GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
From Objectives to Questions: A Planning-based Framework for Educational Mathematical Question Generation
Authors: Cheng Cheng; Zhenya Huang; GuanHao Zhao; Yuxiang Guo; Xin Lin; Jinze Wu; Xin Li; Shijin Wang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Automatically generating high-quality mathematical problems that align with educational objectives is a crucial task in NLP-based educational technology. Traditional generation methods focus primarily on textual quality, but they often overlook educational objectives. Moreover, these methods address only single-dimensional, simple question generation, failing to meet complex, multifaceted educational requirements. To address these challenges, we constructed and annotated EduMath, a dataset of 16k mathematical questions with multi-dimensional educational objectives. Based on this dataset, we developed EQGEVAL, which incorporates three evaluation dimensions and is designed to assess the ability of models to generate educational questions. Drawing inspiration from teachers’ problem design processes, we propose the Educational Question Planning with self-Reflection (EQPR) method for educational mathematical question generation, following a “plan-evaluate-optimize” approach. Specifically, by combining planning algorithm based on Monte Carlo Tree Search with the generative capabilities of Large Language Models, we continuously optimize questions through iterative feedback. This self-optimization mechanism ensures that the generated questions both fit the educational context and strategically achieve specific basic educational objectives. Through extensive experiments based on EQGEVAL, we have demonstrated that EQPR achieves significant improvements in generating questions that meet multi-dimensional educational objectives.
RankCoT: Refining Knowledge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Ranking Chain-of-Thoughts
Authors: Mingyan Wu; Zhenghao Liu; Yukun Yan; Xinze Li; Shi Yu; Zheni Zeng; Yu Gu; Ge Yu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, LLMs still encounter challenges in effectively utilizing the knowledge from retrieved documents, often being misled by irrelevant or noisy information. To address this issue, we introduce RankCoT, a knowledge refinement method that incorporates reranking signals in generating CoT-based summarization for knowledge refinement based on given query and all retrieval documents. During training, RankCoT prompts the LLM to generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) candidates based on the query and individual documents. It then fine-tunes the LLM to directly reproduce the best CoT from these candidate outputs based on all retrieved documents, which requires LLM to filter out irrelevant documents during generating CoT-style summarization. Additionally, RankCoT incorporates a self-reflection mechanism that further refines the CoT outputs, resulting in higher-quality training data. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RankCoT, showing its superior performance over other knowledge refinement models. Further analysis reveals that RankCoT can provide shorter but effective refinement results, enabling the generator to produce more accurate answers. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/RankCoT.
Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs
Authors: Yafu Li; Ronghao Zhang; Zhilin Wang; Huajian Zhang; Leyang Cui; Yongjing Yin; Tong Xiao; Yue Zhang
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 achieved remarkable success in machine translation, demonstrating impressive performance across diverse languages. However, translationese—characterized by overly literal and unnatural translations—remains a persistent challenge in LLM-based translation systems. Despite their pre-training on vast corpora of natural utterances, LLMs exhibit translationese errors and generate unexpected unnatural translations, stemming from biases introduced during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we systematically evaluate the prevalence of translationese in LLM-generated translations and investigate its roots during supervised training. We introduce methods to mitigate these biases, including polishing golden references and filtering unnatural training instances. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that these approaches significantly reduce translationese while improving translation naturalness, validated by human evaluations and automatic metrics. Our findings highlight the need for training-aware adjustments to optimize LLM translation outputs, paving the way for more fluent and target-language-consistent translations.
Accurate KV Cache Quantization with Outlier Tokens Tracing
Authors: Yi Su; Yuechi Zhou; Quantong Qiu; Juntao Li; Qingrong Xia; Ping Li; Xinyu Duan; Zhefeng Wang; Min Zhang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) come at the cost of substantial computational resources during deployment. While KV Cache can significantly reduce recomputation during inference, it also introduces additional memory overhead. KV Cache quantization presents a promising solution, striking a good balance between memory usage and accuracy. Previous research has shown that the Keys are distributed by channel, while the Values are distributed by token. Consequently, the common practice is to apply channel-wise quantization to the Keys and token-wise quantization to the Values. However, our further investigation reveals that a small subset of unusual tokens exhibit unique characteristics that deviate from this pattern, which can substantially impact quantization accuracy. To address this, we develop a simple yet effective method to identify these tokens accurately during the decoding process and exclude them from quantization as outlier tokens, significantly improving overall accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant accuracy improvements under 2-bit quantization and can deliver a 6.4 times reduction in memory usage and a 2.3 times increase in throughput.
