GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
MemBench: Towards More Comprehensive Evaluation on the Memory of LLM-based Agents
Authors: Haoran Tan; Zeyu Zhang; Chen Ma; Xu Chen; Quanyu Dai; Zhenhua Dong
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Recent works have highlighted the significance of memory mechanisms in LLM-based agents, which enable them to store observed information and adapt to dynamic environments. However, evaluating their memory capabilities still remains challenges. Previous evaluations are commonly limited by the diversity of memory levels and interactive scenarios. They also lack comprehensive metrics to reflect the memory capabilities from multiple aspects. To address these problems, in this paper, we construct a more comprehensive dataset and benchmark to evaluate the memory capability of LLM-based agents. Our dataset incorporates factual memory and reflective memory as different levels, and proposes participation and observation as various interactive scenarios. Based on our dataset, we present a benchmark, named MemBench, to evaluate the memory capability of LLM-based agents from multiple aspects, including their effectiveness, efficiency, and capacity. To benefit the research community, we release our dataset and project at https://github.com/import-myself/Membench.
Adaptive LoRA Merge with Parameter Pruning for Low-Resource Generation
Authors: Ryota Miyano; Yuki Arase
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: This study proposes a simple yet effective LoRA merge method to achieve LLM adaptation for low-resource language generation tasks. The LoRA merge technique, which integrates multiple LoRA modules trained on different tasks, has gained attention as an effective and efficient approach for adapting LLMs to target tasks. However, previous methods are limited in adaptability as they keep the LoRA parameters frozen. Additionally, the low-resource problem has been out of their scope. We propose a LoRA merge method that updates and prunes LoRA parameters through fine-tuning with minimal target task data, which allows finer-grained adjustments of LoRA parameters and enhancement of task adaptability. Extensive experiments have been conducted taking summarization as a benchmark task. Our datasets cover various domains and multiple languages of English and Japanese. The results confirm that the proposed method achieves significant and consistent improvements in task adaptability over the previous methods.
LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention
Authors: Longyun Wu; Dawei Zhu; Guangxiang Zhao; Zhuocheng Yu; Junfeng Ran; Xiangyu Wong; Lin Sun; Sujian Li
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: With the development of large language models (LLMs), there has been an increasing need for significant advancements in handling long contexts. To enhance long-context capabilities, constructing high-quality training data with **long-range dependencies** is crucial. Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis,which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel token-level framework, ​**LongAttn**​, which leverages the self-attention mechanism of LLMs to measure the **long-range dependencies** for the data. By calculating token-level dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores, LongAttn effectively quantifies ​**long-range dependencies**​, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. We filter **LongABC-32K** from open-source long-context datasets (ArXiv, Book, and Code). Through our comprehensive experiments, LongAttn has demonstrated its excellent ​**effectiveness**​, ​**scalability**​, and ​**efficiency**​. We will release our code and the high-quality long-context dataset **LongABC-32K** in the future.
CoRE: Condition-based Reasoning for Identifying Outcome Variance in Complex Events
Authors: Sai P Vallurupalli; Francis Ferraro
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Knowing which latent conditions lead to a particular outcome is useful for critically examining claims made about complex event outcomes. Identifying implied conditions and examining their influence on an outcome is challenging. We handle this by combining and augmenting annotations from two existing datasets consisting of goals and states, and explore the influence of conditions through our research questions and Condition-based Reasoning tasks. We examine open and closed LLMs of varying sizes and intent-alignment on our reasoning tasks and find that conditions are useful when not all context is available. Models differ widely in their ability to generate and identify outcome-variant conditions, which affects their performance on outcome validation, when conditions are used to replace missing context. Larger models like GPT-4o, are more cautious in such less constrained situations.
FaVe: Factored and Verified Search Rationale for Long-form Answer
Authors: Jihyuk Kim; Sungjin Lee; Seung-won Hwang; Yang Liu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Targeting long-form question-answering, chain-of-query (CoQ) has been studied, integrating chain-of-thought (CoT) with retrieval-augmented generation. CoQ answers the complex question step-by-step, through simpler subquestions (SQs) from which relevant knowledge is retrieved. By doing so, CoQ aims to improve the answer comprehensiveness and verifiability, at the expense of latency. Our first contribution is showing that the chaining often incurs harmful effects on both objectives, and SQs left unverified often fail to answer the given question. Second, we propose a better alternative to CoQ, union-of-query which adopts a factored approach to break the harmful chain. Finally, we propose to verify SQs before answers, by fine-tuning the SQ generator using verified SQs and introducing a selector verifying SQs in test time. Employing vicuna-13b, our approach, denoted by FaVe (short for Factored and Verified search), even outperforms ChatGPT baselines while maintaining efficiency.
