GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
NormAL LoRA: What is the perfect size?
Authors: Aastik; Meghana Topu; Chinmay Kulkarni; Pragya Paramita Sahu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are pivotal in enabling intelligent experiences across various applications, from summarization to advanced content organization and retrieval functionalities. However, deploying LLMs for diverse tasks is fundamentally constrained by memory and compute limitations, making it impractical to fine-tune separate models for each task. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offer a scalable solution for multi-task LLM deployment. Despite its potential, LoRA faces challenges in selecting optimal ranks and layers for each task-model pair, often resulting in inefficiencies and unnecessary parameters. We introduce Norm Adaptive Localized (NormAL) LoRA, a novel variant that employs rank-norm regularization to dynamically determine the optimal rank for each weight matrix, ensuring adaptation is concentrated where it is most impactful. Our approach reduces adapter parameters by 37% while preserving full fine-tuning performance, making NormAL LoRA a transformative tool for enabling efficient, scalable, and space-constrained AI deployments across diverse industries and applications.
Inclusive Leadership in the Age of AI: A Dataset and Comparative Study of LLMs vs. Real-Life Leaders in Workplace Action Planning
Authors: Vindhya Singh; Sabine Schulte im Walde; Ksenia Keplinger
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Generative Large Language Models have emerged as useful tools, reshaping professional workflows. However, their efficacy in inherently complex and human-centric tasks such as leadership and strategic planning remains underexplored. In this interdisciplinary study, we present a novel dataset and compare LLMs and human leaders in the context of workplace action planning, specifically focusing on translating the abstract idea of inclusion into actionable SMART goals. We developed the Leader Success Bot, a script-based chatbot co-designed with domain experts, to guide more than 250 real-life leaders in generating inclusive workplace action plans. We systematically prompted seven state-of-the-art chat-based LLMs to perform the same task using the socio-demographic data of real-life leaders and instructions co-developed with domain experts. Our publicly released dataset enables direct comparison between human and LLM-generated workplace action plans, offering insights into their respective strengths, biases, and limitations. Our findings highlight critical gaps and opportunities for LLMs in leadership applications, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and NLP applications.
Token Preference Optimization with Self-Calibrated Visual-Anchored Rewards for Hallucination Mitigation
Authors: Jihao Gu; Yingyao Wang; Meng Cao; Pi Bu; Jun Song; Bo Zheng; Yancheng He; Shilong Li
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been demonstrated to be highly effective in mitigating hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) by aligning their outputs more closely with human preferences. Despite the recent progress, existing methods suffer from two drawbacks: 1) Lack of scalable token-level rewards; and 2) Neglect of visual-anchored tokens. To this end, we propose a novel Token Preference Optimization model with self-calibrated rewards (dubbed as TPO), which adaptively attends to visual correlated tokens without fine-grained annotations. Specifically, we introduce a token-level visual-anchored reward as the difference of the logistic distributions of generated tokens conditioned on the raw image and the corrupted one. In addition, to highlight the informative visual-anchored tokens, a visual-aware training objective is proposed to enhance more accurate token-level optimization. Extensive experimental results have manifested the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed TPO. For example, by building on top of LLaVA and Qwen, our TPO boosts the performance absolute improvement for hallucination benchmarks.
EZ-VC: Easy Zero-shot Any-to-Any Voice Conversion
Authors: Advait Joglekar; Divyanshu Singh; Rooshil Rohit Bhatia; Srinivasan Umesh
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Voice Conversion research in recent times has increasingly focused on improving the zero-shot capabilities of existing methods. Despite remarkable advancements, current architectures still tend to struggle in zero-shot cross-lingual settings. They are also often unable to generalize for speakers of unseen languages and accents. In this paper, we adopt a simple yet effective approach that combines discrete speech representations from self-supervised models with a non-autoregressive Diffusion-Transformer based conditional flow matching speech decoder. We show that this architecture allows us to train a voice-conversion model in a purely textless, self-supervised fashion. Our technique works without requiring multiple encoders to disentangle speech features. Our model also manages to excel in zero-shot cross-lingual settings even for unseen languages. We provide our code, model checkpoint and demo samples here: https://github.com/ez-vc/ez-vc
Length Representations in Large Language Models
Authors: Sangjun Moon; Dasom Choi; Jingun Kwon; Hidetaka Kamigaito; Manabu Okumura
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various tasks, that are learned from massive amounts of text-based data. Although LLMs can control output sequence length, particularly in instruction-based settings, the internal mechanisms behind this control have been unexplored yet. In this study, we provide empirical evidence on how output sequence length information is encoded within the internal representations in LLMs. In particular, our findings show that multi-head attention mechanisms are critical in determining output sequence length, which can be adjusted in a disentangled manner. By scaling specific hidden units within the model, we can control the output sequence length without losing the informativeness of the generated text, thereby indicating that length information is partially disentangled from semantic information. Moreover, some hidden units become increasingly active as prompts become more length-specific, thus reflecting the model’s internal awareness of this attribute. Our findings suggest that LLMs have learned robust and adaptable internal mechanisms for controlling output length without any external control.
