GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
REVS: Unlearning Sensitive Information in Language Models via Rank Editing in the Vocabulary Space
Authors: Tomer Ashuach; Martin Tutek; Yonatan Belinkov
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Language models (LMs) risk inadvertently memorizing and divulging sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII) seen in training data, causing privacy concerns. Current approaches to address this issue involve costly dataset scrubbing, or model filtering through unlearning and model editing, which can be bypassed through extraction attacks. We propose REVS, a novel non-gradient-based method for unlearning sensitive information from LMs. REVS identifies and modifies a small subset of neurons relevant for constituent tokens which form sensitive information. To adequately evaluate our method on truly sensitive information, we curate three datasets: an email and URL datasets naturally memorized by the models, and a synthetic social security number dataset that we tune the models to memorize. Compared to other methods, REVS demonstrates superior performance in unlearning sensitive information and robustness to extraction attacks, while retaining underlying model integrity.
Is External Information Useful for Stance Detection with LLMs?
Authors: Quang Minh Nguyen; Taegyoon Kim
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: In the stance detection task, a text is classified as either favorable, opposing, or neutral towards a target. Prior work suggests that the use of external information, e.g., excerpts from Wikipedia, improves stance detection performance. However, whether or not such information can benefit large language models (LLMs) remains an unanswered question, despite their wide adoption in many reasoning tasks. In this study, we conduct a systematic evaluation on how Wikipedia and web search external information can affect stance detection across eight LLMs and in three datasets with 12 targets. Surprisingly, we find that such information degrades performance in most cases, with macro F1 scores dropping by up to 27.9%. We explain this through experiments showing LLMs’ tendency to align their predictions with the stance and sentiment of the provided information rather than the ground truth stance of the given text. We also find that performance degradation persists with chain-of-thought prompting, while fine-tuning mitigates but does not fully eliminate it. Our findings, in contrast to previous literature on BERT-based systems which suggests that external information enhances performance, highlight the risks of information biases in LLM-based stance classifiers.
Benchmarking Query-Conditioned Natural Language Inference
Authors: Marc E. Canby; Xinchi Chen; Xing Niu; Jifan Chen; Bonan Min; Sergul Aydore; Vittorio Castelli
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: The growing excitement around the ability of large language models (LLMs) to tackle various tasks has been tempered by their propensity for generating unsubstantiated information (hallucination) and by their inability to effectively handle inconsistent inputs. To detect such issues, we propose the novel task of Query-Conditioned Natural Language Inference (QC-NLI), where the goal is to determine the semantic relationship (e.g. entailment or not entailment) between two documents conditioned on a query; we demonstrate that many common tasks regarding inconsistency detection can be formulated as QC-NLI problems. We focus on three applications in particular: fact verification, intrinsic hallucination detection, and document inconsistency detection. We convert existing datasets for these tasks into the QC-NLI format, and manual annotation confirms their high quality. Finally, we employ zero- and few-shot prompting methods to solve the QC-NLI prediction problem for each task, showing the critical importance of conditioning on the query.
Flowchart-Based Decision Making with Large Language Models
Authors: Yuuki Yamanaka; Hiroshi Takahashi; Tomoya Yamashita
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for conversational systems, but they face significant challenges in interpretability of dialogue flow and reproducibility of expert knowledge. To address this, we propose a novel method that extracts flowcharts from dialogue data and incorporates them into LLMs. This approach not only makes the decision-making process more interpretable through visual representation, but also ensures the reproducibility of expert knowledge by explicitly modeling structured reasoning flows. By evaluating on dialogue datasets, we demonstrate that our method effectively reconstructs expert decision-making paths with high precision and recall scores. These findings underscore the potential of flowchart-based decision making to bridge the gap between flexibility and structured reasoning, making chatbot systems more interpretable for developers and end-users.
