Adapter parameters provide a mechanism to modify the behavior of machine learning models and have gained significant popularity in the context of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. These parameters can be merged to support multiple tasks via a process known as task merging. However, prior work on merging in LLMs, particularly in natural language processing, has been limited to scenarios where each test example addresses only a single task. In this paper, we focus on on-device settings and study the problem of text-based compositional multi-tasking, where each test example involves the simultaneous execution of multiple tasks. For instance, generating a translated summary of a long text requires solving both translation and summarization tasks concurrently. To facilitate research in this setting, we propose a benchmark comprising four practically relevant compositional tasks. We also present an efficient method (Learnable Calibration) tailored for on-device applications, where computational resources are limited, emphasizing the need for solutions that are both resource-efficient and high-performing. Our contributions lay the groundwork for advancing the capabilities of LLMs in real-world multi-tasking scenarios, expanding their applicability to complex, resource-constrained use cases.

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown remarkable performance across various tasks without requiring fine-tuning. However, recent studies have highlighted the risk of private data leakage through the prompt in ICL, especially when LLMs are exposed to malicious attacks. While differential privacy (DP) provides strong privacy guarantees, it often significantly reduces the utility of in-context learning (ICL). To address this challenge, we incorporate task-related public data into the ICL framework while maintaining the DP guarantee. Based on this approach, we propose a private in-context learning algorithm that effectively balances privacy protection and model utility. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the utility of private ICL with the assistance of public data. Additionally, we show that our method is robust against membership inference attacks, demonstrating empirical privacy protection.

In the era of digitalization, as individuals increasingly rely on digital platforms for communication and news consumption, various actors employ linguistic strategies to influence public perception. While models have become proficient at detecting explicit patterns, which typically appear in texts as single remarks referred to as utterances, such as social media posts, malicious actors have shifted toward utilizing implicit influential verbal patterns embedded within conversations. These verbal patterns aim to mentally penetrate the victim's mind in order to influence them, enabling the actor to obtain the desired information through implicit means. This paper presents an improved approach for detecting such implicit influential patterns. Furthermore, the proposed model is capable of identifying the specific locations of these influential elements within a conversation. To achieve this, the existing dataset was augmented using the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art language models. Our designed framework resulted in a 6% improvement in the detection of implicit influential patterns in conversations. Moreover, this approach improved the multi-label classification tasks related to both the techniques used for influence and the vulnerability of victims by 33% and 43%, respectively.

Code-switching (CS) poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its comprehensibility remains underexplored in LLMs. We introduce CS-Sum, to evaluate the comprehensibility of CS by the LLMs through CS dialogue to English summarization. CS-Sum is the first benchmark for CS dialogue summarization across Mandarin-English (EN-ZH), Tamil-English (EN-TA), and Malay-English (EN-MS), with 900-1300 human-annotated dialogues per language pair. Evaluating ten LLMs, including open and closed-source models, we analyze performance across few-shot, translate-summarize, and fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA on synthetic data) approaches. Our findings show that though the scores on automated metrics are high, LLMs make subtle mistakes that alter the complete meaning of the dialogue. To this end, we introduce 3 most common type of errors that LLMs make when handling CS input. Error rates vary across CS pairs and LLMs, with some LLMs showing more frequent errors on certain language pairs, underscoring the need for specialized training on code-switched data.

Diffusion models have shown promise in text generation but often struggle with generating long, coherent, and contextually accurate text. Token-level diffusion overlooks word-order dependencies and enforces short output windows, while passage-level diffusion struggles with learning robust representation for long-form text. To address these challenges, we propose Segment-Level Diffusion (SLD), a framework that enhances diffusion-based text generation through text segmentation, robust representation training with adversarial and contrastive learning, and improved latent-space guidance. By segmenting long-form outputs into separate latent representations and decoding them with an autoregressive decoder, SLD simplifies diffusion predictions and improves scalability. Experiments on XSum, ROCStories, DialogSum, and DeliData demonstrate that SLD achieves competitive or superior performance in fluency, coherence, and contextual compatibility across automatic and human evaluation metrics comparing with other diffusion and autoregressive baselines. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our segmentation and representation learning strategies.

Mental manipulation severely undermines mental wellness by covertly and negatively distorting decision-making. While there is an increasing interest in mental health care within the natural language processing community, progress in tackling manipulation remains limited due to the complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations. In this paper, we propose Intent-Aware Prompting (IAP), a novel approach for detecting mental manipulations using large language models (LLMs), providing a deeper understanding of manipulative tactics by capturing the underlying intents of participants. Experimental results on the MentalManip dataset demonstrate superior effectiveness of IAP against other advanced prompting strategies. Notably, our approach substantially reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/Anton-Jiayuan-MA/Manip-IAP.

Towards human-level visual understanding, visual commonsense generation has been introduced to generate commonsense inferences beyond images. However, current research on visual commonsense generation has overlooked an important human cognitive ability: generating descriptive and diverse inferences. In this work, we propose a novel visual commonsense generation framework, called DIVE, which aims to improve the descriptiveness and diversity of generated inferences. DIVE involves two methods, generic inference filtering and contrastive retrieval learning, which address the limitations of existing visual commonsense resources and training objectives. Experimental results verify that DIVE outperforms state-of-the-art models for visual commonsense generation in terms of both descriptiveness and diversity, while showing a superior quality in generating unique and novel inferences. Notably, DIVE achieves human-level descriptiveness and diversity on Visual Commonsense Graphs. Furthermore, human evaluations confirm that DIVE aligns closely with human judgments on descriptiveness and diversity\footnote{Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Park-ing-lot/DIVE.

Remarkable advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-quality text summarization. However, this capability is currently accessible only through LLMs of substantial size or proprietary LLMs with usage fees. In response, smaller-scale LLMs (sLLMs) of easy accessibility and low costs have been extensively studied, yet they often suffer from missing key information and entities, i.e., low relevance, in particular, when input documents are long. We hence propose a key-element-informed instruction tuning for summarization, so-called KEITSum, which identifies key elements in documents and instructs sLLM to generate summaries capturing these key elements. Experimental results on dialogue and news datasets demonstrate that sLLM with KEITSum indeed provides high-quality summarization with higher relevance and less hallucinations, competitive to proprietary LLM.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) of several billion parameters can be impractical in most industrial use cases due to constraints such as cost, latency limitations, and hardware accessibility. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a solution by compressing knowledge from resource-intensive large models to smaller ones. Various strategies exist, some relying on the text generated by the teacher model and optionally utilizing his logits to enhance learning. However, these methods based on logits often require both teacher and student models to share the same tokenizer, limiting their applicability across different LLM families. In this paper, we introduce Universal Logit Distillation (ULD) loss, grounded in optimal transport, to address this limitation. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ULD loss in enabling distillation across models with different architectures and tokenizers, paving the way to a more widespread use of distillation techniques.

However, their capabilities on conversational summarization remains under explored. In this work we evaluate LLMs ( 10 billion parameters) on conversational summarization and showcase their performance on various prompts. We show that the summaries generated by models depend on the instructions and the performance of LLMs vary with different instructions sometimes resulting steep drop in ROUGE scores if prompts are not selected carefully. We also evaluate the models with human evaluations and discuss the limitations of the models on conversational summarization.