MultiLingPoT: Boosting Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs through Multilingual Program Integration
Authors: Nianqi Li; Zujie Liang; Siyu Yuan; Jiaqing Liang; Feng Wei; Yanghua Xiao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Program-of-Thought, which aims to use program instead of natural language in reasoning, is an important way for LLMs to solve mathematical problems. Since different programming languages excel in different areas, it is natural to use the most suitable language for solving specific problems. However, current research only focuses on single language PoT, ignoring the differences between programming languages. Therefore, this paper proposes a multilingual programme reasoning method, MultiLingPoT, and deeply explores the impact of multilingual integration in the training and inference. This method allows the model to answer questions using multiple languages by fine-tuning on multilingual data and improving individual language’s reasoning accuracy by 2.5%. Additionally, prior and posterior selection methods are used to help the model select the most suitable language during inference, and achieves 8% performance gains. Finally, our code metric analysis shows that language differences manifest in encapsulation levels and implementation granularity, while strategic deviation from language conventions can enhances code performance.
Simulating Identity, Propagating Bias: Abstraction and Stereotypes in LLM-Generated Text
Authors: Pia Sommerauer; Giulia Rambelli; Tommaso Caselli
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Persona-prompting is a growing strategy to steer LLMs toward simulating particular perspectives or linguistic styles through the lens of a specified identity. While this method is often used to personalize outputs, its impact on how LLMs represent social groups remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether persona-prompting leads to different levels of linguistic abstraction—an established marker of stereotyping—when generating short texts linking socio-demographic categories with stereotypical or non-stereotypical attributes. Drawing on the Linguistic Expectancy Bias framework, we analyze outputs from six open-weight LLMs under three prompting conditions, comparing 11 persona-driven responses to those of a generic AI assistant. To support this analysis, we introduce Self-Stereo, a new dataset of self-reported stereotypes from Reddit. We measure abstraction through three metrics: concreteness, specificity, and negation. Our results highlight the limits of persona-prompting in modulating abstraction in language, confirming criticisms about the ecology of personas as representative of socio-demographic groups and raising concerns about the risk of propagating stereotypes even when seemingly evoking the voice of a marginalized groups.
Do LVLMs Know What They Know? A Systematic Study of Knowledge Boundary Perception in LVLMs
Authors: Zhikai Ding; Shiyu Ni; Keping Bi
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong visual question answering (VQA) capabilities but are shown to hallucinate. A reliable model should perceive its knowledge boundaries—knowing what it knows and what it does not. This paper investigates LVLMs’ perception of their knowledge boundaries by evaluating three types of confidence signals: probabilistic confidence, answer consistency-based confidence, and verbalized confidence. Experiments on three LVLMs across three VQA datasets show that, although LVLMs possess a reasonable perception level, there is substantial room for improvement. Among the three confidence, probabilistic and consistency-based signals are more reliable indicators, while verbalized confidence often leads to overconfidence. To enhance LVLMs’ perception, we adapt several established confidence calibration methods from Large Language Models (LLMs) and propose three effective methods. Additionally, we compare LVLMs with their LLM counterparts, finding that jointly processing visual and textual inputs decreases question-answering performance but reduces confidence, resulting in improved perception level compared to LLMs.
