe to Train Powerful Romanian LLMs with English Instructions

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system is important in domains such as e-commerce, which has many long-tail entities and frequently updated information. Most existing works adopt separate modules for retrieval and generation, which may be suboptimal since the retrieval task and the generation task cannot benefit from each other to improve performance. We propose a novel Backbone Shared RAG framework (BSharedRAG). It first uses a domain-specific corpus to continually pre-train a base model as a domain-specific backbone model and then trains two plug-and-play Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules based on the shared backbone to minimize retrieval and generation losses respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed BSharedRAG outperforms baseline models by 5% and 13% in Hit@3 upon two datasets in retrieval evaluation and by 23% in terms of BLEU-3 in generation evaluation. Our codes, models, and dataset are available at https://bsharedrag.github.io.

BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain

Implicit Personalization (IP) is a phenomenon of language models inferring a user’s background from the implicit cues in the input prompts and tailoring the response based on this inference. While previous work has touched upon various instances of this problem, there lacks a unified framework to study this behavior. This work systematically studies IP through a rigorous mathematical formulation, a multi-perspective moral reasoning framework, and a set of case studies. Our theoretical foundation for IP relies on a structural causal model and introduces a novel method, indirect intervention, to estimate the causal effect of a mediator variable that cannot be directly intervened upon. Beyond the technical approach, we also introduce a set of moral reasoning principles based on three schools of moral philosophy to study when IP may or may not be ethically appropriate. Equipped with both mathematical and ethical insights, we present three diverse case studies illustrating the varied nature of the IP problem and offer recommendations for future research.

Implicit Personalization in Language Models: A Systematic Study

Recent language models achieve impressive results in tasks involving complex multistep reasoning, but scaling these capabilities further traditionally requires expensive collection of more annotated data.
In this work, we explore the potential of improving models' reasoning capabilities without new data, merely using automated feedback to the validity of their predictions in arithmetic reasoning (self-training).

In systematic experimentation across six different arithmetic reasoning datasets, we find that models can substantially improve in both single-round (offline) and online self-training, reaching a correct result in +13.9\% and +25.9\% more cases, respectively, underlining the importance of actuality of self-training feedback. We further find that in the single-round, offline self-training, traditional supervised training can deliver gains comparable to preference optimization, but in online self-training, preference optimization methods largely outperform supervised training thanks to their superior stability and robustness on unseen types of problems.

Self-training Language Models in Arithmetic Reasoning

Medical knowledge is context-dependent and requires consistent reasoning across various natural language expressions of semantically equivalent phrases. This is particularly crucial for drug names, where patients often use brand names like Advil or Tylenol instead of their generic equivalents. To study this, we create a new robustness dataset, \textbf{RABBITS}, to evaluate performance differences on medical benchmarks after swapping brand and generic drug names using physician expert annotations.

We assess both open-source and API-based LLMs on MedQA and MedMCQA, revealing a consistent performance drop ranging from 1-10%. Furthermore, we identify a potential source of this fragility as the contamination of test data in widely used pre-training datasets.

Language Models are Surprisingly Fragile to Drug Names in Biomedical Benchmarks

The advancement in healthcare has shifted focus toward patient-centric approaches, particularly in self-care and patient education, facilitated by access to Electronic Health Records (EHR). However, medical jargon in EHRs poses significant challenges in patient comprehension. To address this, we introduce a new task of automatically generating lay definitions, aiming to simplify complex medical terms into patient-friendly lay language. We first created the README dataset, an extensive collection of over 50,000 unique (medical term, lay definition) pairs and 300,000 mentions, each offering context-aware lay definitions manually annotated by domain experts. We have also engineered a data-centric Human-AI pipeline that synergizes data filtering, augmentation, and selection to improve data quality. We then used README as the training data for models and leveraged a Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to reduce hallucinations and improve the quality of model outputs. Our extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that open-source mobile-friendly models, when fine-tuned with high-quality data, are capable of matching or even surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art closed-source large language models like ChatGPT. This research represents a significant stride in closing the knowledge gap in patient education and advancing patient-centric healthcare solutions.

README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential as tools to support an expanding range of decision-making tasks. Given their training on human (created) data, LLMs have been shown to inherit societal biases against protected groups, as well as be subject to bias functionally resembling cognitive bias. Human-like bias can impede fair and explainable decisions made with LLM assistance. 
Our work introduces BiasBuster, a framework designed to uncover, evaluate, and mitigate cognitive bias in LLMs, particularly in high-stakes decision-making tasks. Inspired by prior research in psychology and cognitive science, we develop a dataset containing 13,465 prompts to evaluate LLM decisions on different cognitive biases (e.g., prompt-induced, sequential, inherent). We test various bias mitigation strategies, while proposing a novel method utilizing LLMs to debias their own human-like cognitive bias within prompts. 
Our analysis provides a comprehensive picture of the presence and effects of cognitive bias across commercial and open-source models. We demonstrate that our selfhelp debiasing effectively mitigates model answers that display patterns akin to human cognitive bias without having to manually craft examples for each bias.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Where Visual Speech Meets Language: VSP-LLM Framework for Efficient and Context-Aware Visual Speech Processing

Similar lecture

Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs