GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
MMLU-CF: A Contamination-free Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark
Authors: Qihao Zhao; Yangyu Huang; Tengchao Lv; Lei Cui; Qinzheng Sun; Shaoguang Mao; Xin Zhang; Ying Xin; Qiufeng Yin; Scarlett Li; Furu Wei
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Multiple-choice question (MCQ) datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) are widely used to evaluate the commonsense, understanding, and problem-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the open-source nature of these benchmarks and the broad sources of training data for LLMs have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation. To alleviate this issue, we propose the contamination-free MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF, which reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. To mitigate unintentional data contamination, we source questions from a broader domain of over 200 billion webpages and apply three specifically designed decontamination rules. To prevent malicious data contamination, we divide the benchmark into validation and test sets with similar difficulty and subject distributions. The test set remains closed-source to ensure reliable results, while the validation set is publicly available to promote transparency and facilitate independent evaluation. The performance gap between these two sets of LLMs will indicate the contamination degree on the validation set in the future. We evaluated over 40 mainstream LLMs on the MMLU-CF. Compared to the original MMLU, not only LLMs’ performances significantly dropped but also the performance rankings of them changed considerably. This indicates the effectiveness of our approach in establishing a contamination-free and fairer evaluation standard.
Code-Switching Red-Teaming: LLM Evaluation for Safety and Multilingual Understanding
Authors: Haneul Yoo; Yongjin Yang; Hwaran Lee
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) have advanced rapidly, concerns regarding their safety have become prominent. In this paper, we discover that code-switching in red-teaming queries can effectively elicit undesirable behaviors of LLMs, which are common practices in natural language. We introduce a simple yet effective framework, CSRT, to synthesize code-switching red-teaming queries and investigate the safety and multilingual understanding of LLMs comprehensively. Through extensive experiments with ten state-of-the-art LLMs and code-switching queries combining up to 10 languages, we demonstrate that the CSRT significantly outperforms existing multilingual red-teaming techniques, achieving 46.7% more attacks than standard attacks in English and being effective in conventional safety domains. We also examine the multilingual ability of those LLMs to generate and understand code-switching texts. Additionally, we validate the extensibility of the CSRT by generating code-switching attack prompts with monolingual data. We finally conduct detailed ablation studies exploring code-switching and propound unintended correlation between resource availability of languages and safety alignment in existing multilingual LLMs.
Unleashing LLM Reasoning Capability via Scalable Question Synthesis from Scratch
Authors: Yuyang Ding; Xinyu Shi; Xiaobo Liang; Juntao Li; Zhaopeng Tu; Qiaoming Zhu; Min Zhang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Improving the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for advancing artificial intelligence. However, access to extensive, diverse, and high-quality reasoning datasets remains a significant challenge, particularly for the open-source community. In this paper, we propose ScaleQuest, a novel, scalable, and cost-effective data synthesis method that enables the generation of large-scale mathematical reasoning datasets using lightweight 7B-scale models. ScaleQuest introduces a two-stage question-tuning process comprising Question Fine-Tuning (QFT) and Question Preference Optimization (QPO) to unlock the question generation capabilities of problem-solving models. By generating diverse questions from scratch – without relying on powerful proprietary models or seed data – we produce a dataset of 1 million problem-solution pairs. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on our data outperform existing open-source datasets in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations. Furthermore, our approach shows continued performance improvement as the volume of training data increases, highlighting its potential for ongoing data scaling. The extensive improvements observed in code reasoning tasks demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our proposed method. Our work provides the open-source community with a practical solution to enhance the mathematical reasoning abilities of LLMs.
DREsS: Dataset for Rubric-based Essay Scoring on EFL Writing
Authors: Haneul Yoo; Jieun Han; So-Yeon Ahn; Alice Oh
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Automated essay scoring (AES) is a useful tool in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing education, offering real-time essay scores for students and instructors. However, previous AES models were trained on essays and scores irrelevant to the practical scenarios of EFL writing education and usually provided a single holistic score due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we release DREsS, a large-scale, standard dataset for rubric-based automated essay scoring with 48.9K samples in total. DREsS comprises three sub-datasets: DREsS_New, DREsS_Std., and DREsS_CASE. We collect DREsS_New, a real-classroom dataset with 2.3K essays authored by EFL undergraduate students and scored by English education experts. We also standardize existing rubric-based essay scoring datasets as DREsS_Std. We suggest CASE, a corruption-based augmentation strategy for essays, which generates 40.1K synthetic samples of DREsS_CASE and improves the baseline results by 45.44%. DREsS will enable further research to provide a more accurate and practical AES system for EFL writing education.
PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling
Authors: Junfeng Kang; Rui Li; Qi Liu; Yanjiang Chen; Zheng Zhang; Junzhe Jiang; Heng Yu; Yu Su
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Dense retrieval has now become the mainstream paradigm in information retrieval. The core idea of dense retrieval is to align document embeddings with their corresponding query embeddings by maximizing their dot product. The current training data is quite sparse, with each document typically associated with only one or a few labeled queries. However, a single document can be retrieved by multiple different queries. Aligning a document with just one or a limited number of labeled queries results in a loss of its semantic information. In this paper, we propose a training-free Potential Query Retrieval (PQR) framework to address this issue. Specifically, we use a Gaussian mixture distribution to model all potential queries for a document, aiming to capture its comprehensive semantic information. To obtain this distribution, we introduce three sampling strategies to sample a large number of potential queries for each document and encode them into a semantic space. Using these sampled queries, we employ the Expectation-Maximization algorithm to estimate parameters of the distribution. Finally, we also propose a method to calculate similarity scores between user queries and documents under the PQR framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Cross-Lingual Generalization and Compression: From Language-Specific to Shared Neurons
Authors: Frederick Riemenschneider; Anette Frank
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Multilingual language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities to transfer knowledge across languages, despite being trained without explicit cross-lingual supervision. We analyze the parameter spaces of three MLLMs to study how their representations evolve during pre-training, observing patterns consistent with compression: models initially form language-specific representations, which gradually converge into cross-lingual abstractions as training progresses. Through probing experiments, we observe a clear transition from uniform language identification capabilities across layers to more specialized layer functions. For deeper analysis, we focus on neurons that encode distinct semantic concepts. By tracing their development during pre-training, we show how they gradually align across languages. Notably, we identify specific neurons that emerge as increasingly reliable predictors for the same concepts across languages. This alignment manifests concretely in generation: once an MLLM exhibits cross-lingual generalization according to our measures, we can select concept-specific neurons identified from, e.g., Spanish text and manipulate them to guide token predictions. Remarkably, rather than generating Spanish text, the model produces semantically coherent English text. This demonstrates that cross-lingually aligned neurons encode generalized semantic representations, independent of the original language encoding.
SDBench: A Survey-based Domain-specific LLM Benchmarking and Optimization Framework
Authors: Cheng Guo; Hu Kai; Shuxian Liang; Yiyang Jiang; Yi Gao; Xian-Sheng Hua; Wei Dong
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) in recent years has made it feasible to establish domain-specific LLMs for specialized fields. However, in practical development, acquiring domain-specific knowledge often requires a significant amount of professional expert manpower. Moreover, even when domain-specific data is available, the lack of a unified methodology for benchmark dataset establishment often results in uneven data distribution. This imbalance can lead to an inaccurate assessment of the true model capabilities during the evaluation of domain-specific LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce **SDBench**, a generic framework for generating evaluation datasets for domain-specific LLMs. This method is also applicable for establishing the LLM instruction datasets. It significantly reduces the reliance on expert manpower while ensuring that the collected data is uniformly distributed. To validate the effectiveness of this framework, we also present the **BridgeBench**, a novel benchmark for bridge engineering knowledge, and the **BridgeGPT**, the first LLM specialized in bridge engineering, which can solve bridge engineering tasks.
