Advanced Natural Language Processing

Advanced Natural Language Processing

natural language hard because ambiguity
breakdown of language: phonetics (sound) → phonology (meaningfully distinct sound)/ orthography (character)
- → morphology → lexeme (word)
- → syntax (grammar) → semantics (meaning) → pragmatics (context) → discourse (relation between sentences)
current model suck when samples are long and few
overwhelmingly obey Zipf’s law

Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Jacob Eisenstein, The MIT Press, 2018

Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, with Language Models, Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin, 2025

GLU Variants Improve Transformer, Noam Shazeer, arXiv, 2020

SwiGLU

GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints, Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebrón, Sumit Sanghai, EMNLP, 2023

paper to present

Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection, Wei Hao, Ran Li, Weiliang Zhao, Junfeng Yang, Chengzhi Mao, ACL, 2025
MultiSocial: Multilingual Benchmark of Machine-Generated Text Detection of Social-Media Texts, Dominik Macko, Jakub Kopál, Robert Moro, Ivan Srba, ACL, 2025
MIND: A Multi-agent Framework for Zero-shot Harmful Meme Detection, Ziyan Liu, Chunxiao Fan, Haoran Lou, Yuexin Wu, Kaiwei Deng, ACL, 2025
UTBoost: Rigorous Evaluation of Coding Agents on SWE-Bench, Boxi Yu, Yuxuan Zhu, Pinjia He, Daniel Kang, ACL, 2025
CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent System, Li Hu, Guoqiang Chen, Xiuwei Shang, Shaoyin Cheng, Benlong Wu, LiGangyang LiGangyang, Xu Zhu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu, ACL, 2025

replication project

Zero-Shot Detection of LLM-Generated Text using Token Cohesiveness, Shixuan Ma, Quan Wang, EMNLP, 2024

paper to question

Self-Instructed Derived Prompt Generation Meets In-Context Learning: Unlocking New Potential of Black-Box LLMs, Zhuo Li, Yuhao Du, Jinpeng Hu, Xiang Wan, Anningzhe Gao, ACL, 2025
- impact on context window?
- what would long prompt do? like a revise request?
- what about multi-turn?

