GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Chain-Talker: Chain Understanding and Rendering for Empathetic Conversational Speech Synthesis
Authors: Yifan Hu; Rui Liu; Yi Ren; Xiang Yin; Haizhou Li
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) aims to align synthesized speech with the emotional and stylistic context of user-agent interactions to achieve empathy. Current generative CSS models face interpretability limitations due to insufficient emotional perception and redundant discrete speech coding. To address the above issues, we present Chain-Talker, a three-stage framework mimicking human cognition: Emotion Understanding derives context-aware emotion descriptors from dialogue history; Semantic Understanding generates compact semantic codes via serialized prediction; and Empathetic Rendering synthesizes expressive speech by integrating both components. To support emotion modeling, we develop CSS-EmCap, an LLM-driven automated pipeline for generating precise conversational speech emotion captions. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that Chain-Talker produces more expressive and empathetic speech than existing methods, with CSS-EmCap contributing to reliable emotion modeling. The code and demos are available at: https://github.com/AI-S2-Lab/Chain-Talker.
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Circular Convolution
Authors: Aochuan Chen; Jiashun Cheng; Zijing Liu; Ziqi Gao; Fugee Tsung; Yu Li; Jia Li
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has gained popularity for fine-tuning large foundation models, leveraging low-rank matrices A and B to represent weight changes (i.e., 𝛥 W = B A). This method reduces trainable parameters and mitigates heavy memory consumption associated with full delta matrices by sequentially multiplying A and B with the activation. Despite its success, the intrinsic low-rank characteristic may limit its performance. Although several variants have been proposed to address this issue, they often overlook the crucial computational and memory efficiency brought by LoRA. In this paper, we propose Circular Convolution Adaptation (C3A), which not only achieves high-rank adaptation with enhanced performance but also excels in both computational power and memory utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that C3A consistently outperforms LoRA and its variants across various fine-tuning tasks.
Alleviating Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Truthfulness-driven Rank-adaptive LoRA
Authors: Jiahao Li; Zhendong Mao; Quan Wang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Improving the truthfulness of LLMs to alleviate hallucinations has become critical for promoting the practical deployment of LLMs. Current fine-tuning-based methods ignore the intrinsic discrepancy in the truthfulness correlations across LLM internal modules, and instead treat them equally, which may potentially decrease the performance of truthfulness improvement. In this paper, we propose a truthfulness-driven rank-adaptive LoRA method to improve LLM truthfulness (RaLFiT), which adaptively allocates the ranks in LoRA training according to the truthfulness correlations of modules within LLM. Specifically, it first measures the truthfulness correlation of each LLM module by a probing process, and allocates higher ranks to strongly correlated modules, which means a larger update subspace during training. Experimental results on TruthfulQA show that RaLFiT consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across the Llama LLM family, verifying its effectiveness and superiority, and for the first time makes the performance of 7B Llama LLMs exceed GPT-4.
ScEdit: Script-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing
Authors: Xinye Li; Zunwen Zheng; Qian Zhang; Dekai Zhuang; Jiabao Kang; Liyan Xu; Qingbin Liu; Xi Chen; Zhiying Tu; Dianhui Chu; Dianbo Sui
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Knowledge Editing (KE) has gained increasing attention, yet current KE tasks remain relatively simple. Under current evaluation frameworks, many editing methods achieve exceptionally high scores, sometimes nearing perfection. However, few studies integrate KE into real-world application scenarios (e.g., recent interest in LLM-as-agent). To support our analysis, we introduce a novel script-based benchmark – ScEdit (Script-based Knowledge Editing Benchmark) – which encompasses both counterfactual and temporal edits. We integrate token-level and text-level evaluation methods, comprehensively analyzing existing KE techniques. The benchmark extends traditional fact-based (“What”-type question) evaluation to action-based (“How”-type question) evaluation. We observe that all KE methods exhibit a drop in performance on established metrics and face challenges on text-level metrics, indicating a challenging task. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/asdfo123/ScEdit.
SafeRoute: Adaptive Model Selection for Efficient and Accurate Safety Guardrails in Large Language Models
Authors: Seanie Lee; Dong Bok Lee; Dominik Wagner; Minki Kang; Haebin Seong; Tobias Bocklet; Juho Lee; Sung Ju Hwang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications requires robust safety guard models to detect and block harmful user prompts. While large safety guard models achieve strong performance, their computational cost is substantial. To mitigate this, smaller distilled models are used, but they often underperform on “hard” examples where the larger model provides accurate predictions. We observe that many inputs can be reliably handled by the smaller model, while only a small fraction require the larger model’s capacity. Motivated by this, we propose SafeRoute, a binary router that distinguishes hard examples from easy ones. Our method selectively applies the larger safety guard model to the data that the router considers hard, improving efficiency while maintaining accuracy compared to solely using the larger safety guard model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our adaptive model selection significantly enhances the trade-off between computational cost and safety performance, outperforming relevant baselines.
