GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Statistical Deficiency for Task Inclusion Estimation
Authors: Loïc Fosse; Frederic Bechet; Benoit Favre; Géraldine Damnati; Gwénolé Lecorvé; Maxime Darrin; Philippe Formont; Pablo Piantanida
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Tasks are central in machine learning, as they are the most natural objects to assess the capabilities of current models. The trend is to build general models able to address any task. Even though transfer learning and multitask learning try to leverage the underlying task space, no well-founded tools are available to study its structure. This study proposes a theoretically grounded setup to define the notion of task and to compute the inclusion between two tasks from a statistical deficiency point of view. We propose a tractable proxy as information sufficiency to estimate the degree of inclusion between tasks, show its soundness on synthetic data, and use it to reconstruct empirically the classic NLP pipeline.
Towards Robust and Efficient Federated Low-Rank Adaptation with Heterogeneous Clients
Authors: Jabin Koo; Minwoo Jang; Jungseul Ok
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Federated fine-tuning for Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently gained attention due to the heavy communication overhead of transmitting large model updates. Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has been proposed as a solution, yet its application in federated learning is complicated by discordance in aggregation. Existing methods addressing this discordance often suffer from performance degradation at low ranks in heterogeneous data settings. In response, we introduce LoRA-A^2 (Low Rank Adaptation with Alternating freeze and Adaptive rank selection), which demonstrates robustness in challenging settings with low ranks and high data heterogeneity. Our experimental findings reveal that LoRA-A^2 maintains performance even under extreme heterogeneity and low rank conditions, achieving up to a 99.8% reduction in uploaded parameters compared to full fine-tuning without compromising performance. This adaptive mechanism boosts robustness and communication efficiency in federated fine-tuning, enabling the practical deployment of LLMs in resource-constrained environments.
LLM-Powered Test Case Generation for Detecting Bugs in Plausible Programs
Authors: Kaibo Liu; Zhenpeng Chen; Yiyang Liu; Jie M. Zhang; Mark Harman; Yudong Han; Yun Ma; Yihong Dong; Ge Li; Gang Huang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Detecting tricky bugs in plausible programs, those that pass existing test suites yet still contain bugs, remains a significant challenge in software testing. To address this problem, we propose TrickCatcher, an LLM-powered approach to generating test cases for uncovering bugs in plausible programs. TrickCatcher operates in three stages: First, it uses an LLM to generate program variants based on the program under test (PUT) and its specification. Second, it employs an LLM to construct an input generator from the specification for producing test inputs. Finally, these inputs are executed on both the PUT and its program variants to detect inconsistencies in their outputs. We evaluate TrickCatcher on two datasets, TrickyBugs and EvalPlus, which include 366 human-written and 151 AI-generated plausible programs with tricky bugs. TrickCatcher achieves recall, precision, and F1 scores that are 1.80×, 2.65×, and 1.66× those of the state-of-the-art baselines, respectively. Code and data used are available at https://github.com/RinCloud/TrickCatcher/.
Capture the Key in Reasoning to Enhance CoT Distillation Generalization
Authors: Chengwei Dai; Kun Li; Wei Zhou; Songlin Hu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up and gain powerful Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning abilities, practical resource constraints drive efforts to distill these capabilities into more compact Smaller Language Models (SLMs). We find that CoTs consist mainly of simple reasoning forms, with a small proportion (4.7%) of key reasoning steps that truly impact conclusions. However, previous distillation methods typically involve supervised fine-tuning student SLMs only on correct CoTs data produced by teacher LLMs, resulting in students struggling to learn the key, instead imitating the teacher’s reasoning forms and making errors or omissions in reasoning. To address these issues, drawing an analogy to human learning, where analyzing mistakes according to correct solutions often reveals the crucial steps leading to successes or failures, we propose mistakE-Driven key reasonIng step distillaTion (EDIT), a novel method that further aids SLMs learning key reasoning steps rather than mere simple fine-tuning. Firstly, to expose the crucial steps in CoTs, we carefully design specific prompts to generate dual CoTs data with similar reasoning paths but divergent conclusions. Then, we apply the minimum edit distance algorithm on the dual CoTs data to locate these key steps and optimize the likelihood on these tokens. Extensive experiments and analysis validate the effectiveness of EDIT across both in-domain(IND) and out-of-domain(OOD) benchmark reasoning datasets.