paper presentations

What Happened in LLMs Layers when Trained for Fast vs. Slow Thinking: A Gradient Perspective
- presented by Jinyi
- fast&slow thinking: system 1&2, subconscious&conscious
- for LLM: no chain-of-thought (CoT) vs CoT; different level of detail
- probing & layer importance
  1. back propagation on different level of detail
  2. nuclear SVD of Q K V O of each layer’s gradient
    - more detailed CoT ⇒ smoother gradient
  3. compare mean absolute difference (MAD) of each layer
  4. compare relative difference (RD)
- instruction tuning does not enable better nonsense detection
byte latent transformer (BLT): patches scale better than tokens
- presented by Saba
- LLM training is end-to-end except for tokenization
- patching: dynamic group w/o fixed vocab
- entropy patching: start new patch when next byte hard to predict
  - small byte-level autoregressive model to produce entropy
  - small byte-level encoder&decoder surrounding 1 large latent transformer in middle
  - use byte encoding plus hashed n-gram
    - not learned!
  - higher patch size ⇒ lower FLOP per accuracy gain
  - minor accuracy degradation
HumT DumT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs
- presented by Sadra
- human-like tone (HumT): ~anthropomorphization; users usually prefer against (bc wordy, not to-the-point)
  - like flirty; overly descriptive?
- DPO + HumT (DUMT): RL to lower HumT
  - little performance degradation
Self-Instructed Derived Prompt Generation Meets In-Context Learning: Unlocking New Potential of Black-Box LLMs
- presented by Feiyu
- train rewriter (small model) to rewrite query, then feed new query to queried model (large), finally feed everything to query model again
  - use judge model for reward in training
- higher token count & slower, in exchange for claimed performance
LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts
- presented by Narges
- train attacker LLM to make victim LLM answer harmful question
TreeRL: LLM Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Tree Search
- presented by Saeed
- entropy tree (EPTree): RL w/ tree of action
  - branch out from high-entropy (uncertain) token
  - only fork once in the paper
- slightly higher #answers generated & pass rate per #tokens generated
  - but unclear if better when allowing more #tokens
- forking appear relative location near uniform distro
Mega: Moving Average Equipped Gated Attention, Xuezhe Ma, Chunting Zhou, Xiang Kong, Junxian He, Liangke Gui, Graham Neubig, Jonathan May, Luke Zettlemoyer, ICLR, 2023
- guest lecture by Xuezhe
- why: longer context practically mean smarter model
- challenge: transformer is quadratic compute&space in context length
  - communication challenge; huge KV cache
  - attention fail in large context
- chunk-wise attention: only attend to chunk instead of global
- damped exponential moving average (EMA): EMA w/ relaxed coupled weight $y_{t} = \alphax_{t} + (1 - α δ) y_{t - 1}$
  - learned parameter
  - parallelize by precomputing flattened weight & FFT
  - theoretically unbounded context
    - practically, w/ chunking, perform worse than full attention
  - apply on layer input for Q K but not V
- single-head gated attention: add reset gate to attention output
  - gated attention: multiple attention output w/ output of another transform from input
  - can reduce #heads e.g. from 32 to 4 ⇒ computational efficiency
- single Mega model perform well on various long-context task
Megalodon: Efficient LLM Pretraining and Inference with Unlimited Context Length, Xuezhe Ma, Xiaomeng Yang, Wenhan Xiong, Beidi Chen, Lili Yu, Hao Zhang, Jonathan May, Luke Zettlemoyer, Omer Levy, Chunting Zhou, NeurIPS 2024
- better Mega
- complex EMA: $y_{t} = \alphax_{t} + (1 - α δ) (cos θ + i sin θ) y_{t - 1}$
  - reason: diagonal matrix much more expressive in complex space
- time-step normalization: auto-regressive group normalization
  - cumulative mean&variance; no reset per document in training
- reduce communication bc only need last output instead of whole KV cache
- Gecko: ongoing improvements to Megalodon
  - running mean&variance via constant decay
  - sliding chunk attention: less wasted compute than flash attention
  - adaptive working memory (online softmax)
TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignment
- presented by Daniel
- problem: BPE & friends bias towards English, etc.
- replace vocabulary of LLM w/o full retraining
- injective map source tokenizer to target tokenizer via GloVe & alignment matrix
  - evaluate by BLEU-1 score of embedding, then recover corpus & eval w/ BERTScore
- replace vocabulary, freeze LLM body, retrain embedding & LM head, then full fine-tune
Turning Trash into Treasure: Accelerating Inference of Large Language Models with Token Recycling
- presented by Ardy
- token recycling for efficient decoding
- speculative decoding: small model speculate multiple token, then large model verify in parallel
  - trash: non-verified speculative token, discarded
- prebuild static possible token tree (unclear how to generalize)
- concatenate all node in tree as LLM input, discard tokens in group
- double speed than autoregressive decoding in benchmark
TokenFormer: Rethinking Transformer Scaling with Tokenized Model Parameters
- presented by Kiarash
- wasteful to not reuse smaller model when training larger
- pattention: cross attention w/ learnable parameter & modified softmax
  - can concatenate parameter matrix to increase
  - equivalent to 2-layer MLP w/ modified softmax as activation
- replace Q K V O (FFN) layer all w/ pattention
- much less computation power to train larger model w/ same performance
- better benchmark score w/ same parameter count
Guest presentation: Path finding: how the search space for creative tasks is navigated
- presented by Tenghao
- for writing /info gathering/ brainstorming task, search&reward space large
- heuristic: constrained beam search: prefer more emotional intensive token
- reward design: emotional intensive + perplexity
Large Language Models Are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models
- presented by Faith
- model learn from biased data
- RLHF does not fundamentally make LLM understand ethics
- need linguists/philosophers & collab btw researcher/corporation
Toward Automatic Discovery of a Canine Phonetic Alphabet
- presented by Ruth-Ann
- clean&split&transcribe YouTube dog bark into cognitive vocal unit
  - mutual filtering based on minimal pairs
  - merge w/ JS divergence
- vision model to describe scene&movement & map to 10 category
- better scenario classifier thru phonetic unit than MFCC & audio model
Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory
- presented by Tianwen
- working memory for RAG: KV cache for retrieved doc
- append memory after context in parallel w/ queue; weighted average of hidden vector ⇒ better retrieval
- recall vs precision tradeoff
Reinforced IR: A Self-Boosting Framework For Domain-Adapted Information Retrieval
- presented by Nikunj
- retriever + generator reinforce in a loop

