GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Video Compression Commander: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Video Large Language Models
Authors: Xuyang Liu; Yiyu Wang; Junpeng Ma; Linfeng Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Video large language models (VideoLLM) excel at video understanding, but face efficiency challenges due to the quadratic complexity of abundant visual tokens. Our systematic analysis of token compression methods for VideoLLMs reveals two critical issues: (i) overlooking distinctive visual signals across frames, leading to information loss; (ii) suffering from implementation constraints, causing incompatibility with modern architectures or efficient operators.To address these challenges, we distill three design principles for VideoLLM token compression and propose a plug-and-play inference acceleration framework “Video Compression Commander” (VidCom2). By quantifying each frame’s uniqueness, VidCom2 adaptively adjusts compression intensity across frames, effectively preserving essential information while reducing redundancy in video sequences. Extensive experiments across various VideoLLMs and benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our VidCom2. With only 25% visual tokens, VidCom2 achieves 99.6% of the original performance on LLaVA-OV while reducing 70.8% of the LLM generation latency. Notably, our Frame Compression Adjustment strategy is compatible with other token compression methods to further improve their performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuyang-liu16/VidCom2.
Router-Tuning: A Simple and Effective Approach for Dynamic Depth
Authors: Shwai He; Tao Ge; Guoheng Sun; Bowei Tian; Xiaoyang Wang; Dong Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The Mixture of Depths (MoD) was introduced to improve computational efficiency by dynamically skipping less important layers, reducing redundant computation while maintaining model capacity. Despite its promise, existing MoD approaches remain under-explored and face two main challenges: (1) high training costs due to the need to train the entire model along with the routers that determine which layers to skip, and (2) performance degradation when important layers are bypassed. In response to the first issue, we propose Router-Tuning, which fine-tunes only the routers on a small dataset, drastically reducing the computational overhead associated with full model training. For the second challenge, we investigate across different architectures and granularities, demonstrating its effectiveness on Attention layers and MoE layers. This method preserves the model’s performance while significantly enhancing computational and memory efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach delivers competitive results while dramatically improving the computation efficiency, e.g., 21% speedup and only a 0.2% performance drop. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Foot-In-The-Door: A Multi-turn Jailbreak for LLMs
Authors: Zixuan Weng; Xiaolong Jin; Jinyuan Jia; Xiangyu Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Ensuring AI safety is crucial as large language models become increasingly integrated into real-world applications. A key challenge is jailbreak, where adversarial prompts bypass built-in safeguards to elicit harmful disallowed outputs. Inspired by psychological foot-in-the-door principles, we introduce FITD, a novel multi-turn jailbreak method that leverages the phenomenon where minor initial commitments lower resistance to more significant or more unethical transgressions. Our approach progressively escalates the malicious intent of user queries through intermediate bridge prompts and aligns the model’s response by itself to induce toxic responses. Extensive experimental results on two jailbreak benchmarks demonstrate that FITD achieves an average attack success rate of 94% across seven widely used models, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of LLM self-corruption, highlighting vulnerabilities in current alignment strategies and emphasizing the risks inherent in multi-turn interactions. The code is available at https://github.com/Jinxiaolong1129/Foot-in-the-door-Jailbreak.
TurnaboutLLM: A Deductive Reasoning Benchmark from Detective Games
Authors: Yuan Yuan; Muyu He; Muhammad Adil Shahid; Ziyang Li; Jiani Huang; Li Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper introduces TurnaboutLLM, a novel framework and dataset for evaluating the deductive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging the interactive gameplay of detective games Ace Attorney and Danganronpa. The framework tasks LLMs with identifying contradictions between testimonies and evidences within long narrative contexts, a challenging task due to the large answer space and diverse reasoning types presented by its questions. We evaluate twelve state-of-the-art LLMs on the dataset, hinting at limitations of popular strategies for enhancing deductive reasoning such as extensive thinking and Chain-of-Thought prompting. The results also suggest varying effects of context size, reasoning steps and answer space size on model performance. Overall, TurnaboutLLM presents a substantial challenge for LLMs’ deductive reasoning abilities in complex, narrative-rich environments.