Moderation Matters: Measuring Conversational Moderation Impact in English as a Second Language Group Discussion
Authors: Rena Gao; Ming-Bin Chen; Lea Frermann; Jey Han Lau
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers often struggle to engage in group discussions due to language barriers. While moderators can facilitate participation, few studies assess conversational engagement and evaluate moderation effectiveness. To address this gap, we develop a dataset comprising 17 sessions from an online ESL conversation club, which includes both moderated and non-moderated discussions. We then introduce an approach that integrates automatic ESL dialogue assessment and a framework that categorizes moderation strategies. Our findings indicate that moderators help improve the flow of topics and start/end a conversation. Interestingly, we find active acknowledgement and encouragement to be the most effective moderation strategy, while excessive information and opinion sharing by moderators has a negative impact. Ultimately, our study paves the way for analyzing ESL group discussions and the role of moderators in non-native conversation settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/RenaGao/L2Moderator.
Measuring Bias and Agreement in Large Language Model Presupposition Judgments
Authors: Katherine Atwell; Mandy Simons; Malihe Alikhani
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Identifying linguistic bias in text demands the identification not only of explicitly asserted content but also of implicit content including presuppositions. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising automated approach to detecting presuppositions, yet the extent to which their judgments align with human intuitions remains unexplored. Moreover, LLMs may inadvertently reflect societal biases when identifying presupposed content. To empirically investigate this, we prompt multiple large language models to evaluate presuppositions across diverse textual domains, drawing from three distinct datasets annotated by human raters. We calculate the agreement between LLMs and human raters, and find several linguistic factors associated with fluctuations in human-model agreement. Our observations reveal discrepancies in human-model alignment, suggesting potential biases in LLMs, notably influenced by gender and political ideology.
Harnessing PDF Data for Improving Japanese Large Multimodal Models
Authors: Jeonghun Baek; Akiko Aizawa; Kiyoharu Aizawa
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance in English, but their effectiveness in Japanese remains limited due to the lack of high-quality training data. Current Japanese LMMs often rely on translated English datasets, restricting their ability to capture Japan-specific cultural knowledge. To address this, we explore the potential of Japanese PDF data as a training resource, an area that remains largely underutilized. We introduce a fully automated pipeline that leverages pretrained models to extract image-text pairs from PDFs through layout analysis, OCR, and vision-language pairing, removing the need for manual annotation. Additionally, we construct instruction data from extracted image-text pairs to enrich the training data. To evaluate the effectiveness of PDF-derived data, we train Japanese LMMs and assess their performance on the Japanese LMM Benchmark. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements, with performance gains ranging from 2.1% to 13.8% on Heron-Bench. Further analysis highlights the impact of PDF-derived data on various factors, such as model size and language models, reinforcing its value as a multimodal resource for Japanese LMMs.
EnerGIZAr: Leveraging GIZA++ for Effective Tokenizer Initialization
Authors: Pranaydeep Singh; Eneko Agirre; Gorka Azkune; Orphee De Clercq; Els Lefever
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Continual pre-training has long been considered the default strategy for adapting models to non-English languages, but struggles with initializing new embeddings, particularly for non-Latin scripts. In this work, we propose EnerGIZAr, a novel methodology that improves continual pre-training by leveraging statistical word alignment techniques. Our approach utilizes GIZA++ to construct a subword-level alignment matrix between source (English) and target language tokens. This matrix enables informed initialization of target tokenizer embeddings, which provides a more effective starting point for adaptation. We evaluate EnerGIZAr against state-of-the-art initialization strategies such as OFA and FOCUS across four typologically diverse languages: Hindi, Basque, Arabic and Korean. Experimental results on key NLP tasks – including POS tagging, Sentiment Analysis, NLI, and NER – demonstrate that EnerGIZAr achieves superior monolingual performance while also out-performing all methods for cross-lingual transfer when tested on XNLI. With EnerGIZAr, we propose an intuitive, explainable as well as state-of-the-art initialisation technique for continual pre-training of English models.