linear model

inter-agreement rate: human annotator may disagree

$\frac{P ( a ) - P ( e )}{1 - P ( e )}$
- $P (a)$ raw agreement rate
- need to subtract expected agreement (by chance) $P (e) =$ sum of products of raw rates
- good rate vary by opinion: 0.8 very good; 0.4 some consider good
perceptron: linear gradient lost
- loss only on argmax y
logistic regression: softmax on all y instead of just argmax y
- more stable than perceptron

naive Bayes

assuming (wrongly) $P (w_{1}, w_{2}, \dots ∣ y) = P (w_{1} ∣ y) P (w_{2} ∣ y) \dots$

non-linear model

need: non-linearly-separable feature
activation function
- old & bad: sigmoid, tanh
- contemporary: ReLU, GELU, Swish, SwiGLU (used in SoTA LLM)

Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques, Bo Pang, Lillian Lee, Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, EMNLP, 2002

distributional feature representations

embedding: arbitrary vector representation of word sequence
distributional hypothesis: word meaning determined by where they are used
pointwise mutual information (PMI) for words: p(word, context)
positive PMI (PPMI): max(PMI, 0)
- very sparse matrix
- ⇒ singular value decomposition (SVD)
word2vec

language model (LM)

can generate: assume what came before determine what comes next
n-gram: “windowed” Bayes
- backoff
- smoothing
- surprisingly good smallish model
perplexity: how well LM predict real text by entropy
feed forward neural network n-gram

tokenization

reuse frequent letter sequence

byte pair encoding (BPE)
1. start w/ character-level tokens
2. count most frequent token pair & greedily replace w/ single token
- space sometimes part of token
- not semantically meaningful
  - Reddit cause weird token e.g. user name
small vocabulary cause long context

recurrent neural network (RNN)

each layer: feed new embedding + old hidden state to get new hidden state
strong emphasis on last token
problem: vanishing gradient bc long chain of hidden state
long short-term memory (LSTM)
- forget/input/output gate
- multiply cell state by forget gate, add input gate, finally multiply output gate
- Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM)
  - go both backward & forward, then concatenate
- residual: directly add input to output
attention: how much to attend to each hidden state
minibatching: concatenate & broadcast multiple sequences for GPU efficiency
major problem: cannot parallelize; inherently sequential

self-attention

of each token to every token: parallelizable
idea: soft weighted lookup (of “query”) in key-value store

step-by-step:

for each token, compute query $q_{i}$ of this token, key $k_{j}$ for every token
compute attention score $α_{i, j}$ using e.g. dot product $q_{i} \cdot k_{j}$
softmax over all $α_{i, j}$ to get $α_{i, j}^{'}$
compute value $v_{j}$ for every token, multiply by $α_{i, j}^{'}$ and sum

problem & solution:

no sequence order
- ⇒ position embedding: add a vector $p_{i}$ representing position e.g. Sinusoidal (OG)/ RoPE
no element-wise nonlinearity
- ⇒ feed forward network (FFN) after attention layer
not looking into future
- ⇒ attention mask: set attention score to $- \infty$ for future token

