GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Cross-Cultural Transfer of Commonsense Reasoning in LLMs: Evidence from the Arab World
Authors: Saeed Almheiri; Rania Elbadry; Mena Attia; Chenxi Wang; Preslav Nakov; Timothy Baldwin; Fajri Koto
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often reflect Western-centric biases, limiting their effectiveness in diverse cultural contexts. Although some work has explored cultural alignment, the potential for cross-cultural transfer, using alignment in one culture to improve performance in others, remains underexplored. This paper investigates cross-cultural transfer of commonsense reasoning within the Arab world, where linguistic and historical similarities coexist with local cultural differences. Using a culturally grounded commonsense reasoning dataset covering 13 Arab countries, we evaluate lightweight alignment methods such as in-context learning (ICL) and demonstration-based reinforcement (DITTO), alongside baselines like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference Optimization (DPO). Our results show that merely 12 culture-specific examples from one country can improve performance in others by 10% on average, within multilingual models. In addition, we demonstrate that out-of-culture demonstrations from Indonesia and US contexts can match or surpass in-culture alignment for MCQ reasoning, highlighting cultural commonsense transferability beyond Arab world. These findings demonstrate that efficient cross-cultural alignment is possible and offer a promising approach to adapt LLMs to low-resource cultural settings.
Enhancing Partially Relevant Video Retrieval with Robust Alignment Learning
Authors: Long Zhang; Peipei Song; Jianfeng Dong; Kun Li; Xun Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos partially relevant to a given query. The core challenge lies in learning robust query-video alignment against spurious semantic correlations arising from inherent data uncertainty: 1) query ambiguity, where the query incompletely characterizes the target video and often contains uninformative tokens, and 2) partial video relevance, where abundant query-irrelevant segments introduce contextual noise in cross-modal alignment. Existing methods often focus on enhancing multi-scale clip representations and retrieving the most relevant clip. However, the inherent data uncertainty in PRVR renders them vulnerable to distractor videos with spurious similarities, leading to suboptimal performance. To fill this research gap, we propose Robust Alignment Learning (RAL) framework, which explicitly models the uncertainty in data. Key innovations include: 1) we pioneer probabilistic modeling for PRVR by encoding videos and queries as multivariate Gaussian distributions. This not only quantifies data uncertainty but also enables proxy-level matching to capture the variability in cross-modal correspondences; 2) we consider the heterogeneous informativeness of query words and introduce learnable confidence gates to dynamically weight similarity. As a plug-and-play solution, RAL can be seamlessly integrated into the existing architectures. Extensive experiments across diverse retrieval backbones demonstrate its effectiveness.
Multi-level Diagnosis and Evaluation for Robust Tabular Feature Engineering with Large Language Models
Authors: Yebin Lim; Susik Yoon
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in feature engineering for tabular data, but concerns about their reliability persist, especially due to variability in generated outputs. We introduce a multi-level diagnosis and evaluation framework to assess the robustness of LLMs in feature engineering across diverse domains, focusing on the three main factors: key variables, relationships, and decision boundary values for predicting target classes. We demonstrate that the robustness of LLMs varies significantly over different datasets, and that high-quality LLM-generated features can improve few-shot prediction performance by up to 10.52%. This work opens a new direction for assessing and enhancing the reliability of LLM-driven feature engineering in various domains.
Prejudge-Before-Think: Enhancing Large Language Models at Test-Time by Process Prejudge Reasoning
Authors: Jianing Wang; Jin Jiang; Yang Liu; Mengdi Zhang; Xunliang Cai
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new process prejudge strategy in LLM reasoning to demonstrate that bootstrapping with process prejudge allows the LLM to adaptively anticipate the errors encountered when advancing the subsequent reasoning steps, similar to people sometimes pausing to think about what mistakes may occur and how to avoid them, rather than relying solely on trial and error. Specifically, we define a prejudge node in the rationale, which represents a reasoning step, with at least one step that follows the prejudge node that has no paths toward the correct answer. To synthesize the prejudge reasoning process, we present an automated reasoning framework with a dynamic tree-searching strategy. This framework requires only one LLM to perform answer judging, response critiquing, prejudge generation, and thought completion. Furthermore, we develop a two-phase training mechanism with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to further enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Experimental results from competition-level complex reasoning demonstrate that our method can teach the model to prejudge before thinking and significantly enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs .
FroM: Frobenius Norm-Based Data-Free Adaptive Model Merging
Authors: Zijian Li; Xiaocheng Feng; Huixin Liu; Yichong Huang; Ting Liu; Bing Qin
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: With the development of large language models, fine-tuning has emerged as an effective method to enhance performance in specific scenarios by injecting domain-specific knowledge. In this context, model merging techniques provide a solution for fusing knowledge from multiple fine-tuning models by combining their parameters. However, traditional methods often encounter task interference when merging full fine-tuning models, and this problem becomes even more evident in parameter-efficient fine-tuning scenarios. In this paper, we introduce an improvement to the RegMean method, which indirectly leverages the training data to approximate the outputs of the linear layers before and after merging. We propose an adaptive merging method called FroM, which directly measures the model parameters using the Frobenius norm, without any training data. By introducing an additional hyperparameter for control, FroM outperforms baseline methods across various fine-tuning scenarios, alleviating the task interference problem.
Dynamic Simulation Framework for Disinformation Dissemination and Correction With Social Bots
Authors: Boyu Qiao; Kun Li; Wei Zhou; Songlin Hu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: In the “human-bot symbiotic” information ecosystem, social bots play key roles in spreading and correcting disinformation. Understanding their influence is essential for risk control and better governance. However, current studies often rely on simplistic user and network modeling, overlook the dynamic behavior of bots, and lack quantitative evaluation of correction strategies. To fill these gaps, we propose MADD, a Multi-Agent-based framework for Disinformation Dissemination. MADD constructs a more realistic propagation network by integrating the Barabási–Albert Model for scale-free topology and the Stochastic Block Model for community structures, while designing node attributes based on real-world user data. Furthermore, MADD incorporates both malicious and legitimate bots, with their controlled dynamic participation allows for quantitative analysis of correction strategies. We evaluate MADD using individual and group-level metrics. We experimentally verify the real-world consistency of MADD’s user attributes and network structure, and we simulate the dissemination of six disinformation topics, demonstrating the differential effects of fact-based and narrative-based correction strategies. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QQQQQQBY/BotInfluence.
Beyond the First Error: Process Reward Models for Reflective Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Zhaohui Yang; Chenghua He; Xiaowen Shi; Shihong Deng; Linjing Li; Qiyue Yin; Daxin Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Many studies focus on data annotation techniques for training effective PRMs. However, current methods encounter a significant issue when applied to long CoT reasoning processes: they tend to focus solely on the first incorrect step and all preceding steps, assuming that all subsequent steps are incorrect. These methods overlook the unique self-correction and reflection mechanisms inherent in long CoT, where correct reasoning steps may still occur after initial reasoning mistakes. To address this issue, we propose a novel data annotation method for PRMs specifically designed to score the long CoT reasoning process. Given that under the reflection pattern, correct and incorrect steps often alternate, we introduce the concepts of Error Propagation and Error Cessation, enhancing PRMs’ ability to identify both effective self-correction behaviors and reasoning based on erroneous steps. Leveraging an LLM-based judger for annotation, we collect 1.7 million data samples to train a 7B PRM and evaluate it at both solution and step levels. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to existing open-source PRMs and PRMs trained on open-source datasets, our PRM achieves superior performance across various metrics, including search guidance, BoN, and F1 scores. Compared to widely used MC-based annotation methods, our annotation approach not only achieves higher data efficiency but also delivers superior performance. Detailed analysis is also conducted to demonstrate the stability and generalizability of our method.
PrAd: Prompt Adaptive Tuning for Decoder-only Language Models
Authors: Youneng Ma; Junyi He; Haojun Fei
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Fine tuning pretrained language models for downstream NLP tasks, while effective, can be costly when the model size and the number of tasks increase, as it requires full parameter updates and a separate model served for each task. Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) addresses the issue by keeping the pretrained parameters fixed while introducing minimal task-specific parameters. There are two essential PET paradigms: prompt-based tuning and adapter-based tuning, each with distinct limitations. Prompt-based methods suffer from increased input lengths and sensitivity to weight initialization, whereas adapter approaches can substantially increase inference time. To overcome these limitations, we propose prompt adaptive tuning (PrAd), a general prompt-based tuning framework for decode-only models that delivers strong performance with high efficiency, even in multi-task scenarios. Unlike conventional prompt-based tuning which uses soft tokens to “wrap” inputs, PrAd employs adapters for flexible input transformation. While traditional adapter-based tuning adapts both the prompt and decoded tokens, PrAd only adapts the prompt. PrAd enables the creation of diverse prompt-based approaches while providing critical advantages for real-world use: (1) it can maintain original input lengths with easy initialization during training, like adapter-based methods; (2) it can reduce management costs while facilitating deployment and efficient batch inference of different tasks, like prompt-based tuning.; and (3) it introduces no additional inference latency in the decoding phase even when serving multiple tasks concurrently. Experiments on six diverse tasks demonstrate that PrAd can consistently attain comparable or better performance and higher inference efficiency.