AMEX: Android Multi-annotation Expo Dataset for Mobile GUI Agents
Authors: Yuxiang Chai; Siyuan Huang; Yazhe Niu; Han Xiao; Liang Liu; Guozhi Wang; Dingyu Zhang; Shuai Ren; Hongsheng Li
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: AI agents have drawn increasing attention mostly on their ability to perceive environments, understand tasks, and autonomously achieve goals. To advance research on AI agents in mobile scenarios, we introduce the Android Multi-annotation EXpo (AMEX), a comprehensive, large-scale dataset designed for generalist mobile GUI-control agents which are capable of completing tasks by directly interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) on mobile devices. AMEX comprises over 104K high-resolution screenshots from popular mobile applications, which are annotated at multiple levels. Unlike existing GUI-related datasets, e.g., Rico, AitW, etc., AMEX includes three levels of annotations: GUI interactive element grounding, GUI screen and element functionality descriptions, and complex natural language instructions with stepwise GUI-action chains. We develop this dataset from a more instructive and detailed perspective, complementing the general settings of existing datasets. Additionally, we finetune a baseline model SPHINX Agent and illustrate the effectiveness of AMEX.
Drop Dropout on Single Epoch Language Model Pretraining
Authors: Houjun Liu; John Bauer; Christopher D Manning
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Originally, dropout was seen as a breakthrough regularization technique that reduced overfitting and improved performance in almost all applications of deep learning by reducing overfitting. Yet, single-epoch pretraining tasks common to modern LLMs yield minimal overfitting, leading to dropout not being used for large LLMs. Nevertheless, no thorough empirical investigation has been done on the role of dropout in LM pretraining. Through experiments in single-epoch pretraining of both masked (BERT) and autoregressive (Pythia 160M and 1.4B) LMs with varying levels of dropout, we find that downstream performance in language modeling, morpho-syntax (BLiMP), question answering (SQuAD), and natural-language inference (MNLI) improves when dropout is not applied during pretraining. We additionally find that the recently-introduced “early dropout” also degrades performance over applying no dropout at all. We further investigate the models’ editability, and find that models trained without dropout are more successful in gradient-based model editing (MEND) and equivalent in representation-based model editing (ReFT). Therefore, we advocate to **drop dropout** during single-epoch pretraining.
Robust and Minimally Invasive Watermarking for EaaS
Authors: Zongqi Wang; Baoyuan Wu; Jingyuan Deng; Yujiu Yang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Embeddings as a Service (EaaS) is emerging as a crucial role in AI applications. Unfortunately, EaaS is vulnerable to model extraction attacks, highlighting the urgent need for copyright protection. Although some preliminary works propose applying embedding watermarks to protect EaaS, recent research reveals that these watermarks can be easily removed. Hence, it is crucial to inject robust watermarks resistant to watermark removal attacks. Existing watermarking methods typically inject a target embedding into embeddings through linear interpolation when the text contains triggers. However, this mechanism results in each watermarked embedding having the same component, which makes the watermark easy to identify and eliminate. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a novel embedding-specific watermarking (ESpeW) mechanism to offer robust copyright protection for EaaS. Our approach involves injecting unique, yet readily identifiable watermarks into each embedding. Watermarks inserted by ESpeW are designed to maintain a significant distance from one another and to avoid sharing common components, thus making it significantly more challenging to remove the watermarks. Moreover, ESpeW is minimally invasive, as it reduces the impact on embeddings to less than 1%, setting a new milestone in watermarking for EaaS. Extensive experiments on four popular datasets demonstrate that ESpeW can even watermark successfully against a highly aggressive removal strategy without sacrificing the quality of embeddings.
Task-Informed Anti-Curriculum by Masking Improves Downstream Performance on Text
Authors: Andrei Jarca; Florinel Alin Croitoru; Radu Tudor Ionescu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Masked language modeling has become a widely adopted unsupervised technique to pre-train large language models (LLMs). However, the process of selecting tokens for masking is random, and the percentage of masked tokens is typically fixed for the entire training process. In this paper, we propose to adjust the masking ratio and to decide which tokens to mask based on a novel task-informed anti-curriculum learning scheme. First, we harness task-specific knowledge about useful and harmful tokens in order to determine which tokens to mask. Second, we propose a cyclic decaying masking ratio, which corresponds to an anti-curriculum schedule (from hard to easy). We exemplify our novel task-informed anti-curriculum by masking (TIACBM) approach across three diverse downstream tasks: sentiment analysis, text classification by topic, and authorship attribution. Our findings suggest that TIACBM enhances the ability of the model to focus on key task-relevant features, contributing to statistically significant performance gains across tasks. We release our code at https://github.com/JarcaAndrei/TIACBM.