How to Enable Effective Cooperation Between Humans and NLP Models: A Survey of Principles, Formalizations, and Beyond
Authors: Chen Huang; Yang Deng; Wenqiang Lei; Jiancheng Lv; Tat-Seng Chua; Jimmy Xiangji Huang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), intelligent models have evolved from mere tools to autonomous agents with their own goals and strategies for cooperating with humans. This evolution has birthed a novel paradigm in NLP, i.e., human-model cooperation, that has yielded remarkable progress in numerous NLP tasks in recent years. In this paper, we take the first step to present a thorough review of human-model cooperation, exploring its principles, formalizations, and open challenges. In particular, we introduce a new taxonomy that provides a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches. Also, we discuss potential frontier areas and their corresponding challenges. We regard our work as an entry point, paving the way for more breakthrough research in this regard.
Enhancing Hyperbole and Metaphor Detection with Their Bidirectional Dynamic Interaction and Emotion Knowledge
Authors: Li Zheng; Sihang Wang; Hao Fei; Zuquan Peng; Fei Li; Jianming Fu; Chong Teng; Donghong Ji
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Text-based hyperbole and metaphor detection are of great significance for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, due to their semantic obscurity and expressive diversity, it is rather challenging to identify them. Existing methods mostly focus on superficial text features, ignoring the associations of hyperbole and metaphor as well as the effect of implicit emotion on perceiving these rhetorical devices. To implement these hypotheses, we propose an emotion-guided hyperbole and metaphor detection framework based on bidirectional dynamic interaction (EmoBi). Firstly, the emotion analysis module deeply mines the emotion connotations behind hyperbole and metaphor. Next, the emotion-based domain mapping module identifies the target and source domains to gain a deeper understanding of the implicit meanings of hyperbole and metaphor. Finally, the bidirectional dynamic interaction module enables the mutual promotion between hyperbole and metaphor. Meanwhile, a verification mechanism is designed to ensure detection accuracy and reliability. Experiments show that EmoBi outperforms all baseline methods on four datasets. Specifically, compared to the current SoTA, the F1 score increased by 28.1% for hyperbole detection on the TroFi dataset and 23.1% for metaphor detection on the HYPO-L dataset. These results, underpinned by in-depth analyses, underscore the effectiveness and potential of our approach for advancing hyperbole and metaphor detection.
UniICL: An Efficient ICL Framework Unifying Compression, Selection, and Generation
Authors: Jun Gao; Qi Lv; Zili Wang; Tianxiang Wu; Ziqiang Cao; Wenjie Li
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) enhances the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by prepending a few demonstrations. It motivates researchers to introduce more examples to provide additional contextual information for the generation. However, existing methods show a significant limitation due to the problem of excessive growth in context length which causes a large hardware burden. Additionally, shallow-relevant examples selected by out-off-shelf tools hinder LLMs from capturing useful contextual information for generation. In this paper, to approach these limitations, we propose UniICL, a novel Unified ICL framework that unifies demonstration compression, demonstration selection, and final response generation. Furthermore, to avoid repeated compression of the same demonstration and boost inference efficiency, we design a tailored compression strategy that allows UniICL caching compression results into Demonstration Bank(DB). Extensive out-of-domain evaluations prove the advantages of UniICL in both effectiveness and efficiency.
BelarusianGLUE: Towards a Natural Language Understanding Benchmark for Belarusian
Authors: Maksim Aparovich; Volha Harytskaya; Vladislav Poritski; Oksana Volchek; Pavel Smrz
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: In the epoch of multilingual large language models (LLMs), it is still challenging to evaluate the models’ understanding of lower-resourced languages, which motivates further development of expert-crafted natural language understanding benchmarks. We introduce BelarusianGLUE — a natural language understanding benchmark for Belarusian, an East Slavic language, with ≈15K instances in five tasks: sentiment analysis, linguistic acceptability, word in context, Winograd schema challenge, textual entailment. A systematic evaluation of BERT models and LLMs against this novel benchmark reveals that both types of models approach human-level performance on easier tasks, such as sentiment analysis, but there is a significant gap in performance between machine and human on a harder task — Winograd schema challenge. We find the optimal choice of model type to be task-specific: e.g. BERT models underperform on textual entailment task but are competitive for linguistic acceptability. We release the datasets (https://hf.co/datasets/maaxap/BelarusianGLUE) and evaluation code (https://github.com/maaxap/BelarusianGLUE).