Transferable Direct Prompt Injection via Activation-Guided MCMC Sampling
Authors: Minghui Li; Hao Zhang; Yechao Zhang; Wei Wan; Shengshan Hu; Pei Xiaobing; Jing Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Direct Prompt Injection (DPI) attacks pose a critical security threat to Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their low barrier of execution and high potential damage. To address the impracticality of existing white-box/gray-box methods and the poor transferability of black-box methods, we propose an activations-guided prompt injection attack framework. We first construct an Energy-based Model (EBM) using activations from a surrogate model to evaluate the quality of adversarial prompts. Guided by the trained EBM, we employ the token-level Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to adaptively optimize adversarial prompts, thereby enabling gradient-free black-box attacks. Experimental results demonstrate our superior cross-model transferability, achieving 49.6% attack success rate (ASR) across five mainstream LLMs and 34.6% improvement over human-crafted prompts, and maintaining 36.6% ASR on unseen task scenarios. Interpretability analysis reveals a correlation between activations and attack effectiveness, highlighting the critical role of semantic patterns in transferable vulnerability exploitation.
Direct Judgement Preference Optimization
Authors: PeiFeng Wang; Austin Xu; Yilun Zhou; Caiming Xiong; Shafiq Joty
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: To meet the increasing need for timely and accurate evaluation of large language model (LLM) responses, training LLM-as-judges to evaluate and critique other model responses has emerged as a popular paradigm. However, existing judge models are largely trained with supervised finetuning (SFT) on small data scales to perform limited types of evaluation tasks, fundamentally limiting generalization.To meet the need for strong, generalized judge models, we explore training foundational judge models at large data scales (680K) with direct preference optimization (DPO). Using four training tasks, we form three types of DPO preference pairs targeting different aspects of evaluation: Generating meaningful critiques, making accurate judgements, and understanding what comprises good and bad responses. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we train judge models of three sizes: 8B parameters, 12B, and 70B, and evaluate on a comprehensive suite of 13 benchmarks (7 pairwise, 4 single rating, and 2 classification). Our models achieve the best aggregate performance, with even our 8B model outperforming GPT-4o in pairwise benchmarks. Further analysis shows that our judge models produce factual and actionable critiques and serve as strong foundational judges for continued finetuning.
WebInject: Prompt Injection Attack to Web Agents
Authors: Xilong Wang; John Bloch; Zedian Shao; Yuepeng Hu; Shuyan Zhou; Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Multi-modal large language model (MLLM)-based web agents interact with webpage environments by generating actions based on screenshots of the webpages. In this work, we propose WebInject, a prompt injection attack that manipulates the webpage environment to induce a web agent to perform an attacker-specified action. Our attack adds a perturbation to the raw pixel values of the rendered webpage. After these perturbed pixels are mapped into a screenshot, the perturbation induces the web agent to perform the attacker-specified action. We formulate the task of finding the perturbation as an optimization problem. A key challenge in solving this problem is that the mapping between raw pixel values and screenshot is non-differentiable, making it difficult to backpropagate gradients to the perturbation. To overcome this, we train a neural network to approximate the mapping and apply projected gradient descent to solve the reformulated optimization problem. Extensive evaluation on multiple datasets shows that WebInject is highly effective and significantly outperforms baselines.
F²Bench: An Open-ended Fairness Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs with Factuality Considerations
Authors: Tian Lan; Jiang Li; Yemin Wang; Xu Liu; Xiangdong Su; Guanglai Gao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: With the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, concerns about their fairness have intensified. Yet, most existing fairness benchmarks rely on closed-ended evaluation formats, which diverge from real-world open-ended interactions. These formats are prone to position bias and introduce a “minimum score” effect, where models can earn partial credit simply by guessing. Moreover, such benchmarks often overlook factuality considerations rooted in historical, social, physiological, and cultural contexts, and rarely account for intersectional biases. To address these limitations, we propose F²Bench: an open-ended fairness evaluation benchmark for LLMs that explicitly incorporates factuality considerations. F²Bench comprises 2,568 instances across 10 demographic groups and two open-ended tasks. By integrating text generation, multi-turn reasoning, and factual grounding, F²Bench aims to more accurately reflect the complexities of real-world model usage. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several LLMs across different series and parameter sizes. Our results reveal that all models exhibit varying degrees of fairness issues. We further compare open-ended and closed-ended evaluations, analyze model-specific disparities, and provide actionable recommendations for future model development. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/VelikayaScarlet/F2Bench.
Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation
Authors: Taylor Sorensen; Pushkar Mishra; Roma Patel; Michael Henry Tessler; Michiel A. Bakker; Georgina Evans; Iason Gabriel; Noah Goodman; Verena Rieser
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Modelling human variation in rating tasks is crucial for enabling AI systems for personalization, pluralistic model alignment, and computational social science. We propose representing individuals using value profiles – natural language descriptions of underlying values compressed from in-context demonstrations – along with a steerable decoder model to estimate ratings conditioned on a value profile or other rater information. To measure the predictive information in rater representations, we introduce an information-theoretic methodology. We find that demonstrations contain the most information, followed by value profiles and then demographics. However, value profiles offer advantages in terms of scrutability, interpretability, and steerability due to their compressed natural language format. Value profiles effectively compress the useful information from demonstrations (70% information preservation). Furthermore, clustering value profiles to identify similarly behaving individuals better explains rater variation than the most predictive demographic groupings. Going beyond test set performance, we show that the decoder models interpretably change ratings according to semantic profile differences, are well-calibrated, and can help explain instance-level disagreement by simulating an annotator population. These results demonstrate that value profiles offer novel, predictive ways to describe individual variation beyond demographics or group information.
Language Models as Causal Effect Generators
Authors: Lucius E.j. Bynum; Kyunghyun Cho
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In this work, we present sequence-driven structural causal models (SD-SCMs), a framework for specifying causal models with user-defined structure and language-model-defined mechanisms. We characterize how an SD-SCM enables sampling from observational, interventional, and counterfactual distributions according to the desired causal structure. We then leverage this procedure to propose a new type of benchmark for causal inference methods, generating individual-level counterfactual data to test treatment effect estimation. We create an example benchmark consisting of thousands of datasets, and test a suite of popular estimation methods for average, conditional average, and individual treatment effect estimation. We find under this benchmark that (1) causal methods outperform non-causal methods and that (2) even state-of-the-art methods struggle with individualized effect estimation, suggesting this benchmark captures some inherent difficulties in causal estimation. Apart from generating data, this same technique can underpin the auditing of language models for (un)desirable causal effects, such as misinformation or discrimination. We believe SD-SCMs can serve as a useful tool in any application that would benefit from sequential data with controllable causal structure.
Constructions are Revealed in Word Distributions
Authors: Joshua Rozner; Leonie Weissweiler; Kyle Mahowald; Cory Shain
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Construction grammar posits that constructions, or form-meaning pairings, are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about constructions does this distribution actually contain? Corpus-based analyses provide some answers, but text alone cannot answer counterfactual questions about what caused a particular word to occur. This requires computable models of the distribution over strings—namely, pretrained language models (PLMs). Here, we treat a RoBERTa model as a proxy for this distribution and hypothesize that constructions will be revealed within it as patterns of statistical affinity. We support this hypothesis experimentally: many constructions are robustly distinguished, including (i) hard cases where semantically distinct constructions are superficially similar, as well as (ii) schematic constructions, whose "slots" can be filled by abstract word classes. Despite this success, we also provide qualitative evidence that statistical affinity alone may be insufficient to identify all constructions from text. Thus, statistical affinity is likely an important, but partial, signal available to learners.
CodeMixBench: Evaluating Code-Mixing Capabilities of LLMs Across 18 Languages
Authors: Yilun Yang; Yekun Chai
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Code-mixing, the practice of switching between languages within a conversation, poses unique challenges for traditional NLP. Existing benchmarks like LinCE and GLUECoS are limited by their narrow language pairs and tasks, failing to adequately assess large language models’ (LLMs) code-mixing abilities. Despite the recognized importance of code-mixing for multilingual users, research on LLMs in this context remains sparse. Additionally, current techniques for synthesizing code-mixed data are underdeveloped to generate code-mixing. In response, we introduce CodeMixBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering eight tasks, including three specific to LLMs and five traditional NLP tasks, and 18 languages from seven language families. We also propose a new method for generating large-scale synthetic code-mixed texts by combining word substitution with GPT-4 prompting. Our evaluation reveals consistent underperformance of LLMs on code-mixed datasets involving different language families. Enhancements in training data size, model scale, and few-shot learning could improve their performance. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jeromeyluck/CodeMixBench.