Personalized Question Answering with User Profile Generation and Compression
Authors: Hang Su; Yun Yang; Tianyang Liu; Xin Liu; Peng Pu; Xuesong Lu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer a novel and convenient avenue for humans to acquire knowledge. However, LLMs are prone to providing “midguy” answers regardless of users’ knowledge background, thereby failing to meet each user’s personalized needs. To tackle the problem, we propose to generate personalized answers with LLMs based on users’ past question-answering records. We dynamically generate and update a user’s domain and global profiles as the user asks questions, and use the latest profile as the context to generate the answer for a newly-asked question. To save tokens, we propose to compress the domain profile into a set of keywords and use the keywords to prompt LLMs. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of the compression strategy. Experimental results show that our method can generate more personalized answers than comparative methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/DaSESmartEdu/PQA.
Dream to Chat: Model-based Reinforcement Learning on Dialogues with User Belief Modeling
Authors: Yue Zhao; Xiaoyu Wang; Dan Wang; Zhonglin Jiang; Qingqing Gu; Teng Chen; Ningyuan Xi; Jinxian Qu; Yong Chen; Luo Ji
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: World models have been widely utilized in robotics, gaming, and autonomous driving. However, their applications to natural language tasks are relatively limited. In this paper, we construct the dialogue world model, which could predict future utterances and user beliefs, including emotion, sentiment, and intention. In this paper, we propose a framework called DreamCUB, which shows that this user belief modeling and the entire dialogue world model can be established by LLM post-training. By defining a POMDP, we apply model-based reinforcement learning to the dialogue system and solve it by maximizing the information bottleneck. Experiments show that the pretrained dialogue world model can achieve state-of-the-art performances on emotion classification and sentiment identification, while dialogue quality is also enhanced by joint training of policy, critic and dialogue world model. Further analysis reveals that DreamCUB holds a reasonable exploration-exploitation balance and also transfers well to out-of-domain scenarios such as empathetic dialogues.
FakeSV-VLM: Taming VLM for Detecting Fake Short-Video News via Progressive Mixture-Of-Experts Adapter
Authors: JunXi Wang; Yaxiong Wang; Lechao Cheng; Zhun Zhong
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: We present FakeSV-VLM in this paper, a new VLM-based framework for detecting fake news on short video platforms. Despite significant efforts to combat this issue due to the severe threat that fake news videos pose to public information security, existing methods still fall short in detection accuracy, often due to lack of knowledge to verify the news is real or not. However, large Vision Language Models (VLMs) have absorbed extensive real-world knowledge from massive multimodal datasets. Motivated by this, we adapt advanced VLMs for fake news detection in short videos. Upon close examination of news samples, we observe that short video samples can be categorized into four distinct scenarios: both video and text are real (for real samples), or both are fake, or either the video or text is fake (for fake samples). Inspired by this insight, we design four experts tailored to handle each scenario and integrate them into VLM via Mixture of Experts. Specifically, we develop the Progressive MoE Adapter (PMOE) module where detection experts first provide an initial analysis, followed by attribution experts for a comprehensive diagnosis, leading to a robust decision. Additionally, we also note the fake news videos often show inconsistency between two modalities. Consequently, we further design the Alignment-driven Event Checking (ADEC) module, which perceives the fake news by capturing the inconsistency between different modalities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, FakeSV and FakeTT, verify the superiority of our model. It significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art models by +3.32% and +5.02%, establishing a new benchmark in the field.
Beyond Inherent Cognition Biases in LLM-Based Event Forecasting: A Multi-Cognition Agentic Framework
Authors: Zhen Wang; Xi Zhou; Yating Yang; Bo Ma; Lei Wang; Rui Dong; Azmat Anwar
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities and are widely applied in event forecasting. However, studies have demonstrated that LLMs exhibit human-like cognitive biases, systematic patterns of deviation from rationality in decision-making. To explore the cognitive biases in event forecasting, we introduce CogForecast, a human-curated dataset comprising six topics. Experimental results on three LLMs reveal significant cognitive biases in LLM-based event forecasting methods. To address this issue, we propose MCA, a Multi-Cognition Agentic framework. Specifically, MCA leverages LLMs to act as multi-cognition event participants, performing perspective-taking based on the cognitive patterns of event participants to alleviate the inherent cognitive biases in LLMs and offer diverse analytical perspectives. Then, MCA clusters agents according to their predictions and derives a final answer through a group-level reliability scoring method. Experimental results on a dataset including eight event categories demonstrate the effectiveness of MCA. Using Llama-3.1-70B, MCA achieves an accuracy of 82.3% (79.5% for the human crowd). Additionally, we demonstrate that MCA can alleviate the cognitive biases in LLMs and investigate three influencing factors.