Can Large Language Models Understand Internet Buzzwords Through User-Generated Content
Authors: Chen Huang; Junkai Luo; Xinzuo Wang; Wenqiang Lei; Jiancheng Lv
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The massive user-generated content (UGC) available in Chinese social media is giving rise to the possibility of studying internet buzzwords. In this paper, we study if large language models (LLMs) can generate accurate definitions for these buzzwords based on UGC as examples. Our work serves a threefold contribution. First, we introduce CHEER, the first dataset of Chinese internet buzzwords, each annotated with a definition and relevant UGC. Second, we propose a novel method, called RESS, to effectively steer the comprehending process of LLMs to produce more accurate buzzword definitions, mirroring the skills of human language learning. Third, with CHEER, we benchmark the strengths and weaknesses of various off-the-shelf definition generation methods and our RESS. Our benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of RESS while revealing a crucial shared challenge: comprehending unseen buzzwords and leveraging sufficient, high-quality UGC to facilitate this comprehension. In this paper, we believe our work lays the groundwork for future advancements in LLM-based definition generation. Our dataset and code will be openly released.
EAC-MoE: Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models
Authors: Yuanteng Chen; Yuantian Shao; Peisong Wang; Jian Cheng
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has demonstrated promising potential in scaling LLMs. However, it is hindered by two critical challenges: (1) substantial GPU memory consumption to load all experts; (2) low activated parameters cannot be equivalently translated into inference acceleration effects. In this work, we propose EAC-MoE, an Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for MoE-LLMs, which deeply aligns with the characteristics of MoE from the perspectives of quantization and pruning, and introduces two modules to address these two challenges respectively: (1) The expert selection bias caused by low-bit quantization is a major factor contributing to the performance degradation in MoE-LLMs. Based on this, we propose Quantization with Expert-Selection Calibration (QESC), which mitigates the expert selection bias by calibrating the routers within the MoE; (2) There are always certain experts that are not crucial for the corresponding tasks, yet causing inference latency. Therefore, we propose Pruning based on Expert-Selection Frequency (PESF), which significantly improves inference speed by pruning less frequently used experts for current task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces memory usage and improves inference speed with minimal performance degradation.
Activation Steering Decoding: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models through Bidirectional Hidden State Intervention
Authors: Jingran Su; Jingfan Chen; Hongxin Li; Yuntao Chen; Li Qing; Zhaoxiang Zhang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multimodal understanding, but they frequently suffer from hallucination - generating content inconsistent with visual inputs. In this work, we explore a novel perspective on hallucination mitigation by examining the intermediate activations of LVLMs during generation. Our investigation reveals that hallucinated content manifests as distinct, identifiable patterns in the model’s hidden state space. Motivated by this finding, we propose Activation Steering Decoding (ASD), a training-free approach that mitigates hallucination through targeted intervention in the model’s intermediate activations. ASD operates by first identifying directional patterns of hallucination in the activation space using a small calibration set, then employing a contrast decoding mechanism that computes the difference between positive and negative steering predictions. This approach effectively suppresses hallucination patterns while preserving the model’s general capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucination across multiple benchmarks while maintaining performance on general visual understanding tasks. Notably, our approach requires no model re-training or architectural modifications, making it readily applicable to existing deployed models.