Benchmarking Large Language Models for Cryptanalysis and Side-Channel Vulnerabilities
Authors: Utsav Maskey; Chencheng Zhu; Usman Naseem
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language understanding and generation, leading to extensive benchmarking across diverse tasks. However, cryptanalysis—a critical area for data security and its connection to LLMs’ generalization abilities remains underexplored in LLM evaluations. To address this gap, we evaluate the cryptanalytic potential of state‐of‐the‐art LLMs on ciphertexts produced by a range of cryptographic algorithms. We introduce a benchmark dataset of diverse plaintexts—spanning multiple domains, lengths, writing styles, and topics—paired with their encrypted versions. Using zero‐shot and few‐shot settings along with chain‐of‐thought prompting, we assess LLMs’ decryption success rate and discuss their comprehension abilities. Our findings reveal key insights into LLMs’ strengths and limitations in side‐channel scenarios and raise concerns about their susceptibility to under-generalization related attacks. This research highlights the dual‐use nature of LLMs in security contexts and contributes to the ongoing discussion on AI safety and security.
MTabVQA: Evaluating Multi-Tabular Reasoning of Language Models in Visual Space
Authors: Anshul Singh; Chris Biemann; Jan Strich
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in interpreting visual layouts and text. However, a significant challenge remains in their ability to interpret robustly and reason over multi-tabular data presented as images, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios like web pages and digital documents. Existing benchmarks typically address single tables or non-visual data (text/structured). This leaves a critical gap: they don’t assess the ability to parse diverse table images, correlate information across them, and perform multi-hop reasoning on the combined visual data. To bridge this evaluation gap, we introduce MTabVQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed for multi-tabular visual question answering. MTabVQA comprises 3,745 complex question-answer pairs that necessitate multi-hop reasoning across several visually rendered table images. We provide extensive benchmark results for state-of-the-art VLMs on MTabVQA, revealing significant performance limitations. We further investigate post-training techniques to enhance these reasoning abilities and release MTabVQA-Instruct, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset. Our experiments show that fine-tuning VLMs with MTabVQA-Instruct substantially improves their performance on visual multi-tabular reasoning. Code and dataset are available online: .
TurnBench-MS: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Turn, Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Yiran Zhang; Mo Wang; Xiaoyang Li; Kaixuan Ren; Chencheng Zhu; Usman Naseem
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Despite impressive advances in large language models (LLMs), existing benchmarks often focus on single-turn or single-step tasks, failing to capture the kind of iterative reasoning required in real-world settings. To address this limitation, we introduce **TurnBench**, a novel benchmark that evaluates multi-turn, multi-step reasoning through an interactive code-breaking task inspired by the “Turing Machine Board Game.” In each episode, a model must uncover hidden logical or arithmetic rules by making sequential guesses, receiving structured feedback, and integrating clues across multiple rounds. This dynamic setup requires models to reason over time, adapt based on past information, and maintain consistency across steps—capabilities underexplored in current benchmarks. TurnBench includes two modes: *Classic*, which tests standard reasoning, and *Nightmare*, which introduces increased complexity and requires robust inferential chains. To support fine-grained analysis, we provide ground-truth annotations for intermediate reasoning steps. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs reveals significant gaps: the best model achieves 84% accuracy in Classic mode, but performance drops to 18% in Nightmare mode. In contrast, human participants achieve 100% in both, underscoring the challenge TurnBench poses to current models. By incorporating feedback loops and hiding task rules, TurnBench reduces contamination risks and provides a rigorous testbed for diagnosing and advancing multi-step, multi-turn reasoning in LLMs.
Assessing LLM Reasoning Steps via Principal Knowledge Grounding
Authors: Hyeon Hwang; Yewon Cho; Chanwoong Yoon; Yein Park; Minju Song; Kyungjae Lee; Gangwoo Kim; Jaewoo Kang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Step-by-step reasoning has become a standard approach for large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks. While this paradigm has proven effective, it raises a fundamental question: How can we verify that an LLM’s reasoning is accurately grounded in knowledge? To address this question, we introduce a novel evaluation suite that systematically assesses the knowledge grounding of intermediate reasoning. Our framework comprises three key components. (1) Principal Knowledge Collection, a large-scale repository of atomic knowledge essential for reasoning. Based on the collection, we propose (2) knowledge-grounded evaluation metrics designed to measure how well models recall and apply prerequisite knowledge in reasoning. These metrics are computed by our (3) evaluator LLM, a lightweight model optimized for cost-effective and reliable metric computation. Our evaluation suite demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in identifying missing or misapplied knowledge elements, providing crucial insights for uncovering fundamental reasoning deficiencies in LLMs. Beyond evaluation, we demonstrate how these metrics can be integrated into preference optimization, showcasing further applications of knowledge-grounded evaluation. Our evaluation suite is publicly available.