A Survey on Foundation Language Models for Single-cell Biology
Authors: Fan Zhang; Hao Chen; Zhihong Zhu; Ziheng Zhang; Zhenxi Lin; Ziyue Qiao; Yefeng Zheng; Xian Wu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The recent advancements in language models have significantly catalyzed progress in computational biology. A growing body of research strives to construct unified foundation models for single-cell biology, with language models serving as the cornerstone. In this paper, we systematically review the developments in foundation language models designed specifically for single-cell biology. Our survey offers a thorough analysis of various incarnations of single-cell foundation language models, viewed through the lens of both pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs). This includes an exploration of data tokenization strategies, pre-training/tuning paradigms, and downstream single-cell data analysis tasks. Additionally, we discuss the current challenges faced by these pioneering works and speculate on future research directions. Overall, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the existing single-cell foundation language models, paving the way for future research endeavors.
RuleArena: A Benchmark for Rule-Guided Reasoning with LLMs in Real-World Scenarios
Authors: Ruiwen Zhou; Wenyue Hua; Liangming Pan; Sitao Cheng; Xiaobao Wu; En Yu; William Yang Wang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: This paper introduces RuleArena, a novel and challenging benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex, real-world rules in reasoning. Covering three practical domains – airline baggage fees, NBA transactions, and tax regulations – RuleArena assesses LLMs’ proficiency in handling intricate natural language instructions that demand long-context understanding, logical reasoning, and accurate mathematical computation. Two key attributes distinguish RuleArena from traditional rule-based reasoning benchmarks: (1) it extends beyond standard first-order logic representations, and (2) it is grounded in authentic, practical scenarios, providing insights into the suitability and reliability of LLMs for real-world applications. Our findings reveal several notable limitations in LLMs: (1) they struggle to identify and apply the appropriate rules, frequently becoming confused by similar but distinct regulations, (2) they cannot consistently perform accurate mathematical computations, even when they correctly identify the relevant rules, and (3) in general, they perform poorly in the benchmark. We also observe a significant performance boost when LLMs are provided with external tools for oracle math and logic operations. These results highlight significant challenges and promising research directions in advancing LLMs’ rule-guided reasoning capabilities in real-life applications. Our codes and data are publicly available on https://github.com/skyriver-2000/rulearena.
Extending LLM Context Window with Adaptive Grouped Positional Encoding: A Training-Free Method
Authors: Xinhao Xu; Jiaxin Li; Hui Chen; Zijia Lin; Jungong Han; Guiguang Ding
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Processing long input remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the scarcity of large-scale long-context training data and the high computational cost of training models for extended context windows. In this paper, we propose **Ada**ptive **Gro**uped **P**ositional **E**ncoding (AdaGroPE), a training-free, plug-and-play method to enhance long-context understanding in existing LLMs. AdaGroPE progressively increases the reuse count of relative positions as the distance grows and dynamically adapts the positional encoding mapping to sequence length, thereby fully exploiting the range of pre-trained position embeddings. Its design is consistent with the principles of rotary position embedding (RoPE) and aligns with human perception of relative distance, enabling robust performance in real-world settings with variable-length inputs. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that our AdaGroPE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing baseline methods and even outperforming LLMs inherently designed for long-context processing on certain tasks.
Semantic Exploration with Adaptive Gating for Efficient Problem Solving with Language Models
Authors: Sungjae Lee; Hyejin Park; Jaechang Kim; Jungseul Ok
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in various complex tasks requiring multi-step reasoning methods like tree search to explore diverse reasoning paths. However, existing methods often suffer from computational inefficiency and redundancy. First, they overlook the diversity of task difficulties, leading to unnecessarily extensive searches even for easy tasks. Second, they neglect the semantics of reasoning paths, resulting in redundant exploration of semantically identical paths. To address these limitations, we propose Semantic Exploration with Adaptive Gating (SEAG), a computationally efficient method. SEAG employs an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically decides whether to conduct a tree search, based on the confidence level of answers from a preceding simple reasoning method. Furthermore, its tree-based exploration consolidates semantically identical reasoning steps, reducing redundant explorations while maintaining or even improving accuracy. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SEAG significantly improves accuracy by 4.3% on average while requiring only 31% of computational costs compared to existing tree search-based methods on complex reasoning benchmarks including GSM8K and ARC with diverse language models such as Llama2, Llama3, and Mistral. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-postech/SEAG-semantic-exploration-with-adaptive-gating.