Breaking the Reviewer: Assessing the Vulnerability of Large Language Models in Automated Peer Review Under Textual Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Tzu-Ling Lin; Wei-Chih Chen; Teng-Fang Hsiao; Hou-I Liu; Ya-Hsin Yeh; Yu-Kai Chan; Wen-Sheng Lien; Po-Yen Kuo; Philip S. Yu; Hong-Han Shuai
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Peer review is essential for maintaining academic quality, but the increasing volume of submissions places a significant burden on reviewers. Large language models (LLMs) offer potential assistance in this process, yet their susceptibility to textual adversarial attacks raises reliability concerns. This paper investigates the robustness of LLMs used as automated reviewers in the presence of such attacks. We focus on three key questions: (1) The effectiveness of LLMs in generating reviews compared to human reviewers. (2) The impact of adversarial attacks on the reliability of LLM-generated reviews. (3) Challenges and potential mitigation strategies for LLM-based review. Our evaluation reveals significant vulnerabilities, as text manipulations can distort LLM assessments. We offer a comprehensive evaluation of LLM performance in automated peer reviewing and analyze its robustness against adversarial attacks. Our findings emphasize the importance of addressing adversarial risks to ensure AI strengthens, rather than compromises, the integrity of scholarly communication.
Watermarking with Low-Entropy POS-Guided Token Partitioning and Z-Score-Driven Dynamic Bias for Large Language Models
Authors: He Li; Xiaojun Chen; Zhendong Zhao; Yunfei Yang; Xin Zhao; Jingcheng He
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Texts generated by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly widespread online. Due to the lack of effective attribution mechanisms, the enforcement of copyright and the prevention of misuse remain significant challenges in the context of LLM-generated content. LLMs watermark emerges as a crucial technology to trace the source of AI-generated content. However, most existing watermarking methods reduce the fidelity of semantics. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel watermarking framework. To enhance the fidelity of semantics, we propose low-entropy POS-guided token partitioning mechanism and z-score-driven dynamic bias mechanism. Moreover, to enhance the robustness against potential bias sparsity exploitation attack, we propose a relative position encoding (RPE) mechanism, which can uniformly distribute bias in the generated text. Evaluated across 6 baselines, 4 tasks, and 5 LLMs under 8 attacks, compared to the KGW, our watermark improves semantic fidelity by 24.53% (RC-PPL) and robustness by 3.75% (F1). Our code is publicly available, facilitating reproducibility in LLM watermarking research.
Knowledge Graph-Driven Memory Editing with Directional Interventions
Authors: Jinhu Fu; Kun Wang; Chongye Guo; Junfeng Fang; Wentao Zhang; Sen Su
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing and understanding, yet their performance is hampered by inaccuracies and outdated information. Model editing techniques offer a solution but face two key challenges: **(I)** Most methods inject knowledge by constructing rigid loss, which leads to poor compatibility when dealing with higher-order multi-hop problems. **(II)** Locate-then-edit vein, by altering pre-trained parameters, inevitably affect normal knowledge and even face the catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we introduce **KGMET**, a framework that constructs knowledge graphs using available information to guide the direction of knowledge editing, enabling **consistent**, **aligned**, and **stable** information during **large-scale** editing scenario. Furthermore, *KGMET* goes beyond this by employing orthogonal constraints to block the interference of irrelevant information, ensuring the updates are both controllable and generalizable. Experiments on Multi-Conterfact, ZsRE, and MQuAKE datasets using *Llama-3-8B*, *GPT-J-6B*, and *GPT-2-XL* models showcase improvements over state-of-the-art methods, with ↑ 5%-17% in multi-hop tasks while remaining generalizable (at least ↑ 20% in fluency). Our code is available on Github.
DTDES-KGE: Dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation with Distinct Embedding Spaces for Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Authors: Bofan Wei; Hongyuan Xu; Yuhang Niu; Jiarui Ren; Yanlong Wen; Xiaojie Yuan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Knowledge distillation for knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models effectively compresses KGE models by reducing their embedding dimensions. While existing methods distill knowledge from a high-dimensional teacher to a low-dimensional student, they typically rely on a single teacher embedding space, thereby overlooking valuable complementary knowledge from teachers in distinct embedding spaces. This paper introduces DTDES-KGE, a novel knowledge distillation framework that significantly enhances distillation performance by leveraging dual teachers in distinct embedding spaces. To overcome the challenge of spatial heterogeneity when integrating knowledge from dual teachers, we propose a spatial compatibility module for reconciliation. Additionally, we introduce a student-aware knowledge fusion mechanism to fuse the knowledge from dual teachers dynamically. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of DTDES-KGE.