United States

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be a great success in a wide range of applications ranging from regular NLP-based use cases to AI agents. LLMs have been trained on a vast corpus of texts from various sources; despite the best efforts during the data pre-processing stage while training the LLMs, they may pick some undesirable information such as personally identifiable information (PII). Consequently, in recent times research in the area of Machine Unlearning (MUL) has become active, the main idea is to force LLMs to forget (unlearn) certain information (e.g., PII) without suffering from performance loss on regular tasks. In this work, we examine the robustness of the existing MUL techniques for their ability to enable leakage-proof forgetting in LLMs. In particular, we examine the effect of data transformation on forgetting, i.e., is an unlearned LLM able to recall forgotten information if there is a change in the format of the input? Our findings on the TOFU dataset highlight the necessity of using diverse data formats to quantify unlearning in LLMs more reliably.

EMNLP 2024

Towards Robust Evaluation of Unlearning in LLMs via Data Transformations

quantity-aware search

quantity understanding

information retrieval

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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News recommendation is a challenging task that involves personalization based on the interaction history and preferences of each user. Recent works have leveraged the power of pretrained language models (PLMs) to directly rank news items by using inference approaches that predominately fall into three categories: pointwise, pairwise, and listwise learning-to-rank. While pointwise methods offer linear inference complexity, they fail to capture crucial comparative information between items that is more effective for ranking tasks. Conversely, pairwise and listwise approaches excel at incorporating these comparisons but suffer from practical limitations: pairwise approaches are either computationally expensive or lack theoretical guarantees and listwise methods often perform poorly in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for PLM-based news recommendation that integrates both pointwise relevance prediction and pairwise comparisons in a scalable manner. We present a rigorous theoretical analysis of our framework, establishing conditions under which our approach guarantees improved performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the MIND and Adressa news recommendation datasets.

Efficient Pointwise-Pairwise Learning-to-Rank for News Recommendation

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is often constrained by memory bandwidth, where the primary bottleneck is the cost of transferring model parameters from the GPU's global memory to its registers. When coupled with custom kernels that fuse the dequantization and matmul operations, weight-only quantization can thus enable faster inference by reducing the amount of memory movement. However, developing high-performance kernels for weight-quantized LLMs presents substantial challenges, especially when the weights are compressed to non-evenly-divisible bit widths (e.g., 3 bits) with non-uniform, lookup table (LUT) quantization. This paper describes FLUTE, a flexible lookup table engine for LUT-quantized LLMs, which uses offline restructuring of the quantized weight matrix to minimize bit manipulations associated with unpacking, and vectorization and duplication of the lookup table to mitigate shared memory bandwidth constraints. At batch sizes < 32 and quantization group size of 128 (typical in LLM inference), the FLUTE kernel can be 2-4x faster than existing GEMM kernels. As an application of FLUTE, we explore a simple extension to lookup table-based NormalFloat quantization and apply it to quantize LLaMA3 to various configurations, obtaining competitive quantization performance against strong baselines while obtaining an end-to-end throughput increase of 1.5 to 2 times.

Fast Matrix Multiplications for Lookup Table-Quantized LLMs

Understanding procedural texts, such as cooking recipes, is essential for enabling machines to follow instructions and reason about tasks, a key aspect of intelligent reasoning. 
In cooking, these instructions can be interpreted as a series of modifications to a food preparation.
For a model to effectively reason about cooking recipes, it must accurately discern and understand the inputs and outputs of intermediate steps within the recipe.
We present a new corpus of cooking recipes enriched with descriptions of intermediate steps that describe the input and output for each step. PizzaCommonsense serves as a benchmark for the reasoning capabilities of LLMs because it demands rigorous explicit input-output descriptions to demonstrate the acquisition of implicit commonsense knowledge, which is unlikely to be
easily memorized. GPT-4 achieves only 26\% human-evaluated preference for generations, leaving room for future improvements.

PizzaCommonSense: A Dataset for Commonsense Reasoning about Intermediate Steps in Cooking Recipes

In this work, we show the pre-trained language models return distinguishable generation probability and uncertainty distribution to unfaithfully hallucinated texts, regardless of their size and structure. By examining 24 models on 6 data sets, we find out that 88-98\% of cases return statistically significantly distinguishable generation probability and uncertainty distributions. Using this general phenomenon, we showcase a hallucination-reducing training algorithm. Our algorithm outperforms other baselines by achieving higher faithfulness metrics while maintaining sound general text quality measures.

Pre-trained Language Models Return Distinguishable Probability Distributions to Unfaithfully Hallucinated Texts

Downstream applications often require text classification models to be accurate and robust. While the accuracy of state-of-the-art Language Models (LMs) approximates human performance, they often exhibit a drop in performance on real-world noisy data. This lack of robustness can be concerning, as even small perturbations in text, irrelevant to the target task, can cause classifiers to incorrectly change their predictions. A potential solution can be the family of Prototype-Based Networks (PBNs) that classifies examples based on their similarity to prototypical examples of a class (prototypes) and has been shown to be robust to noise for computer vision tasks. In this paper, we study whether the robustness properties of PBNs transfer to text classification tasks under both targeted and static adversarial attack settings. Our results show that PBNs, as a mere architectural variation of vanilla LMs, offer more robustness compared to vanilla LMs under both targeted and static settings. We showcase how PBNs' interpretability can help us understand PBNs' robustness properties. Finally, our ablation studies reveal the sensitivity of PBNs' robustness to the strictness of clustering and the number of prototypes in the training phase, as tighter clustering and a low number of prototypes result in less robust PBNs.