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design
Authors: Jiyue Jiang; Yitao Xu; Zikang Wang; Yihan Ye; Yanruisheng Shao; Yuheng Shan; Jiuming Wang; Xiaodan Fan; Jiao Yuan; Yu Li
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play essential roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation via recognizing specific RNA molecules as well as modulating several key physiological processes in cellulo, represented by alternative splicing and RNA degradation. Despite extensive research, most existing approaches still rely on superficial sequence features or coarse structural representations, limiting their ability to capture the intricate nature of RBP-RNA interactions. The recent surge in large language models (LLMs), combined with advances in geometric deep learning for extracting three-dimensional representations, enables the integration of multi-modal, multi-scale biological data for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design. In this work, we curate and extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset, and introduce RBPtool, a multi-task, multi-resolution framework that combines a geometric vector perception (GVP) module together with a deep language model encoder to fuse sequence and structural information. Our tool achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset, while also supporting fine-grained level predictions and enabling de novo RNA design through a generative module conditioned on protein, cell-type, and specified species. RBPtool provides a fast and versatile platform for both fundamental RBP-RNA research and practical RNA drug design, delivering enhanced predictive accuracy and fine-grained structural insights.
Unveiling Internal Reasoning Modes in LLMs: A Deep Dive into Latent Reasoning vs. Factual Shortcuts with Attribute Rate Ratio
Authors: Yiran Yang; Haifeng Sun; Jingyu Wang; Qi Qi; Zirui Zhuang; Huazheng Wang; Pengfei Ren; Jing Wang; Jianxin Liao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Existing research in multi-hop questions has identified two reasoning modes: latent reasoning and factual shortcuts, but has not deeply investigated how these modes differ during inference. This impacts both model generalization ability and downstream reasoning tasks. In this work, we systematically examine these distinctions and propose a simple and efficient classification metric, Attribute Rate Ratio (ARR). First, we construct specialized datasets corresponding to the two reasoning modes based on our proposed criteria. Then, using reverse engineering methods, including attention knockout and logit lens techniques, we reveal that subject representations differ significantly across modes: latent reasoning encodes bridge-related information for final answer extraction, while factual shortcuts bypass intermediate reasoning and resemble single-hop factual queries. Finally, our proposed ARR achieves around 90% accuracy on our datasets and demonstrates effectiveness in RAG conflict scenarios, showing that model behavior under conflicting prompts is closely tied to its underlying reasoning mode. Our findings and proposed metric have significant potential for advancing LLM development and applications.
SAE-SSV: Supervised Steering in Sparse Representation Spaces for Reliable Control of Language Models
Authors: Zirui He; Mingyu Jin; Bo Shen; Ali Payani; Yongfeng Zhang; Mengnan Du
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper introduces a novel supervised steering approach that operates in sparse, interpretable representation spaces. We employ sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to obtain sparse latent representations that aim to disentangle semantic attributes from model activations. Then we train linear classifiers to identify a small subspace of task-relevant dimensions in latent representations. Finally, we learn supervised steering vectors constrained to this subspace, optimized to align with target behaviors. Experiments across sentiment, truthfulness, and politics polarity steering tasks with multiple LLMs demonstrate that our supervised steering vectors achieve higher success rates with minimal degradation in generation quality compared to existing methods. Further analysis reveals that a notably small subspace is sufficient for effective steering, enabling more targeted and interpretable interventions.
BabyLM’s First Constructions: Causal interventions provide a signal of learning
Authors: Joshua Rozner; Leonie Weissweiler; Cory Shain
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Construction grammar posits that language learners acquire constructions (form-meaning pairings) from the statistics of their environment. Recent work supports this hypothesis by showing sensitivity to constructions in pretrained language models (PLMs), including one recent study (Rozner et al., 2025) demonstrating that constructions shape RoBERTa’s output distribution. However, models under study have generally been trained on developmentally implausible amounts of data, casting doubt on their relevance to human language learning. Here we use Rozner et al.’s methods to evaluate construction learning in masked language models from the 2024 BabyLM Challenge.Our results show that even when trained on developmentally plausible quantities of data, models learn diverse constructions, even hard cases that are superficially indistinguishable.We further find correlational evidence that constructional performance may be functionally relevant: models that better represent constructions perform better on the BabyLM benchmarks.