Mexico

Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated strong efficacy as visual assistants that can parse natural queries about the visual content and generate human-like outputs. In this work, we explore the ability of these models to demonstrate human-like reasoning based on the perceived information. To address a crucial concern regarding the extent to which their reasoning capabilities are fully consistent and grounded, we also measure the reasoning consistency of these models. We achieve this by proposing a chain-of-thought (CoT) based consistency measure. However, such an evaluation requires a benchmark that encompasses both high-level inference and detailed reasoning chains, which is costly. We tackle this challenge by proposing an LLM-Human-in-the-Loop pipeline, which notably reduces cost while simultaneously ensuring the generation of a high-quality dataset. Based on this pipeline and the existing coarse-grained annotated dataset, we build the CURE benchmark to measure both the zero-shot reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art VLMs, and find that even the best-performing model is unable to demonstrate strong visual reasoning capabilities and consistency, indicating that substantial efforts are required to enable VLMs to perform visual reasoning as systematically and consistently as humans. As an early step, we propose a two-stage training framework aimed at improving both the reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. The first stage involves employing supervised fine-tuning of VLMs using step-by-step reasoning samples automatically generated by LLMs. In the second stage, we further augment the training process by incorporating feedback provided by LLMs to produce reasoning chains that are highly consistent and grounded. We empirically highlight the effectiveness of our framework in both reasoning performance and consistency.

NAACL 2024

Measuring and Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

chain-of-thought reasoning

vision-language models

benchmark

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

poster

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

To access the event page you need to register [**here.**](http://acl.swoogo.com/naacl2024) 
Your access to the event page is limited based on your registration type. If you registered for workshops only, you will gain access to full workshops content on the day of the workshops program.

Please register!

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems traditionally relies on hand annotations for input queries, passages to retrieve, and responses to generate. We introduce ARES, an Automated RAG Evaluation System, for evaluating RAG systems along the dimensions of context relevance, answer faithfulness, and answer relevance. By creating its own synthetic training data, ARES finetunes lightweight LM judges to assess the quality of individual RAG components. To mitigate potential prediction errors, ARES utilizes a small set of human-annotated datapoints for prediction-powered inference (PPI). Across eight different knowledge-intensive tasks in KILT, SuperGLUE, and AIS, ARES accurately evaluates RAG systems while using only a few hundred human annotations during evaluation. Furthermore, ARES judges remain effective across domain shifts, proving accurate even after changing the type of queries and/or documents used in the evaluated RAG systems. We make our code and datasets publicly available on Github.

ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Planning is a crucial task for agents in task oriented dialogs (TODs). Human agents typically resolve user issues by following predefined workflows, decomposing workflow steps into actionable items, and performing actions by executing APIs in order; all of which require reasoning and planning. With the recent advances in LLMs, there have been increasing attempts to use them for task planning and API usage. However, the faithfulness of the plans to predefined workflows and API dependencies, is not guaranteed with LLMs. Moreover, workflows in real life are often custom-defined and prone to changes; hence, adaptation is desirable. To study this, we propose the problem of faithful planning in TODs that needs to resolve user intents by following predefined flows and preserving API dependencies. To solve this problem, we propose $\textbf{FLAP}$, a $\textbf{Fl}$ow-$\textbf{A}$dhering $\textbf{P}$lanning algorithm based on constrained decoding with lookahead heuristic for LLMs. Our algorithm alleviates the need for finetuning LLMs using domain specific (plan/dependency) data, enables quick adaptation to predefined flows, and outperforms other decoding and prompting-based baselines. Further, our algorithm empowers smaller LLMs ($\approx7$B) to perform at par larger LLMs ($\approx30$B-$40$B).

FLAP: Flow-Adhering Planning with Constrained Decoding in LLMs

In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. A recent line of work suggests that ICL performs gradient descent (GD)-based optimization implicitly. While appealing, much of the research focuses on simplified settings, where the parameters of a shallow model are optimized. In this work, we revisit evidence for ICL-GD correspondence on realistic NLP tasks and models. We find gaps in evaluation, both in terms of problematic metrics and insufficient baselines. We show that surprisingly, even untrained models achieve comparable ICL-GD similarity scores despite not exhibiting ICL. Next, we explore a major discrepancy in the flow of information throughout the model between ICL and GD, which we term \textit{Layer Causality}. We propose a simple GD-based optimization procedure that respects layer causality, and show it improves similarity scores significantly.

In-context Learning and Gradient Descent Revisited

Large language models are successful in answering factoid questions but are also prone to hallucination. We investigate the phenomenon of LLMs possessing correct answer knowledge yet still hallucinating from the perspective of inference dynamics, an area not previously covered in studies on hallucinations. We are able to conduct this analysis via two key ideas. First, we identify the factual questions that query the same triplet knowledge but result in different answers. The difference between the model behaviors on the correct and incorrect outputs hence suggests the patterns when hallucinations happen. Second, to measure the pattern, we utilize mappings from the residual streams to vocabulary space. We reveal the different dynamics of the output token probabilities along the depths of layers between the correct and hallucinated cases. In hallucinated cases, the output token's information rarely demonstrates abrupt increases and consistent superiority in the later stages of the model. Leveraging the dynamic curve as a feature, we build a classifier capable of accurately detecting hallucinatory predictions with an 88\% success rate. Our study shed light on understanding the reasons for LLMs' hallucinations on their known facts, and more importantly, on accurately predicting when they are hallucinating.