Interactive Evolution: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Training Framework For Large Language Models
Authors: Fangzhi Xu; Qiushi Sun; Kanzhi Cheng; Jun Liu; Yu Qiao; Zhiyong Wu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: One of the primary driving forces contributing to the superior performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the extensive availability of human-annotated natural language data, which is used for alignment fine-tuning. This inspired researchers to investigate self-training methods to mitigate the extensive reliance on human annotations. However, the current success of self-training has been primarily observed in natural language scenarios, rather than in the increasingly important neural-symbolic scenarios. To this end, we propose an environment-guided neural-symbolic self-training framework named ENVISIONS. It aims to overcome two main challenges: (1) the scarcity of symbolic data, and (2) the limited proficiency of LLMs in processing symbolic language. Extensive evaluations conducted on three distinct domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Additionally, we have conducted a comprehensive analysis to uncover the factors contributing to ENVISIONS’s success, thereby offering valuable insights for future research in this area.
Improving Medical Large Vision-Language Models with Abnormal-Aware Feedback
Authors: Yucheng Zhou; Lingran Song; Jianbing Shen
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Existing Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs), encapsulating extensive medical knowledge, demonstrate excellent capabilities in understanding medical images. However, there remain challenges in visual localization in medical images, which is crucial for abnormality detection and interpretation. To address these issues, we propose a novel UMed-LVLM designed to unveil medical abnormalities. Specifically, we collect a Medical Abnormalities Unveiling (MAU) dataset and propose a two-stage training method for UMed-LVLM training. To collect MAU dataset, we propose a prompt method utilizing the GPT-4V to generate diagnoses based on identified abnormal areas in medical images. Moreover, the two-stage training method includes Abnormal-Aware Instruction Tuning and Abnormal-Aware Rewarding, comprising Relevance Reward, Abnormal Localization Reward and Vision Relevance Reward. Experimental results demonstrate that our UMed-LVLM significantly outperforms existing Med-LVLMs in identifying and understanding medical abnormalities, achieving a 58% improvement over the baseline. In addition, this work shows that enhancing the abnormality detection capabilities of Med-LVLMs significantly improves their understanding of medical images and generalization capability. Our code and data release at URL.
Upcycling Instruction Tuning from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts via Parameter Merging
Authors: Tingfeng Hui; Zhenyu Zhang; Shuohuan Wang; Yu Sun; Hua Wu; Sen Su
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) shines brightly in large language models (LLMs) and demonstrates outstanding performance in plentiful natural language processing tasks. However, existing methods transforming LLMs from dense to MoE face significant data requirements and typically rely on large-scale post-training. In this paper, we propose Upcycling Instruction Tuning (UpIT), a data-efficient approach for tuning a dense pre-trained model into a MoE instruction model. Specifically, we first point out that intermediate checkpoints during instruction tuning of the dense model are naturally suitable for specialized experts, and then propose an expert expansion stage to flexibly achieve models with flexible numbers of experts, where genetic algorithm and parameter merging are introduced to ensure sufficient diversity of new extended experts. To ensure that each specialized expert in the MoE model works as expected, we select a small amount of seed data that each expert excels to pre-optimize the router. Extensive experiments with various data scales and upcycling settings demonstrate the outstanding performance and data efficiency of UpIT, as well as stable improvement in expert or data scaling. Further analysis reveals the importance of ensuring expert diversity in upcycling.
MapNav: A Novel Memory Representation via Annotated Semantic Maps for VLM-based Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Lingfeng Zhang; Xiaoshuai Hao; Qinwen Xu; Qiang Zhang; Xinyao Zhang; Pengwei Wang; Jing Zhang; Zhongyuan Wang; Shanghang Zhang; Renjing Xu
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Vision-language navigation (VLN) is a key task in Embodied AI, requiring agents to navigate diverse and unseen environments while following natural language instructions. Traditional approaches rely heavily on historical observations as spatio-temporal contexts for decision making, leading to significant storage and computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce MapNav, a novel end-to-end VLN model that leverages Annotated Semantic Map (ASM) to replace historical frames. Specifically, our approach constructs a top-down semantic map at the start of each episode and update it at each timestep, allowing for precise object mapping and structured navigation information. Then, we enhance this map with explicit textual labels for key regions, transforming abstract semantics into clear navigation cues and generate our ASM. MapNav agent using the constructed ASM as input, and use the powerful end-to-end capabilities of VLM to empower VLN. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MapNav achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both simulated and real-world environments, validating the effectiveness of our method. We will release our ASM generation source code and dataset to ensure reproducibility, contributing valuable resources to the field. We believe that our proposed MapNav can be used as a new memory representation method in VLN, paving the way for future research in this field.
Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multimodal LLMs for Medical Imaging
Authors: Zhenyang Cai; Junying Chen; Rongsheng Wang; Weihong Wang; Yonglin Deng; Dingjie Song; Yize Chen; Zixu Zhang; Benyou Wang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Medical imaging provides essential visual insights for diagnosis, and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly utilized for its analysis due to their strong generalization capabilities; however, the underlying factors driving this generalization remain unclear. Current research suggests that multi-task training outperforms single-task as different tasks can benefit each other, but they often overlook the internal relationships within these tasks. To analyze this phenomenon, we attempted to employ **compositional generalization** (CG), which refers to the models’ ability to understand novel combinations by recombining learned elements, as a guiding framework. Since medical images can be precisely defined by **M**odality, **A**natomical area, and **T**ask, naturally providing an environment for exploring CG, we assembled 106 medical datasets to create **Med-MAT** for comprehensive experiments. The experiments confirmed that MLLMs can use CG to understand unseen medical images and identified CG as one of the main drivers of the generalization observed in multi-task training. Additionally, further studies demonstrated that CG effectively supports datasets with limited data and confirmed that MLLMs can achieve CG across classification and detection tasks, underscoring its broader generalization potential. Med-MAT is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Med-MAT.
CLAIM: Mitigating Multilingual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models with Cross-Lingual Attention Intervention
Authors: Zekai Ye; Qiming Li; Xiaocheng Feng; Libo Qin; Yichong Huang; Baohang Li; Kui Jiang; Yang Xiang; Zhirui Zhang; Yunfei Lu; Duyu Tang; Dandan Tu; Bing Qin
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive multimodal abilities but remain prone to multilingual object hallucination, with a higher likelihood of generating responses inconsistent with the visual input when utilizing queries in non-English languages compared to English. Most existing approaches to address these rely on pretraining or fine-tuning, which are resource-intensive. In this paper, inspired by observing the disparities in cross-modal attention patterns across languages, we propose Cross-Lingual Attention Intervention for Mitigating multilingual object hallucination (CLAIM) in LVLMs, a novel near training-free method by aligning attention patterns. CLAIM first identifies language-specific cross-modal attention heads, then estimates language shift vectors from English to the target language, and finally intervenes in the attention outputs during inference to facilitate cross-lingual visual perception capability alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLAIM achieves an average improvement of 13.56% (up to 30% in Spanish) on the POPE and 21.75% on the hallucination subsets of the MME benchmark across various languages. Further analysis reveals that multilingual attention divergence is most prominent in intermediate layers, highlighting their critical role in multilingual scenarios.
Wizard of Shopping: Target-Oriented E-commerce Dialogue Generation with Decision Tree Branching
Authors: Xiangci Li; Zhiyu Chen; Jason Ingyu Choi; Nikhita Vedula; Besnik Fetahu; Oleg Rokhlenko; Shervin Malmasi
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The goal of conversational product search (CPS) is to develop an intelligent, chat-based shopping assistant that can directly interact with customers to understand shopping intents, ask clarification questions, and find relevant products. However, training such assistants is hindered mainly due to the lack of reliable and large-scale datasets. Prior human-annotated CPS datasets are extremely small in size and lack integration with real-world product search systems. We propose a novel approach, TRACER, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate realistic and natural conversations for different shopping domains. TRACER’s novelty lies in grounding the generation to dialogue plans, which are product search trajectories predicted from a decision tree model, that guarantees relevant product discovery in the shortest number of search conditions. We also release the first target-oriented CPS dataset Wizard of Shopping (WoS), containing highly natural and coherent conversations (3.6k) from three shopping domains. Finally, we demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of WoS via human evaluations and downstream tasks.