Robust Text Classification: Analyzing Prototype-Based Networks

Vision-language models (VLMs) have gained widespread adoption in both industry and academia. In this study, we propose a unified framework for systematically evaluating gender, race, and age biases in VLMs with respect to professions. Our evaluation encompasses all supported inference modes of the recent VLMs, including image-to-text, text-to-text, text-to-image, and image-to-image. We create a synthetic, high-quality dataset comprising text and images that intentionally obscure gender, race, and age distinctions across various professions. The dataset includes action-based descriptions of each profession and serves as a benchmark for evaluating societal biases in vision-language models (VLMs). In our benchmarking of popular vision-language models (VLMs), we observe that different input-output modalities result in distinct bias magnitudes and directions. We hope our work will help guide future progress in improving VLMs to learn socially unbiased representations. We will release our data and code.

A Unified Framework and Dataset for Assessing Societal Bias in Vision-Language Models

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective technique that leverages pairwise preference data (one chosen and rejected response per prompt) to align LLMs to human preferences. In practice, multiple responses could exist for a given prompt with varying quality relative to each other. We propose to utilize these responses to create multiple preference pairs for a given prompt. Our work focuses on aligning LLMs by systematically curating multiple preference pairs and presenting them in a meaningful manner facilitating curriculum learning to enhance the prominent DPO technique. We order multiple preference pairs from easy to hard, according to various criteria thus emulating curriculum learning. Our method, which is referred to as Curri-DPO consistently shows increased performance gains on MTbench, Vicuna bench, WizardLM, highlighting its effectiveness over standard DPO setting that utilizes single preference pair. More specifically, Curri-DPO achieves a score of 7.43 on MTbench with Zephyr-7B, outperforming majority of existing LLMs with similar parameter size. Curri-DPO also achieves the highest win rates on Vicuna, WizardLM, and UltraFeedback test sets (90.7%, 87.1%, and 87.9% respectively) in our experiments, with notable gains of up to 7.5% when compared to standard DPO. We release the preference pairs used in alignment at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow-AI/Curriculum_DPO_preferences.

Enhancing Alignment using Curriculum Learning & Ranked Preferences

As language models become more general purpose, increased attention needs to be paid to detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) instances, i.e., those not belonging to any of the distributions seen during training. Existing methods for detecting OOD data are computationally complex and storage-intensive. We propose a novel soft clustering approach for OOD detection based on non-negative kernel regression. Our approach greatly reduces computational and space complexities (up to $11\times $ improvement in inference time and 87\% reduction in storage requirements). It outperforms existing approaches by up to 4 AUROC points on four benchmarks. We also introduce an entropy-constrained version of our algorithm, leading to further reductions in storage requirements (up to 97\% lower than comparable approaches) while retaining competitive performance. Our soft clustering approach for OOD detection highlights its potential for detecting tail-end phenomena in extreme-scale data settings. Our source code is available on Github.

Out-of-Distribution Detection through Soft Clustering with Non-Negative Kernel Regression

Merging Large Language Models (LLMs) is a cost-effective technique for combining multiple expert LLMs into a single versatile model, retaining the expertise of the original ones. However, current approaches often overlook the importance of safety alignment during merging, leading to highly misaligned models. This work investigates the effects of model merging on alignment. We evaluate several popular model merging techniques, demonstrating that existing methods do not only transfer domain expertise but also propagate misalignment. We propose a simple two-step approach to address this problem: (i) generating synthetic safety and domain-specific data, and (ii) incorporating these generated data into the optimization process of existing data-aware model merging techniques. This allows us to treat alignment as a skill that can be maximized in the resulting merged LLM. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of integrating alignment-related data during merging, resulting in models that excel in both domain expertise and alignment.

Model Merging and Safety Alignment: One Bad Model Spoils the Bunch

Speculative decoding stands as a pivotal technique to expedite inference in autoregressive (large) language models. This method employs a smaller *draft* model to speculate a block of tokens, which the *target* model then evaluates for acceptance. Despite a wealth of studies aimed at increasing the efficiency of speculative decoding, the influence of generation configurations on the decoding process remains poorly understood, especially concerning decoding temperatures. This paper delves into the effects of decoding temperatures on speculative decoding’s efficacy. Beginning with knowledge distillation (KD), we first highlight the challenge of decoding at higher temperatures, and demonstrate KD in a consistent temperature setting could be a remedy. We also investigate the effects of out-of-domain testing sets with out-of-range temperatures. Building upon these findings, we take an initial step to further the speedup for speculative decoding, particularly in a high-temperature generation setting. Our work offers new insights into how generation configurations drastically affect the performance of speculative decoding, and underscores the need for developing methods that focus on diverse decoding configurations.

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Efficient Pointwise-Pairwise Learning-to-Rank for News Recommendation

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