NarGINA: Towards Accurate and Interpretable Children’s Narrative Ability Assessment via Narrative Graphs
Authors: Jun Zhong; Longwei Xu; Li Kong; Xianzhuo Li; Dandan Liang; Junsheng Zhou
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: The assessment of children’s narrative ability is crucial for diagnosing language disorders and planning interventions. Distinct from the typical automated essay scoring, this task focuses primarily on evaluating the completeness of narrative content and the coherence of expression, as well as the interpretability of assessment results. To address these issues, we propose a novel computational assessing framework NarGINA, under which the narrative graph is introduced to provide a concise and structured summary representation of narrative text, allowing for explicit narrative measurement. To this end, we construct the first Chinese children’s narrative assessment corpus based on real children’s narrative samples, and we then design a narrative graph construction model and a narrative graph-assisted scoring model to yield accurate narrative ability assessment. Particularly, to enable the scoring model to understand narrative graphs, we propose a multi-view graph contrastive learning strategy to pre-train the graph encoder and apply instruction-tuned large language models to generate scores. The extensive experimental results show that NarGINA can achieve significant performance improvement over the baselines, simultaneously possessing good interpretability. Our findings reveal that the utilization of structured narrative graphs beyond flat text is well suited for narrative ability assessment. The model and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JlexZzz/NarGINA.
Improving Efficiency in Large Language Models via Extendable Block Floating Point Representation
Authors: Dongyang Li; Zeyang Li; Bosheng Liu; Jigang Wu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their increasing size poses substantial challenges in terms of computational and memory resources. Block floating-point (BFP) arithmetic offers an effective solution by leveraging the strengths of both floating-point and fixed-point representations, leading to reductions in both storage and computational overhead. However, current low-bit BFP quantization approaches often struggle to handle extreme outliers, leading to significant accuracy degradation. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Extendable Exponent Sharing (EES), a novel BFP representation that extends the exponent bit width to capture a wider dynamic range. EES achieves this by embedding extendable exponent bits into the least significant mantissa bits, thereby increasing the shared exponent’s bit width without incurring additional storage costs. To optimize the trade-off between accuracy and energy efficiency, EES employs a design space exploration strategy to optimize the configuration of extendable exponent bit widths. Experimental results show that EES outperforms representative baselines in both accuracy and computational efficiency.
EpiCoDe: Boosting Model Performance Beyond Training with Extrapolation and Contrastive Decoding
Authors: Mingxu Tao; Jie Hu; Mingchuan Yang; Yunhuai Liu; Dongyan Zhao; Yansong Feng
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: The remarkable performance of Large language models (LLMs) relies heavily on the availability of abundant high-quality training data. However, the high cost of acquiring annotated data often prevents models from obtaining capabilities to tackle downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, EpiCoDe that boosts model performance in data-scarcity scenarios without extra training. We first employ model extrapolation to enhance a finetuned model with its inferior version, and then adopt contrastive decoding to further reduce predicted errors, by comparing the logit scores given by the extrapolated and the vanilla finetuned model. Experiments across three domains over four different LLMs show that EpiCoDe consistently outperforms existing methods with significant and robust improvement. We also propose a new theoretical framework to reveal the mechanism behind contrastive decoding in data-scarcity scenarios, which further helps better understand the effectiveness of our EpiCoDe.
NativQA: Multilingual Culturally-Aligned Natural Query for LLMs
Authors: Md. Arid Hasan; Maram Hasanain; Fatema Ahmad; Sahinur Rahman Laskar; Sunaya Upadhyay; Vrunda N Sukhadia; Mucahid Kutlu; Shammur Absar Chowdhury; Firoj Alam
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Natural Question Answering (QA) datasets play a crucial role in evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), ensuring their effectiveness in real-world applications. Despite the numerous QA datasets that have been developed and some work done in parallel, there is a notable lack of a framework and large-scale region-specific datasets queried by native users in their own languages. This gap hinders effective benchmarking and the development of fine-tuned models for regional and cultural specificities. In this study, we propose a scalable, language-independent framework, NativQA, to seamlessly construct culturally and regionally aligned QA datasets in native languages for LLM evaluation and tuning. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework by designing a multilingual natural QA dataset, MultiNativQA, consisting of approximately ~64K manually annotated QA pairs in seven languages, ranging from high- to extremely low-resource, based on queries from native speakers from 9 regions covering 18 topics. We benchmark both open- and closed-source LLMs using the MultiNativQA dataset. The dataset and related experimental scripts are publicly available for the community at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/MultiNativQAand https://gitlab.com/nativqa/multinativqa.