transformer

residual (add): smoothen loss landscape
layer normalization (norm): speed up training by normalizing mean & variance
multi-head attention: multiple attention & concatenation
optimizer: basic SGD
- Adam: momentum, per-parameter normalize adjustment by std of output
- AdamW: de facto in 2025
checkpoint/restart

pretrained language model

ELMo (2016): word vector w/ context from BiLSTM
fine-tuning: reuse model for other task for new task
GPT (2018): decoder-only classifier-only transformer
BERT (2018): convert piece of text to 512-dim vector w/ bidirectional transformer
- mask certain tokens w/ [MASK], random token, or actual token, then try to predict
- popular partially bc good marketing as a Muppet just like Elmo
- still fail Winograd challenge: figure out what ambiguous “it” refer to
GPT-2 (2019): did well on task not trained on
- huge model: 1.5B parameters
- PR stunt bc uhallucinated nicorn story
GPT-3 (2020): SoTA on many task
- 175B parameters
- few-shot; hardly affected by irrelevant/misleading context
- fixated on what it learned instead of adapting to flipped task
T0: like T5 but only w/ task phrased in natural language
LLaMA (2023): public architecture, weights, training data
- no training&preprocessing code
- hard to reproduce
Gemini (2023): started trend of white paper w/o technical details w/ tons of safety check

modified pretrained language model

T5: encoder-decoder transformer able to do multiple task
- cross-attention: query from decoder, key&value from encoder
prefix tuning: prepend token to mark what the task is
- additional parameter alongside each layer
- do not fine-tune original parameter
adapter: linear layer before&after transformer to adapt to new task
LoRA: add parameter alongside each layer and add them
- work very well
- can add anywhere: Q, K, V, FFN
  - Jon: a student claimed adding to FFN was best
mixture of experts (MoE, from 1990s): send embedding to different channel for FFN
- learn the router

introspective model ourobouros

scratchpad (2021): let model generate hidden token
- RNN and transformer are Turing complete if given infinite think time
chain-of-thought (CoT, 2022): encourage model to include reasoning
- hand-written example for training
ReAct: agentic + reasoning

human feedback

problem
- some words matter more
- bad training data
- exposure bias
evaluation is usually not differentiable ⇒ RL
InstructGPT/ChatGPT
1. supervised fine-tuning: got questions & answers & preference from human
2. train reward mode: use human to rank answers from LLM
3. PPO: initialize from supervised policy

reinforcement learning (RL)

less desirable than supervised learning
trick: start w/ MLE training before RL
avoid moving away too much from existing model ⇒ KL divergence
proximal policy optimization (PPO): avoid hard-to-compute KL divergence w/ CLIP
- cap model improvement by $1 + ε$
(DPO): no explicit reward model; only compare action
minimum Bayes rick (MBR)
- generate many outputs & score against each other
(GRPO): choose group w/ low variance

inference optimization

KV cache
LM-infinite: $Λ$ -shaped + capped attention for “infinite” context window
- attention instability beyond training context length
speculative decoding: guess many upcoming tokens w/ smaller mode, check in parallel in large model

information retrieval (IR)

multi-shot
- eval over k shots: mean average precision (MAP)/ normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG)/ mean reciprocal rank (MRR, +1/rank for each hit)
limited ground truth ⇒ false negatives
- human review of ground truth
- user behavior telemetry
token matching: surprisingly good
- need tokenization to account for word morphology
TF-IDF/ BM25 (best match)
cross-encoder: concatenate query & doc, classify
bi-encoder: encode query & doc separately, find similarity, e.g. Faiss
late-state interaction (e.g. ColBERT): bi-encoder except per query token
hard negative training (difficult, e.g. from weaker model)

Steven Hé (Sīchàng)

Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Jacob Eisenstein, The MIT Press, 2018

GLU Variants Improve Transformer, Noam Shazeer, arXiv, 2020

GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints, Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebrón, Sumit Sanghai, EMNLP, 2023

Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques, Bo Pang, Lillian Lee, Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, EMNLP, 2002