GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
FiNE: Filtering and Improving Noisy Data Elaborately with Large Language Models
Authors: Junliang He; Ziyue Fan; Shaohui Kuang; Li Xiaoqing; Kai Song; Yaqian Zhou; Xipeng Qiu
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Data is the lifeblood of large language models (LLMs). While the quantity of open-source data available for training LLMs is substantial, its integrity often falls short. For instance, the open-source chat version of Yi-1.5-9B scores 5.20 on AlignBench, while the Chinese Alpaca-GPT4 version scores 4.12. This discrepancy makes it challenging for developers to create models that excel in downstream tasks and instruction following. Therefore, it is essential to improve data integrity. Currently, there are two mainstream methods for enhancing data integrity: data filtering and data augmentation. Due to the labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of performing these tasks manually, some of these efforts are now being undertaken by LLMs, owing to their high alignment with human preferences. However, we have found that performing data filtering or data augmentation with LLMs has limited effectiveness in improving data integrity. In this work, we propose FiNE (Filtering and Improving Noisy data Elaborately), a method that performs refined filtering and improvement of training data with LLMs. Using the data obtained through our method to train Yi-1.5-9B, the performance gap on AlignBench between our model and the open-source chat version is reduced from 1.08 to 0.35. Additionally, on HalluQA, our model surpasses the open-source chat version by 8.45.
CAMIEval: Enhancing NLG Evaluation through Multidimensional Comparative Instruction-Following Analysis
Authors: Ziyue Fan; Junliang He; Li Xiaoqing; Shaohui Kuang; Kai Song; Yaqian Zhou; Xipeng Qiu
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), due to their strong performance across various fields, LLM-based evaluation methods (LLM-as-a-Judge) have become widely used in natural language generation (NLG) evaluation. However, these methods encounter the following challenges: (1) distinguishing instruction-following ability, (2) being applicable across diverse NLG tasks, and (3) identifying low-quality outputs. To address these issues, we propose CAMIEval, a multidimensional comparative evaluation method based on instruction-following. Specifically, we define three fundamental dimensions of instruction-following: relevance, factuality, and adherence. Subsequently, we introduce a concrete Chain-of-Thoughts (ConcreteCoT) process to enhance the accuracy of evaluations. In addition, we trained a “regrettable model” RegretLM to generate low-quality outputs, which helps the evaluator better identify the potential shortcomings of the candidate output by comparing low-quality outputs with reference outputs. Through this comparison, the evaluator can generate instruction-specific dimensions that complement the fundamental dimensions, forming a more comprehensive evaluation metric system. Experiments on two NLG evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that CAMIEval consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of correlation with human evaluations, providing a general and accurate framework for evaluating the outputs of LLMs.
LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios
Authors: Pei Chen; Hongye Jin; Cheng-Che Lee; Rulin Shao; Jingfeng Yang; Mingyu Zhao; Zhaoyu Zhang; Qin Lu; Kaiwen Men; Ning Xie; Huasheng Li; Bing Yin; Han Li; Lingyun Wang
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by Claude and LLama, have exhibited impressive proficiency in tackling a myriad of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, in pursuit of the ambitious goal of attaining Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there remains ample room for enhancing LLM capabilities. Chief among these is the pressing need to bolster long-context comprehension. Numerous real-world scenarios demand LLMs to adeptly reason across extended contexts, such as multi-turn dialogues or agent workflow. Hence, recent advancements have been dedicated to stretching the upper bounds of long-context comprehension, with models like Claude 3 accommodating up to 200k tokens, employing various techniques to achieve this feat. Aligned with this progression, we propose a leaderboard LongLeader that seeks to comprehensively assess different long-context comprehension abilities of diverse LLMs and context length extension strategies across meticulously selected benchmarks. Specifically, we aim to address the following questions: 1) Do LLMs genuinely deliver the long-context proficiency they purport? 2) Which benchmarks offer reliable metrics for evaluating long-context comprehension? 3) What technical strategies prove effective in extending the understanding of longer contexts? We streamline the evaluation process for LLMs on the benchmarks, offering open-source access to the benchmarks and maintaining a dedicated website for leaderboards. We will continuously curate new datasets and update models to the leaderboards.