UnrealLLM: Towards Highly Controllable and Interactable 3D Scene Generation by LLM-powered Procedural Content Generation
Authors: Song Tang; Kaiyong Zhao; Lei Wang; Yuliang Li; Xuebo Liu; Junyi Zou; Qiang Wang; Xiaowen Chu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: The creation of high-quality 3D scenes is essential for applications like video games and simulations, yet automating this process while retaining the benefits of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce UnrealLLM, a novel multi-agent framework that connects natural language descriptions with the professional PCG system (Unreal Engine 5) to automate scene generation. UnrealLLM constructs a comprehensive knowledge base to translate text into executable PCG blueprints and a diverse asset library that guarantees high-quality scene generation. Additionally, it also introduces a text-based blueprint system with a spline-based control mechanism for geometric arrangement, enabling natural language interaction and enhancing interactivity in 3D environments using UE5’s advanced capabilities. Through extensive experiments, we show that UnrealLLM achieves competitive performance in technical metrics and aesthetic quality, offering unique advantages in generation scale and interactivity. This work makes a valuable contribution to automated 3D content creation, benefiting both novice users and professional designers.
Tree-of-Prompts: Abstracting Control-Flow for Prompt Optimization
Authors: Jihyuk Kim; Shubham Garg; Lahari Poddar; Seung-won Hwang; Chris Hench
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Prompt optimization (PO) generates prompts to guide Large Language Models (LLMs) in performing tasks. Existing methods, such as PromptAgent, rely on a single static prompt, which struggles with disjoint cases in complex tasks. Although MoP uses multiple prompts, it fails to account for variations in task complexity. Inspired by programmatic control flow, we introduce a nested if-else structure to address both varying similarities and complexities across diverse cases. We propose Tree-of-Prompts (ToP), which implements this structure by recursively expanding child prompts from a parent prompt. Sibling prompts tackle disjoint cases while inheriting shared similarities from their parent, and handle cases more complex than the parent. Evaluated on Gorilla (understanding), MATH (reasoning), and a subset of BBH benchmarks, ToP outperforms PromptAgent and MoP, with improvements of 1.4% and 4.6% over PromptAgent and 3.2% and 4.5% over MoP, when tested with GPT-4o-mini and Llama 3.2-3B, respectively.
Outlier-weighed Layerwise Sampling for LLM Fine-tuning
Authors: Pengxiang Li; Lu Yin; Xiaowei Gao; Shiwei Liu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. However, the substantial size of LLMs presents significant challenges in training or fine-tuning. While parameter-efficient approaches such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) have gained popularity, they often compromise performance compared to full-rank fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose Outlier-weighed Layerwise Sampling (OWS), a new memory-efficient fine-tuning approach, inspired by the layerwise outlier distribution of LLMs. Unlike LoRA, which adds extra adapters to all layers, OWS strategically assigns higher sampling probabilities to layers with more outliers, selectively sampling only a few layers and fine-tuning their pre-trained weights. To further increase the number of fine-tuned layers without a proportional rise in memory costs, we incorporate gradient low-rank projection, further boosting the approach’s performance. Our extensive experiments across various architectures, including LLaMa2 and Mistral, demonstrate that OWS consistently outperforms baseline approaches, including full fine-tuning. Specifically, it achieves up to a 1.1% average accuracy gain on the Commonsense Reasoning benchmark, a 3.0% improvement on MMLU, and a notable 10% boost on MT-Bench, while being more memory efficient. OWS allows us to fine-tune 7B LLMs with only 21GB of memory. Our code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/OWS.
KVPR: Efficient LLM Inference with I/O-Aware KV Cache Partial Recomputation
Authors: Chaoyi Jiang; Lei Gao; Hossein Entezari Zarch; Murali Annavaram
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) is computationally demanding. To reduce the cost of auto-regressive decoding, Key-Value (KV) cache is used to store intermediate activations, which significantly lowers the computational overhead for token generation. However, the memory required for the KV cache grows rapidly, often exceeding the capacity of GPU memory. A cost-effective alternative is to offload KV cache to CPU memory, which alleviates GPU memory pressure, but shifts the bottleneck to the limited bandwidth of the PCIe connection between the CPU and GPU. Existing methods attempt to address these issues by overlapping GPU computation with I/O or employing CPU-GPU heterogeneous execution, but they are hindered by excessive data movement and dependence on CPU capabilities. Fully overlapping PCIe communication latency gets challenging as the size of the KV cache grows and/or the GPU compute capabilities increase. In this paper, we introduce KVPR, an efficient I/O-aware LLM inference method where the CPU first transfers a partial set of activations, from which the GPU can start recomputing the KV cache values. While the GPU recomputes the partial KV cache, the remaining portion of the KV cache is transferred concurrently from the CPU. This approach overlaps GPU recomputation with KV cache transfer to minimize idle GPU time and maximize inference performance. KVPR is fully automated by integrating a profiler module that utilizes input characteristics and system hardware information, a scheduler module to optimize the distribution of computation and communication workloads, and a runtime module to efficiently execute the derived execution plan. Experimental results show that KVPR achieves up to 35.8% lower latency and 46.2% higher throughput during decoding compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/chaoyij/KVPR.
