United States

In this paper, we investigate the overlooked impact of instruction-tuning on memorization in large language models (LLMs), which has largely been studied in base, pre-trained models. We propose a black-box prompt optimization method where an attacker LLM agent uncovers higher levels of memorization in a victim agent, surpassing traditional approaches that prompt the model directly with training data. Using an iterative rejection-sampling process, we design instruction-based prompts that minimize overlap with training data to avoid providing direct solutions while maximizing overlap between the victim&#39;s output and the training data to induce memorization. Our method shows 23.7% more overlap with training data compared to state-of-the-art baselines. We explore two attack settings: an analytical approach that determines the empirical upper bound of the attack, both with and without access to responses for prompt initialization, and a practical classifier-based method for assessing memorization without access to memorized data. Our findings reveal that instruction-tuned models can expose pre-training data as much as, or more than, base models; contexts beyond the original training data can lead to leakage; and instructions generated by other LLMs open new avenues for automated attacks, which we believe require further exploration.

NAACL 2025

ALPACA AGAINST VICUNA: Using LLMs to Uncover Memorization of LLMs

memorization

privacy

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.

In this paper, we investigate the overlooked impact of instruction-tuning on memorization in large language models (LLMs), which has largely been studied in base, pre-trained models. We propose a black-box prompt optimization method where an attacker LLM agent uncovers higher levels of memorization in a victim agent, surpassing traditional approaches that prompt the model directly with training data. Using an iterative rejection-sampling process, we design instruction-based prompts that minimize overlap with training data to avoid providing direct solutions while maximizing overlap between the victim's output and the training data to induce memorization. Our method shows 23.7% more overlap with training data compared to state-of-the-art baselines. We explore two attack settings: an analytical approach that determines the empirical upper bound of the attack, both with and without access to responses for prompt initialization, and a practical classifier-based method for assessing memorization without access to memorized data. Our findings reveal that instruction-tuned models can expose pre-training data as much as, or more than, base models; contexts beyond the original training data can lead to leakage; and instructions generated by other LLMs open new avenues for automated attacks, which we believe require further exploration.

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The rapid development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has significantly advanced multimodal understanding by harnessing the language abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and integrating modality-specific encoders. However, LMMs are plagued by hallucinations that limit their reliability and adoption. While traditional methods to detect and mitigate these hallucinations often involve costly training or rely heavily on external models, recent approaches utilizing internal model features present a promising alternative. In this paper, we critically assess the limitations of the state-of-the-art training-free technique, the logit lens, in handling generalized visual hallucinations. We introduce *ContextualLens*, a refined method that leverages contextual token embeddings from middle layers of LMMs. This approach significantly improves hallucination detection and grounding across diverse categories, including actions and OCR, while also excelling in tasks requiring contextual understanding, such as spatial relations and attribute comparison. Our novel grounding technique yields highly precise bounding boxes, facilitating a transition from Zero-Shot Object Segmentation to Grounded Visual Question Answering. Our contributions pave the way for more reliable and interpretable multimodal models.

Beyond Logit Lens: Contextual Embeddings for Robust Hallucination Detection & Grounding in VLMs

This paper investigates the knowledge of language models from the perspective of Bayesian epistemology. We explore how language models adjust their confidence and responses when presented with evidence with varying levels of informativeness and reliability. To study these properties, we create a dataset with various types of evidence and analyze language models' responses and confidence using verbalized confidence, token probability, and sampling. We observed that language models do not consistently follow Bayesian epistemology: language models follow the Bayesian confirmation assumption well with true evidence but fail to adhere to other Bayesian assumptions when encountering different evidence types. Also, we demonstrated that language models can exhibit high confidence when given strong evidence, but this does not always guarantee high accuracy. Our analysis also reveals that language models are biased toward golden evidence and show varying performance depending on the degree of irrelevance, helping explain why they deviate from Bayesian assumptions.