HotelMatch-LLM: Joint Multi-Task Training of Small and Large Language Models for Efficient Multimodal Hotel Retrieval
Authors: Arian Askari; Emmanouil Stergiadis; Ilya Gusev; Moran Beladev
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: We present HotelMatch-LLM, a multimodal dense retrieval model for the travel domain that enables natural language property search, addressing the limitations of traditional travel search engines which require users to start with a destination and editing search parameters. HotelMatch-LLM features three key innovations: (1) Domain-specific multi-task optimization with three novel retrieval, visual, and language modeling objectives; (2) Asymmetrical dense retrieval architecture combining a small language model (SLM) for efficient online query processing and a large language model (LLM) for embedding hotel data; and (3) Extensive image processing to handle all property image galleries. Experiments on four diverse test sets show HotelMatch-LLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, including VISTA and MARVEL. Specifically, on the test set—main query type—we achieve 0.681 for HotelMatch-LLM compared to 0.603 for the most effective baseline, MARVEL. Our analysis highlights the impact of our multi-task optimization, the generalizability of HotelMatch-LLM across LLM architectures, and its scalability for processing large image galleries.
Can Multimodal Large Language Models Understand Spatial Relations?
Authors: Jingping Liu; Ziyan Liu; Zhedong Cen; Yan Zhou; Yinan Zou; Weiyan Zhang; Haiyun Jiang; Tong Ruan
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Spatial relation reasoning is a crucial task for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand the objective world. However, current benchmarks have issues like relying on bounding boxes, ignoring perspective substitutions, or allowing questions to be answered using only the model’s prior knowledge without image understanding. To address these issues, we introduce SpatialMQA, a human-annotated spatial relation reasoning benchmark based on COCO2017, which enables MLLMs to focus more on understanding images in the objective world. To ensure data quality, we design a well-tailored annotation procedure, resulting in SpatialMQA consisting of 5,392 samples. Based on this benchmark, a series of closed- and open-source MLLMs are implemented and the results indicate that the current state-of-the-art MLLM achieves only 48.14% accuracy, far below the human-level accuracy of 98.40%. Extensive experimental analyses are also conducted, suggesting the future research directions. The benchmark and codes are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/liuziyan/SpatialMQA.
S3 - Semantic Signal Separation
Authors: Márton Kardos; Jan Kostkan; Kenneth Enevoldsen; Arnault-Quentin Vermillet; Kristoffer Nielbo; Roberta Rocca
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Topic models are useful tools for discovering latent semantic structures in large textual corpora. Recent efforts have been oriented at incorporating contextual representations in topic modeling and have been shown to outperform classical topic models. These approaches are typically slow, volatile, and require heavy preprocessing for optimal results. We present Semantic Signal Separation (S3), a theory-driven topic modeling approach in neural embedding spaces. S3 conceptualizes topics as independent axes of semantic space and uncovers these by decomposing contextualized document embeddings using Independent Component Analysis. Our approach provides diverse and highly coherent topics, requires no preprocessing, and is demonstrated to be the fastest contextual topic model, being, on average, 4.5x faster than the runner-up BERTopic. We offer an implementation of S3, and all contextual baselines, in the Turftopic Python package.
TrimLLM: Progressive Layer Dropping for Domain-Specific LLMs
Authors: Lanxiang Hu; Tajana Rosing; Hao Zhang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Specializing large language models (LLMs) for local deployment in domain-specific use cases is necessary for strong performance while meeting latency and privacy constraints. However, conventional task-specific adaptation approaches do not show simultaneous memory saving and inference speedup at deployment time. Practical compression techniques like quantization and pruning require dedicated hardware or kernel support to achieve measured inference speedup. We develop TrimLLM based on the layer-wise specialization phenomenon we empirically observed and verified on contemporary LLMs. TrimLLM reduces the depth of LLMs via progressive layer dropping. We show it retains LLMs’ capacity in specific domains and achieves inference speedup irrespective of hardware and deep learning frameworks. We evaluated TrimLLM on LLMs of various sizes for inference; models adapted on medical, legal, and financial datasets all demonstrate 2.1 - 5.7× inference speedup on consumer GPUs and up to 3.1× speedup on A100 when compared to state-of-the-art model compression algorithms, with no loss in accuracy at 50∼ 60% model compression ratio.