Stratified Selective Sampling for Instruction Tuning with Dedicated Scoring Strategy
Authors: Paramita Mirza; Lucas Weber; Fabian Küch
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Recent work shows that post-training datasets for LLMs can be substantially downsampled without noticeably deteriorating performance. However, data selection often incurs high computational costs or is limited to narrow domains. In this paper, we demonstrate that data selection can be both—efficient and universal—by using a multi-step pipeline in which we efficiently bin data points into groups, estimate quality using specialized models, and score difficulty with a robust, lightweight method. Task-based categorization allows us to control the composition of our final data—crucial for finetuning multi-purpose models. To guarantee diversity, we improve upon previous work using embedding models and a clustering algorithm. This integrated strategy enables high-performance fine-tuning with minimal overhead.
CoTD-PO: Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization
Authors: Lujie Niu; Haochen Sun; Fangkun Zhao; Sheng Chen; Zimeng Bai; Jiawei Zhang; Caixia Yuan; Xiaojie Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation has emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance the reasoning ability of small language models by imitating the reasoning and outputs of larger teacher models. However, existing approaches suffer from a critical limitation: a distribution mismatch between teacher-generated training trajectories and the student model’s own generative distribution. This mismatch leads to exposure bias during inference and often induces mode collapse or mode averaging, thereby degrading the student model’s generative diversity and robustness. To address these issues, we propose CoTD-PO (Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that shifts the training paradigm from passive imitation to active trajectory exploration. Instead of forcing the student to imitate exact teacher traces, our method enables the student to sample its own answer paths. To support training with non-open-source teacher models, we approximate the teacher’s output distribution through preference-based scoring. Furthermore, we adopt an offline iterative training procedure that enables stable and efficient optimization. Experiments on diverse open-ended generation tasks demonstrate that CoTD-PO significantly outperforms standard CoT distillation baselines, achieving higher output quality while mitigating mode collapse and preserving semantic diversity.
Intelligent Document Parsing: Towards End-to-end Document Parsing via Decoupled Content Parsing and Layout Grounding
Authors: Hangdi Xing; Feiyu Gao; Qi Zheng; Zhaoqing Zhu; Zirui Shao; Ming Yan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: In the daily work, vast amounts of documents are stored in pixel-based formats such as images and scanned PDFs, posing challenges for efficient database management and data processing. Existing methods often fragment the parsing process into the pipeline of separated subtasks on the layout element level, resulting in incomplete semantics and error propagation. Even though models based on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) mitigate the issues to some extent, they also suffer from absent or sub-optimal grounding ability for visual information. To address these challenges, we introduce the Intelligent Document Parsing (IDP) framework, an end-to-end document parsing framework leveraging the vision-language priors of MLLMs, equipped with an elaborately designed document representation and decoding mechanism to decouple the content parsing and layout grounding to fully activate the potential of MLLMs for document parsing. Experimental results demonstrate that the IDP method surpasses existing methods, significantly advancing MLLM-based document parsing.
Feel the Difference? A Comparative Analysis of Emotional Arcs in Real and LLM-Generated CBT Sessions
Authors: Xiaoyi Wang; Jiwei Zhang; Guangtao Zhang; Honglei Guo
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Synthetic therapy dialogues generated by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in mental health NLP to simulate counseling scenarios, train models, and supplement limited real-world data. However, it remains unclear whether these synthetic conversations capture the nuanced emotional dynamics of real therapy. In this work, we introduce RealCBT, a dataset of authentic cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) dialogues, and conduct the first comparative analysis of emotional arcs between real and LLM-generated CBT sessions. We adapt the Utterance Emotion Dynamics framework to analyze fine-grained affective trajectories across valence, arousal, and dominance dimensions. Our analysis spans both full dialogues and individual speaker roles (counselor and client), using real sessions from the RealCBT dataset and synthetic dialogues from the CACTUS dataset. We find that while synthetic dialogues are fluent and structurally coherent, they diverge from real conversations in key emotional properties: real sessions exhibit greater emotional variability, more emotion-laden language, and more authentic patterns of reactivity and regulation. Moreover, emotional arc similarity remains low across all pairings, with especially weak alignment between real and synthetic speakers. These findings underscore the limitations of current LLM-generated therapy data and highlight the importance of emotional fidelity in mental health applications. To support future research, our dataset RealCBT is released at https://gitlab.com/xiaoyi.wang/realcbt-dataset.