DoCIA: An Online Document-Level Context Incorporation Agent for Speech Translation
Authors: Xinglin Lyu; Wei Tang; Yuang Li; Xiaofeng Zhao; Ming Zhu; Junhui Li; Yunfei Lu; Min Zhang; Daimeng Wei; Hao Yang; Min Zhang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Document-level context is crucial for handling discourse challenges in text-to-text document-level machine translation (MT). Despite the increased discourse challenges introduced by noise from automatic speech recognition (ASR), the integration of document-level context in speech translation (ST) remains insufficiently explored. In this paper, we develop DoCIA, an online framework that enhances ST performance by incorporating document-level context. DoCIA decomposes the ST pipeline into four stages. Document-level context is integrated into the ASR refinement, MT, and MT refinement stages through auxiliary LLM (large language model)-based modules. Furthermore, DoCIA leverages document-level information in a multi-level manner while minimizing computational overhead. Additionally, a simple yet effective determination mechanism is introduced to prevent hallucinations from excessive refinement, ensuring the reliability of the final results. Experimental results show that DoCIA significantly outperforms traditional ST baselines in both sentence and discourse metrics across four LLMs, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving ST performance.
RISE: Reasoning Enhancement via Iterative Self-Exploration in Multi-hop Question Answering
Authors: Bolei He; Xinran He; Mengke Chen; Xianwei Xue; Ying Zhu; Zhen-Hua Ling
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in many areas but continue to face challenges with complex reasoning tasks, such as Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA). MHQA requires integrating evidence from diverse sources while managing intricate logical dependencies, often leads to errors in reasoning. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), widely employed in MHQA tasks, faces challenges in effectively filtering noisy data and retrieving all necessary evidence, thereby limiting its effectiveness in addressing MHQA challenges. To address these challenges, we propose RISE:Reasoning Enhancement via Iterative Self-Exploration, a novel framework designed to enhance models’ reasoning capability through iterative self-exploration. Specifically, RISE involves three key steps in addressing MHQA tasks: question decomposition, retrieve-then-read, and self-critique. By leveraging continuous self-exploration, RISE identifies accurate reasoning paths, iteratively self-improving the model’s capability to integrate evidence, maintain logical consistency, and enhance performance in MHQA tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple MHQA benchmarks demonstrate that RISE significantly improves reasoning accuracy and task performance.
VADE: Visual Attention Guided Hallucination Detection and Elimination
Authors: Vishnu Prabhakaran; Purav Aggarwal; Vinay Kumar Verma; Gokul Swamy; Anoop Saladi
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant advancements in complex visual understanding tasks. However, VLMs are prone to hallucinations—generating outputs that lack alignment with visual content. This paper addresses hallucination detection in VLMs by leveraging the visual grounding information encoded in transformer attention maps. We identify three primary challenges in this approach: the elective nature of visual grounding for certain tokens, the high-dimensional and noisy nature of attention maps, and the dynamic sequence length of attention on previous tokens. To address these, we propose VADE, a novel sequence modelling approach to effectively learn complex sequential patterns from high-dimensional and noisy attention maps for fine-grained hallucination detection and mitigation. VADE achieves an average PR-AUC of 80% in hallucination detection on M-HalDetect across four different model architectures and an 5% improvement in hallucination mitigation on MSCOCO.
PGPO: Enhancing Agent Reasoning via Pseudocode-style Planning Guided Preference Optimization
Authors: Zouying Cao; Runze Wang; Yifei Yang; Xinbei Ma; Xiaoyong Zhu; Bo Zheng; Hai Zhao
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in handling complex interactive problems. Existing LLM agents mainly generate natural language plans to guide reasoning, which is verbose and inefficient. NL plans are also tailored to specific tasks and restrict agents’ ability to generalize across similar tasks. To this end, we explore pseudocode-style plans (P-code Plan) to capture the structural logic of reasoning. We find that P-code Plan empowers LLM agents with stronger generalization ability and more efficiency. Inspired by this finding, we propose a pseudocode-style  ̲Planning  ̲Guided  ̲Preference  ̲Optimization method called PGPO for effective agent learning. With two planning-oriented rewards, PGPO further enhances LLM agents’ ability to generate high-quality P-code Plans and subsequent reasoning. Experiments show that PGPO achieves superior performance on representative agent benchmarks and outperforms the current leading baselines. Analyses reveal the advantage of PGPO in reducing action errors and omissions during reasoning.
The Effectiveness of Uncased Tokeniziaion for Clinical Notes
Authors: Cory Paik; Katharina Von Der Wense
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: The impact of case-sensitive tokenization on clinical notes is not well understood. While clinical notes share similarities with biomedical text in terminology, they often lack the proper casing found in polished publications. Language models, unlike humans, require a fixed vocabulary and case sensitivity is a trade-off that must be considered carefully. Improper casing can lead to sub-optimal tokenization and increased sequence length, degrading downstream performance and increasing computational costs. While most recent open-domain encoder language models use uncased tokenization for all tasks, there is no clear trend in biomedical and clinical models. In this work we (1) show that uncased models exceed the performance of cased models on clinical notes, even on traditionally case-sensitive tasks such as named entity recognition and (2) introduce independent case encoding to better balance model performance on case-sensitive and improperly-cased tasks.