From Evidence to Belief: A Bayesian Epistemology Approach to Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have gained prominence due to their success in solving complex cross-modal tasks. However, the internal mechanisms of VLMs, particularly the roles of cross-attention and self-attention in multimodal integration, are not fully understood. To address this gap, we introduce NOTICE, a Gaussian-Noise-free Text-Image Corruption and Evaluation pipeline for mechanistic interpretability in VLMs. NOTICE introduces Semantic Image Pairs (SIP) corruption, the first visual counterpart to Symmetric Token Replacement (STR) for text. Through NOTICE, we uncover a set of ``universal attention heads'' in BLIP and LLaVA that consistently contribute across different tasks and modalities. In BLIP, cross-attention heads implement object detection, object suppression, and outlier suppression, whereas important self-attention heads in LLaVA only perform outlier suppression. Notably, our findings reveal that cross-attention heads perform image-grounding, while self-attention in LLaVA heads do not, highlighting key differences in how VLM architectures handle multimodal learning.

What Do VLMs NOTICE? A Mechanistic Interpretability Pipeline for Gaussian-Noise-free Text-Image Corruption and Evaluation

Large language models have emerged as powerful tools for general intelligence, showcasing advanced natural language processing capabilities that find applications across diverse domains. Despite their impressive performance, recent studies have highlighted the potential for significant enhancements in LLMs' task-specific performance through fine-tuning strategies like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and Quantized Low-Rank Adapters (Q-LoRA) method. However, previous works have shown that while fine-tuning offers significant performance gains, it also leads to challenges such as catastrophic forgetting and privacy and safety risks. To this end, there has been little to no work in *understanding the impact of fine-tuning on the reasoning capabilities of LLMs*. Our research investigates the effect of fine-tuning on the reasoning abilities of LLMs, addressing critical questions regarding the impact of task-specific fine-tuning on overall reasoning capabilities, the influence of fine-tuning on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning performance, and the implications for the faithfulness of CoT reasonings. By exploring these dimensions, our study shows the impact of fine-tuning on LLM reasoning capabilities, where the faithfulness of CoT reasoning, on average across four datasets, decreases, highlighting potential shifts in internal mechanisms of the LLMs resulting from fine-tuning processes.

On the Impact of Fine-Tuning on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Tool-using agents that act in the world need to be both useful and safe. Well-calibrated model confidences can be used to weigh the risk versus reward of potential actions, but prior work shows that many models are poorly calibrated. Inspired by interpretability literature exploring the internals of models, we propose a novel class of model-internal confidence estimators (MICE) to better assess confidence when calling tools. MICE first decodes from each intermediate layer of the language model using logit lens and then computes similarity scores between each layer's generation and the final output. These features are fed into a learned probabilistic classifier to assess confidence in the decoded output. On the simulated trial and error (STE) tool-calling dataset using Llama3 models, we find that MICE beats or matches the baselines on smoothed expected calibration error. Using MICE confidences to determine whether to call a tool significantly improves over strong baselines on a new metric, expected tool-calling utility. Further experiments show that MICE is sample-efficient, can generalize zero-shot to unseen APIs, and results in higher tool-calling utility in scenarios with varying risk levels. Our code is open source, available at https://github.com/microsoft/mice_for_cats.

MICE for CATs: Model-Internal Confidence Estimation for Calibrating Agents with Tools

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, including chatbot assistants and code generation, aligning their behavior with safety and ethical standards has become paramount. However, jailbreak attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs, threaten LLMs safety significantly. In this paper, we introduce Layer-AdvPatcher, a novel methodology designed to defend against jailbreak attacks by utilizing an unlearning strategy to patch specific layers within LLMs through self-augmented datasets. Our insight is that certain layer(s), tend to produce affirmative tokens when faced with harmful prompts. By identifying these layers and adversarially exposing them to generate more harmful data, one can understand their inherent and diverse vulnerabilities to attacks. With these exposures, we then “unlearn” these issues, reducing the impact of affirmative tokens and hence minimizing jailbreak risks while keeping the model’s responses to safe queries intact. We conduct extensive experiments on two models, four benchmark datasets, and multiple state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Results indicate that our framework reduces the harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to recent defense methods. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/oyy2000/LayerAdvPatcher

Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense

In-context knowledge editing (IKE) enables efficient modification of large language model (LLM) outputs without parameter changes and at zero-cost. However, it can be misused to manipulate responses opaquely, e.g., insert misinformation or offensive content. Such malicious interventions could be incorporated into high-level wrapped APIs where the final input prompt is not shown to end-users. To address this issue, we investigate the detection and reversal of IKE-edits. First, we demonstrate that IKE-edits can be detected with high accuracy (F1 > 80%) using only the top-10 output probabilities of the next token, even in a black-box setting, e.g. proprietary LLMs with limited output information. Further, we introduce the novel task of reversing IKE-edits using specially tuned reversal tokens. We explore using both continuous and discrete reversal tokens, achieving over 80% accuracy in recovering original, unedited outputs across multiple LLMs. Our continuous reversal tokens prove particularly effective, with minimal impact on unedited prompts. Through analysis of output distributions, attention patterns, and token rankings, we provide insights into IKE's effects on LLMs and how reversal tokens mitigate them. This work represents a significant step towards enhancing LLM resilience against potential misuse of in-context editing, improving their transparency and trustworthiness.

How to Make LLMs Forget: On Reversing In-Context Knowledge Edits

Topic models are a popular approach for extracting semantic information from large document collections. However, recent studies suggest that the topics generated by these models often do not align well with human intentions. Although metadata such as labels and authorship information are available, it has not yet been effectively incorporated into neural topic models. To address this gap, we introduce FANToM, a novel method to align neural topic models with both labels and authorship information. FANToM allows for the inclusion of this metadata when available, producing interpretable topics and author distributions for each topic. Our approach demonstrates greater expressiveness than conventional topic models by learning the alignment between labels, topics, and authors. Experimental results show that FANToM improves existing models in terms of both topic quality and alignment. Additionally, it identifies author interests and similarities.

Tethering Broken Themes: Aligning Neural Topic Models with Labels and Authors

Recent advances in natural language processing and the increased use of large language models have exposed new security vulnerabilities, such as backdoor attacks. Previous backdoor attacks require input manipulation after model distribution to activate the backdoor, posing limitations in real-world applicability. Addressing this gap, we introduce a novel Claim-Guided Backdoor Attack (CGBA), which eliminates the need for such manipulations by utilizing inherent textual claims as triggers. CGBA leverages claim extraction, clustering, and targeted training to trick models to misbehave on targeted claims without affecting their performance on clean data. CGBA demonstrates its effectiveness and stealthiness across various datasets and models, significantly enhancing the feasibility of practical backdoor attacks. Our code and data will be available at https://github.com/minkyoo9/CGBA.

Claim-Guided Textual Backdoor Attack for Practical Applications

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a key training strategy for large language models. However, its reliance on fewer trainable parameters poses security risks, such as task-agnostic backdoors. Despite their severe impact on a wide range of tasks, there is no practical defense solution available that effectively counters task-agnostic backdoors within the context of PEFT. In this study, we introduce Obliviate, a PEFT-integrable backdoor defense. We develop two techniques aimed at amplifying benign neurons within PEFT layers and penalizing the influence of trigger tokens. Our evaluations across three major PEFT architectures show that our method can significantly reduce the attack success rate of the state-of-the-art task-agnostic backdoors (83.6%↓). Furthermore, our method exhibits robust defense capabilities against both task-specific backdoors and adaptive attacks. Source code will be obtained at https://github.com/jaehanwork/Obliviate.

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Beyond Logit Lens: Contextual Embeddings for Robust Hallucination Detection & Grounding in VLMs

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