Direct Behavior Optimization: Unlocking the Potential of Lightweight LLMs
Authors: Hongming Yang; Shi Lin; Jun Shao; Changting Lin; Donghai Zhu; Meng Han; Qinglei Kong
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Lightweight Large Language Models (LwLLMs) are reduced-parameter, optimized models designed to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware, offering significant advantages in resource efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and data privacy. However, these models often struggle with limited inference and reasoning capabilities, which restrict their performance on complex tasks and limit their practical applicability. Moreover, existing prompt optimization methods typically rely on extensive manual effort or the meta-cognitive abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, making them less effective for LwLLMs.To address these challenges, we introduce DeBoP, a new Direct Behavior Optimization Paradigm, original from the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting technique. Unlike CoT Prompting, DeBoP is an automatic optimization method, which focuses on the optimization directly on the behavior of LwLLMs. In particular, DeBoP transforms the optimization of complex prompts into the optimization of discrete, quantifiable execution sequences using a gradient-free Monte Carlo Tree Search. We evaluate DeBoP on seven challenging tasks where state-of-the-art LLMs excel but LwLLMs generally underperform. Experimental results demonstrate that DeBoP significantly outperforms recent prompt optimization methods on most tasks. In particular, DeBoP-optimized LwLLMs surpass GPT-3.5 on most tasks while reducing computational time by approximately 60% compared to other automatic prompt optimization methods.
Whether LLMs Know If They Know: Identifying Knowledge Boundaries via Debiased Historical In-Context Learning
Authors: Bo Lv; Nayu Liu; Yang Shen; Xin Liu; Ping Luo; Yue Yu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: In active retrieval (AR), large language models (LLMs) need first assess whether they possess knowledge to answer a given query, to decide whether to invoke a retrieval module. Existing methods primarily rely on training classification models or using the confidence of the model’s answer to determine knowledge boundaries. However, training-based methods may have limited generalization, and our analysis reveals that LLMs struggle to reliably assess whether they possess the required information based on their answers, often biased by prior cognitive tendencies (e.g., tokens’ semantic preferences). To address this, we propose Debiased Historical In-Context Learning (DH-ICL) to identify knowledge boundaries in AR. DH-ICL aims to reframe this self-awareness metacognitive task as a structured pattern-learning problem by retrieving similar historical queries as high-confidence in-context examples to guide LLMs to identify knowledge boundaries. Furthermore, we introduce a historical bias calibration strategy that leverages deviations in the model’s past response logits to mitigate cognitive biases in its current knowledge boundary assessment. Experiments on four QA benchmarks show that DH-ICL achieves performance comparable to full retrieval on LLaMA with only half the number of retrievals, without any additional training.
How do LLMs’ Preferences Affect Event Argument Extraction? CAT: Addressing Preference Traps in Unsupervised EAE
Authors: Yunhao Wei; Kai Shuang; Zhiyi Li; Chenrui Mao
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of unsupervised Event Argument Extraction (EAE) tasks. However, LLMs’ inherent preferences severely hinder their effectiveness in EAE, leading to what we term preference traps, namely, the Prior Knowledge Trap, the Sycophancy Hallucination Trap, and the Output Contradiction Trap. Existing approaches often fall into these traps due to misalignments between their prior knowledge, instructions, or output constraints and LLMs’ preferences, which significantly limits further performance gains. To address this issue, we propose Choose-After-Think (CAT), an unsupervised EAE framework designed to handle these preference traps through targeted measures. CAT innovatively divides the EAE task into two phases: identification of event information (argument roles) (Think Phase) and selection of the final answers from a candidate set (Choose Phase). This two-phase approach reduces the impact of individual token probability anomalies and ensures the integrity of EAE results. Experimental results demonstrate that CAT (based on the local 7B model, zero-shot setting) matches the performance of the best DeepSeek-R1 API model, with a significantly lower time cost.