AMXFP4: Taming Activation Outliers with Asymmetric Microscaling Floating-Point for 4-bit LLM Inference
Authors: Janghwan Lee; Jiwoong Park; Jinseok Kim; Yongjik Kim; Jungju Oh; Jinwook Oh; Jungwook Choi
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) grow in parameter size and context length, computation precision has been reduced from 16-bit to 4-bit to improve inference efficiency. However, this reduction causes accuracy degradation due to activation outliers. Rotation-based INT4 methods address this via matrix calibration, but they introduce multi-hour overheads and leave key computations in full precision. Microscaling (MX) floating-point (FP) formats offer fine-grained representation with a shared scale, enabling fully quantized matrix multiplications through direct casting without calibration. However, existing research shows unsatisfactory empirical results for MXFP4 inference, and the robustness of MX formats remains largely unexplored. In this work, we uncover the fundamental tradeoffs of the MX format: while it effectively suppresses activation outliers, it does so at the cost of increased group-wise asymmetry. To address this, we propose AMXFP4, a 4-bit asymmetric FP format that handles both issues using asymmetric shared scales, without requiring calibration. Our custom MAC engine adds negligible hardware cost while improving accuracy: AMXFP4 outperforms MXFP4 by 3% on VQA and exceeds rotation-based methods by 1.6% on CSQA. It also surpasses recently deployed commercial MXFP4 variants. Code: https://github.com/aiha-lab/MX-QLLM
Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing
Authors: Ruicheng Yin; Xuan Gao; Changze Lv; Xiaohua Wang; Xiaoqing Zheng; Xuanjing Huang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Continual pre-training has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing model performance, particularly in domain-specific scenarios. The most common approach for packing data before continual pre-training involves concatenating input texts and splitting them into fixed-length sequences. While straightforward and efficient, this method often leads to excessive truncation and context discontinuity, which can hinder model performance. To address these issues, we explore the potential of data engineering to enhance continual pre-training, particularly its impact on model performance and efficiency. We propose Seamless Packing (SP), a novel data packing strategy aimed at preserving contextual information and enhancing model performance. Our approach employs a sliding window technique in the first stage that synchronizes overlapping tokens across consecutive sequences, ensuring better continuity and contextual coherence. In the second stage, we adopt a First-Fit-Decreasing algorithm to pack shorter texts into bins slightly larger than the target sequence length, thereby minimizing padding and truncation. Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming baselines in 99% of all settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Infernus-WIND/Seamless-Packing.
The Impact of Name Age Perception on Job Recommendations in LLMs
Authors: Mahammed Kamruzzaman; Gene Louis Kim
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Names often carry generational connotations, with certain names stereotypically associated with younger or older age groups. This study examines implicit age-related name bias in LLMs used for job recommendations. Analyzing six LLMs and 117 American names categorized by perceived age across 30 occupations, we find systematic bias: older-sounding names are favored for senior roles, while younger-sounding names are linked to youth-dominant jobs, reinforcing generational stereotypes. We also find that this bias is based on perceived rather than real ages associated with the names.
DAPI: Domain Adaptive Toxicity Probe Vector Intervention, for Fine-Grained Detoxification
Authors: Cho Hyeonsu; Dooyoung Kim; Youngjoong Ko
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: There have been attempts to utilize linear probe for detoxification, with existing studies relying on a single toxicity probe vector to reduce toxicity. However, toxicity can be fine-grained into various subcategories, making it difficult to remove certain types of toxicity by using a single toxicity probe vector. To address this limitation, we propose a category-specific toxicity probe vector approach. First, we train multiple toxicity probe vectors for different toxicity categories. During generation, we dynamically select the most relevant toxicity probe vector based on the current context. Finally, the selected vector is dynamically scaled and subtracted from model. Our method successfully mitigated toxicity from categories that the single probe vector approach failed to detoxify. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves up to a 78.52% reduction in toxicity on the evaluation dataset, while fluency remains nearly unchanged, with only a 0.052% drop compared to the unsteered model.