ReflecTool: Towards Reflection-Aware Tool-Augmented Clinical Agents
Authors: Yusheng Liao; Shuyang Jiang; Yanfeng Wang; Yu Wang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising potential in the medical domain, assisting with tasks like clinical note generation and patient communication. However, current LLMs are limited to text-based communication, hindering their ability to interact with diverse forms of information in clinical environments. Despite clinical agents succeeding in diverse signal interaction, they are oriented to a single clinical scenario and hence fail for broader applications. To evaluate clinical agents holistically, we propose ClinicalAgent Bench (CAB), a comprehensive medical agent benchmark consisting of 18 tasks across five key realistic clinical dimensions. Building on this, we introduce ReflectTool, a novel framework that excels at utilizing domain-specific tools within two stages. The first optimization stage progressively enlarges a long-term memory by saving successful solving processes and tool-wise experience of agents in a tiny pre-defined training set. In the following inference stage, ReflectTool can search for supportive successful demonstrations from already built long-term memory to guide the tool selection strategy, and a verifier improves the tool usage according to the tool-wise experience with two verification methods–iterative refinement and candidate selection. Extensive experiments on CAB demonstrate that ReflectTool surpasses the pure LLMs with more than 10 points and the well-established agent-based methods with 3 points, highlighting its adaptability and effectiveness in solving complex clinical tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/BlueZeros/ReflecTool.
Lexical Recall or Logical Reasoning: Probing the Limits of Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models
Authors: Henrike Beyer; Chris Reed
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Despite the increasing interest in the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), existing work shows limitations in assessing logic abilities independently from lexical memory. We address this gap with Mystery-Zebra. This robust two-part benchmark (4,290 puzzles) challenges the logic abstraction abilities of LLMs in two setups: (1) a lexical obfuscation setup tests the dependence of LLMs on lexical content based on two canonical grid puzzles widely spread on the Internet; (2) a set of new grid puzzles in 42 different sizes and 12 difficulty levels tests how the formal difficulty degree of a puzzle affects LLMs.We test open and closed-weight LLMs on both parts of the benchmark. The results on part two suggest that model sizes up to 70B parameters have only a minor influence when solving newly generated puzzles, while performance mainly relates to the number of items in the puzzle. The results on the first part of the benchmark suggest that the applied obfuscation strategies help to mitigate effects of logic puzzles being part of LLM training data, showing a drastic drop in performance for obfuscated versions of well-known puzzles. In addition we conduct a case-study on the first part of the benchmark predicting the position of single items, unveiling that the reasoning abilities of LLMs are mainly limited to a few consecutive steps of reasoning.
ChainEdit: Propagating Ripple Effects in LLM Knowledge Editing through Logical Rule-Guided Chains
Authors: Zilu Dong; Xiangqing Shen; Zinong Yang; Rui Xia
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Current knowledge editing methods for large language models (LLMs) struggle to maintain logical consistency when propagating ripple effects to associated facts. We propose ChainEdit, a framework that synergizes knowledge graph-derived logical rules with LLM logical reasoning capabilities to enable systematic chain updates. By automatically extracting logical patterns from structured knowledge bases and aligning them with LLMs’ internal logics, ChainEdit dynamically generates and edits logically connected knowledge clusters. Experiments demonstrate an improvement of more than 30% in logical generalization over baselines while preserving editing reliability and specificity. We further address evaluation biases in existing benchmarks through knowledge-aware protocols that disentangle external dependencies. This work establishes new state-of-the-art performance on ripple effect while ensuring internal logical consistency after knowledge editing.
HiDe-LLaVA: Hierarchical Decoupling for Continual Instruction Tuning of Multimodal Large Language Model
Authors: Haiyang Guo; Fanhu Zeng; Ziwei Xiang; Fei Zhu; Da-Han Wang; Xu-Yao Zhang; Cheng-Lin Liu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Instruction tuning is widely used to enhance a pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to understand and follow human instructions by training it on a curated set of task-specific dataset. However, it is infeasible to collect all possible instruction datasets simultaneously in real-world scenarios. Thus, enabling MLLM with continual instruction tuning is essential for maintaining their adaptability. However, existing methods often trade off memory efficiency for performance gains, significantly compromising overall efficiency. In this paper, we propose a task-specific expansion and task-general fusion framework based on the variations in Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) similarity across different model layers when trained on diverse datasets. Furthermore, we analyze the information leakage present in the existing benchmark and propose a new and more challenging benchmark to rationally evaluate the performance of different methods. Comprehensive experiments showcase a significant performance improvement of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be public available.
Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models
Authors: Qika Lin; Tianzhe Zhao; Kai He; Zhen Peng; Fangzhi Xu; Ling Huang; Jingying Ma; Mengling Feng
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Due to the presence of the natural gap between Knowledge Graph (KG) structures and the natural language, the effective integration of holistic structural information of KGs with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a significant question. To this end, we propose a two-stage framework to learn and apply quantized codes for each entity, aiming for the seamless integration of KGs with LLMs. Firstly, a self-supervised quantized representation (SSQR) method is proposed to compress both KG structural and semantic knowledge into discrete codes (i.e., tokens) that align the format of language sentences. We further design KG instruction-following data by viewing these learned codes as features to directly input to LLMs, thereby achieving seamless integration. The experiment results demonstrate that SSQR outperforms existing unsupervised quantized methods, producing more distinguishable codes. Moreover, the fine-tuned LLaMA2 and LLaMA3.1 also have superior performance on KG link prediction and triple classification tasks, utilizing only 16 tokens per entity instead of thousands in conventional prompting methods.
Finite State Automata Inside Transformers with Chain-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Study on State Tracking
Authors: Yifan Zhang; Wenyu Du; Dongming Jin; Jie Fu; Zhi Jin
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks, and prior research shows that CoT can theoretically increase expressiveness. However, there is limited mechanistic understanding of the algorithms that Transformer+CoT can learn. Our key contributions are: (1) We evaluate the state tracking capabilities of Transformer+CoT and its variants, confirming the effectiveness of CoT. (2) Next, we identify the circuit (a subset of model components, responsible for tracking the world state), indicating that late-layer MLP neurons play a key role. We propose two metrics, compression and distinction, and show that the neuron sets for each state achieve nearly 100% accuracy, providing evidence of an implicit finite state automaton (FSA) embedded within the model. (3) Additionally, we explore three challenging settings: skipping intermediate steps, introducing data noises, and testing length generalization. Our results demonstrate that Transformer+CoT learns robust algorithms (FSAs), highlighting its resilience in challenging scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/IvanChangPKU/FSA.
TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition
Authors: Tianwei Lin; Jiang Liu; Wenqiao Zhang; Yang Dai; Haoyuan Li; Zhelun Yu; Wanggui He; Juncheng Li; Jiannan Guo; Hao Jiang; Siliang Tang; Yueting Zhuang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) effectively address resource constraints during fine-tuning, their performance often falls short, especially in multidimensional task scenarios. To address this issue, one straightforward solution is to introduce task-specific LoRA as domain experts, leveraging the modeling of multiple capabilities of experts and thus enhancing the general capability of multi-task learning.Although promising, these additional components often add complexity to the training and inference process, contravening the efficiency that PEFT is designed to deliver. Considering this, we introduce an innovative PEFT method, **TeamLoRA**, consisting of a collaboration and competition module for LoRA experts, thus achieving the right balance of effectiveness and efficiency:**(i)** For *collaboration*, we introduce a novel knowledge sharing and organization mechanism designed to optimize hierarchical learning while enhancing the efficiency of model training and inference.**(ii)** For *competition*, we propose leveraging a game-theoretic interaction mechanism for experts, encouraging experts to transfer their domain-specific knowledge while facing diverse downstream tasks, thus enhancing the performance.By doing so, TeamLoRA elegantly connects the experts as a “*Team*” with internal collaboration and competition, enabling a faster and more accurate PEFT paradigm. Meanwhile, we curate a **Comprehensive Multi-Task Evaluation (CME)** benchmark to thoroughly assess the capability of multi-task learning. Experiments conducted on our CME and other benchmarks indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of TeamLoRA. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/TeamLoRA.