On Large Language Models’ Hallucination with Regard to Known Facts

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for accessing information on the web. Their truthfulness and factuality are thus of great interest. To help users make the right decisions about the information they get, LLMs should not only provide information but also help users fact-check it. We conduct human experiments with 80 crowdworkers to compare language models with search engines (information retrieval systems) at facilitating fact-checking. We prompt LLMs to validate a given claim and provide corresponding explanations. Users reading LLM explanations are significantly more efficient than those using search engines while achieving similar accuracy. However, they over-rely on the LLMs when the explanation is wrong. To reduce over-reliance on LLMs, we ask LLMs to provide contrastive information—explain both why the claim is true and false, and then we present both sides of the explanation to users. This contrastive explanation mitigates users’ over-reliance on LLMs, but cannot significantly outperform search engines. Further, showing both search engine results and LLM explanations offers no complementary benefits compared to search engines alone. Taken together, our study highlights that natural language explanations by LLMs may not be a reliable replacement for reading the retrieved passages, especially in high-stakes settings where over-relying on wrong AI explanations could lead to critical consequences.

Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness – Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong

Despite remarkable strides made in the development of entity linking systems in recent years, a comprehensive comparative analysis of these systems using a unified framework is notably absent. This paper addresses this oversight by introducing a new black-box benchmark and conducting a comprehensive evaluation of all state-of-the-art entity linking methods. We use an ablation study to investigate the impact of candidate sets on the performance of entity linking. Our findings uncover exactly how much such entity linking systems depend on candidate sets, and how much this limits the general applicability of each system. We present an alternative approach to candidate sets, demonstrating that leveraging the entire in-domain candidate set can serve as a viable substitute for certain models. We show the trade-off between less restrictive candidate sets, increased inference time and memory footprint for some models.

Unified Examination of Entity Linking in Absence of Candidate Sets

Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the mechanisms driving ICL, few have explored training strategies that incentivize these models to generalize to multiple tasks. Multi-task learning (MTL) for generalist models is a promising direction that offers transfer learning potential, enabling large parameterized models to be trained from simpler, related tasks. In this work, we investigate the combination of MTL with ICL to build models that efficiently learn tasks while being robust to out-of-distribution examples. We propose several effective curriculum learning strategies that allow ICL models to achieve higher data efficiency and more stable convergence. Our experiments reveal that ICL models can effectively learn difficult tasks by training on progressively harder tasks while mixing in prior tasks, denoted as mixed curriculum in this work.

How does Multi-Task Training Affect Transformer In-Context Capabilities? Investigations with Function Classes

In text ranking, it is generally believed that the cross-encoders already gather sufficient token interaction information via the attention mechanism in the hidden layers. However, our results show that the cross-encoders can consistently benefit from additional token interaction in the similarity computation at the last layer. We introduce CELI (Cross-Encoder with Late Interaction), which incorporates a late interaction layer into the current cross-encoder models. This simple method brings 5% improvement on BEIR without compromising in-domain effectiveness or search latency. Extensive experiments show that this finding is consistent across different sizes of the cross-encoder models and the first-stage retrievers. Our findings suggest that boiling all information into the [CLS] token is a suboptimal use for cross-encoders, and advocate further studies to investigate its relevance score mechanism.

CELI: Simple yet Effective Approach to Enhance Out-of-Domain Generalization of Cross-Encoders.

Are Large Language Models (LLMs) temporally grounded? Since LLMs cannot perceive and interact with the environment, it is impossible to answer this question directly. Instead, we provide LLMs with textual narratives and probe them with respect to their common-sense knowledge of the structure and duration of events, their ability to order events along a timeline, and self-consistency within their temporal model (e.g., temporal relations such as after and before are mutually exclusive for any pair of events). We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs (such as LLaMA 2 and GPT-4) on three tasks reflecting these abilities. Generally, we find that LLMs lag significantly behind both human performance as well as small-scale, specialised LMs. In-context learning, instruction tuning, and chain-of-thought prompting reduce this gap only to a limited degree. Crucially, LLMs struggle the most with self-consistency, displaying incoherent behaviour in at least 27.23\% of their predictions. Contrary to expectations, we also find that scaling the model size does not guarantee positive gains in performance. To explain these results, we study the sources from which LLMs may gather temporal information: we find that sentence ordering in unlabelled texts, available during pre-training, is only weakly correlated with event ordering. Moreover, public instruction tuning mixtures contain few temporal tasks. Hence, we conclude that current LLMs lack a consistent temporal model of textual narratives.

Are Large Language Model Temporally Grounded?

We breifly introduce the our large language model pipeline parallelism framework for long context on heterogeneous cost-effective devices.

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Next from NAACL 2024

ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

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