CARMO: Dynamic Criteria Generation for Context Aware Reward Modelling
Authors: Taneesh Gupta; Shivam Shandilya; Xuchao Zhang; Rahul Madhavan; Supriyo Ghosh; Chetan Bansal; Huaxiu Yao; Saravan Rajmohan
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Reward modeling in large language models is known to be susceptible to reward hacking, causing models to latch onto superficial features such as the tendency to generate lists or unnecessarily long responses. In RLHF, and more generally during post-training, flawed reward signals often lead to outputs that optimize for these spurious correlates instead of genuine quality or correctness. We propose **Carmo (Context-Aware Reward Modeling)**, a novel approach that first generates dynamic, context-relevant criteria to ground the reward model prior to producing reward scores. Unlike prior methods that use static rubrics, Carmo leverages powerful LLMs to adaptively create evaluation criteria, e.g., logical consistency, clarity, and depth, tailored to the user query. Our theoretical analysis shows that such criteria generation can mitigate reward hacking. We further demonstrate how Carmo can be distilled into smaller models, thereby lowering the computational cost of alignment. We establish a new state-of-the-art performance on zero shot setting for generative models, with a 2.1% improvement on Reward Bench. Furthermore, alignment performed on the Carmo-curated preference dataset achieves **22.5% and 21.1% LC-WR (%) and WR (%) on Mistral-Base (7B)**. We release our datasets at [huggingface/CARMO](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Multi-preference-Optimization/CARMO-UltraFeedback).
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training
Authors: Wenxi Chen; Ziyang Ma; Ruiqi Yan; Yuzhe Liang; Xiquan Li; Ruiyang Xu; Zhikang Niu; Yanqiao Zhu; Yifan Yang; Zhanxun Liu; Kai Yu; Yuxuan Hu; Jinyu Li; Yan Lu; Shujie Liu; Xie Chen
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Recent advancements highlight the potential of end-to-end real-time spoken dialogue systems, showcasing their low latency and high quality. In this paper, we introduce SLAM-Omni, a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training. SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens and decoupling speaker information to a vocoder. By predicting grouped speech semantic tokens at each step, our method significantly reduces the sequence length of audio tokens, accelerating both training and inference. Additionally, we propose historical text prompting to compress dialogue history, facilitating efficient multi-round interactions. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that SLAM-Omni outperforms prior models of similar scale, requiring only 15 hours of training on 4 GPUs with limited data. Notably, it is the first spoken dialogue system to achieve competitive performance with a single-stage training approach, eliminating the need for pre-training on TTS or ASR tasks. Further experiments validate its multilingual and multi-turn dialogue capabilities on larger datasets.
C2LEVA: Toward Comprehensive and Contamination-Free Language Model Evaluation
Authors: Yanyang Li; Wong Tin Long; Cheung To Hung; Jianqiao Zhao; Duo Zheng; Liu Ka Wai; Michael R. Lyu; Liwei Wang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise, yet their evaluation raises concerns, particularly regarding data contamination due to the lack of access to proprietary training data. To address this issue, we present C2LEVA, a comprehensive bilingual benchmark featuring systematic contamination prevention. C2LEVA firstly offers a holistic evaluation encompassing 22 tasks, each targeting a specific application or ability of LLMs, and secondly a trustworthy assessment due to our contamination-free tasks, ensured by a systematic contamination prevention strategy that fully automates test data renewal and enforces data protection during benchmark data release. Our large-scale evaluation of 15 open-source and proprietary models demonstrates the effectiveness of C2LEVA.
Texts or Images? A Fine-grained Analysis on the Effectiveness of Input Representations and Models for Table Question Answering
Authors: Wei Zhou; Mohsen Mesgar; Heike Adel; Annemarie Friedrich
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: In table question answering (TQA), tables are encoded as either texts or images. Prior work suggests that passing images of tables to multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) performs comparably to using textual input with large language models (LLMs). However, the lack of controlled setups limits fine-grained distinctions between these approaches. In this paper, we conduct the first controlled study on the effectiveness of several combinations of table representations and model types from two perspectives: question complexity and table size. We build a new benchmark based on existing TQA datasets. In a systematic analysis of seven pairs of MLLMs and LLMs, we find that the best combination of table representation and model varies across setups. We propose FRES, a method selecting table representations dynamically, and observe a 10% average performance improvement compared to using both representations indiscriminately.