Out-of-Distribution Detection via LLM-Guided Outlier Generation for Text-attributed Graph
Authors: Xiangwei Lv; Mengze Li; Jingyuan Chen; Zhiang Dong; Sirui Han; Beishui Liao
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), which are characterized with text attributes, are widely used in the real world. When evaluating fully trained models designed for TAG predictions, they may perform significantly unsatisfactory on samples outside the In-Distribution (ID) data, which may raise serious security issues. To tackle it, Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection is introduced to the TAGs field, which aims to utilize a detector to classify OOD and ID samples. Recent studies attempt to introduce extra OOD datasets to regularize the detection model. However, due to the vastness of the OOD data space, high-quality OOD samples for training the detector are scarce and difficult to obtain in the real world. Thus, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the OOD training samples with high quality. There are two issues in this process: (1) LLMs tend to generate OOD-node samples significantly different from ID ones, with a limited learning value for OOD and ID relations. (2) Due to the inherent structure of TAGs, obtained OOD nodes need to be integrated with existing nodes by generating edges using LLMs. However, the large number of nodes makes reasoning over each node pair computationally unbearable. Toward these issues, we introduce LLMGuard with challenging OOD-node generation and lightweight edge predictors. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of LLMGuard. The source code is available.
Document-Level Relation Extraction with Global Relations and Entity Pair Reasoning
Authors: Fu Zhang; Yi Yan; Jingwei Cheng
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract structured relational triples from unstructured text based on given entities. Existing methods are mainly categorized into transformer-based models and graph-based models. While transformer-based models capture global contextual information, they typically focus on individual entity pairs, making it challenging to capture complex interactions between multiple entity pairs. Graph-based models build document graphs using entities or sentences as nodes for reasoning but often lack explicit mechanisms to model fine-grained interactions between entity pairs, limiting their ability to handle complex relational reasoning tasks. Additionally, previous research has not considered predicting all possible relations in advance to assist with DocRE tasks. To address these issues, we propose a new framework namely **GREP** (**g**lobal **r**elations and **e**ntity **p**air reasoning) for DocRE tasks. GREP leverages the global interdependencies between entity pairs to capture fine-grained interactions and perform multi reasoning at the entity pair level. In addtion, GREP for the first time proposes an auxiliary task that predicts all possible relations in advance that exist in a document, which enables the model to filter out the most unlikely relations. Experimental results on widely-used datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/yanyi74/GREP.
Towards Storage-Efficient Visual Document Retrieval: An Empirical Study on Reducing Patch-Level Embeddings
Authors: Yubo Ma; Jinsong Li; Yuhang Zang; Xiaobao Wu; Xiaoyi Dong; Pan Zhang; Yuhang Cao; Haodong Duan; Jiaqi Wang; Yixin Cao; Aixin Sun
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: Despite the strong performance of ColPali/ColQwen2 in Visualized Document Retrieval (VDR), its patch-level embedding approach leads to excessive memory usage. This empirical study investigates methods to reduce patch embeddings per page while minimizing performance degradation. We evaluate two token-reduction strategies: token pruning and token merging. Regarding token pruning, we surprisingly observe that a simple random strategy outperforms other sophisticated pruning methods, though still far from satisfactory. Further analysis reveals that pruning is inherently unsuitable for VDR as it requires removing certain page embeddings without query-specific information. Turning to token merging (more suitable for VDR), we search for the optimal combinations of merging strategy across three dimensions and develops Light-ColPali/ColQwen2. It maintains 98.2% of retrieval performance with only 11.8% of original memory usage, and preserves 94.6% effectiveness at 2% memory footprint. We expect our empirical findings and resulting Light-ColPali/ColQwen2 offer valuable insights and establish a competitive baseline for future efficient-VDR research.
Step-by-Step Mastery: Enhancing Soft Constraint Following Ability of Large Language Models
Authors: Qingyu Ren; Jie Zeng; Qianyu He; Jiaqing Liang; Yanghua Xiao; Weikang Zhou; Zeye Sun; Fei Yu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025)

Abstract: It is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions that involve multiple constraints. In real-world scenarios, user instructions often contain soft constraints, which are semantically related and cannot be rule-based verified, posing challenges for LLMs. To enhance the soft constraint following ability of LLMs, we initially design a pipeline to construct datasets with high-quality outputs for instructions containing soft constraints automatically. Additionally, to fully utilize the positive and negative samples generated during the data construction process, we choose Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) as the training method. Furthermore, taking into account the difficulty of soft constraints indicated by the number of constraints, we design a curriculum learning training paradigm based on the constraint quantity. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of our methods in improving LLMs’ soft constraint following ability and analyze the factors driving the improvements.