Language Models Can Infer Action Semantics for Symbolic Planners from Environment Feedback
Authors: Wang Bill Zhu; Ishika Singh; Robin Jia; Jesse Thomason
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Symbolic planners can discover a sequence of actions from initial to goal states given expert-defined, domain-specific logical action semantics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can directly generate such sequences, but limitations in reasoning and state-tracking often result in plans that are insufficient or unexecutable. We propose Predicting Semantics of Actions with Language Models (PSALM), which automatically learns action semantics by leveraging the strengths of both symbolic planners and LLMs. PSALM repeatedly proposes and executes plans, using the LLM to partially generate plans and to infer domain-specific action semantics based on execution outcomes. PSALM maintains a belief over possible action semantics that is iteratively updated until a goal state is reached. Experiments on 7 environments show that when learning just from one goal, PSALM boosts plan success rate from 36.4% (on Claude-3.5) to 100%, and explores the environment more efficiently than prior work to infer ground truth domain action semantics.
SLM-Mod: Small Language Models Surpass LLMs at Content Moderation
Authors: Xianyang Zhan; Agam Goyal; Yilun Chen; Eshwar Chandrasekharan; Koustuv Saha
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in many natural language understanding tasks, including content moderation. However, these models can be expensive to query in real-time and do not allow for a community-specific approach to content moderation. To address these challenges, we explore the use of open-source small language models (SLMs) for community-specific content moderation tasks. We fine-tune and evaluate SLMs (less than 15B parameters) by comparing their performance against much larger open- and closed-sourced models in both a zero-shot and few-shot setting. Using 150K comments from 15 popular Reddit communities, we find that SLMs outperform zero-shot LLMs at content moderation-11.5% higher accuracy and 25.7% higher recall on average across all communities. Moreover, few-shot in-context learning leads to only a marginal increase in the performance of LLMs, still lacking compared to SLMs. We further show the promise of cross-community content moderation, which has implications for new communities and the development of cross-platform moderation techniques. Finally, we outline directions for future work on language model based content moderation.
On Positional Bias of Faithfulness for Long-form Summarization
Authors: David Wan; Jesse Vig; Mohit Bansal; Shafiq Joty
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit positional bias in long-context settings, under-attending to information in the middle of inputs. We investigate the presence of this bias in long-form summarization, its impact on faithfulness, and various techniques to mitigate this bias. To consistently evaluate faithfulness, we first compile a benchmark of eight human-annotated long-form summarization datasets and perform a meta-evaluation of faithfulness metrics. We show that LLM-based faithfulness metrics, though effective with full-context inputs, remain sensitive to document order, indicating positional bias. Analyzing LLM-generated summaries across six datasets, we find a “U-shaped” trend in faithfulness, where LLMs faithfully summarize the beginning and end of documents but neglect middle content. Perturbing document order similarly reveals models are less faithful when important documents are placed in the middle of the input. We find that this behavior is partly due to shifting focus with context length: as context increases, summaries become less faithful, but beyond a certain length, faithfulness improves as the model focuses on the end. Finally, we experiment with different generation techniques to reduce positional bias and find that prompting techniques effectively direct model attention to specific positions, whereas more sophisticated approaches offer limited improvements. Our data and code will be publicly available.
BPO: Towards Balanced Preference Optimization between Knowledge Breadth and Depth in Alignment
Authors: Sizhe Wang; Yongqi Tong; Hengyuan Zhang; Dawei Li; Xin Zhang; Tianlong Chen
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is the key to the success of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. In this work, we first introduce the concepts of knowledge breadth and knowledge depth, which measure the comprehensiveness and depth of an LLM or knowledge source respectively. We reveal that the imbalance in the number of prompts and responses can lead to a potential disparity in breadth and depth learning within alignment tuning datasets by showing that even a simple uniform method for balancing the number of instructions and responses can lead to significant improvements. Building on this, we further propose Balanced Preference Optimization (BPO), designed to dynamically augment the knowledge depth of each sample. BPO is motivated by the observation that the usefulness of knowledge varies across samples, necessitating tailored learning of knowledge depth. To achieve this, we introduce gradient-based clustering, estimating the knowledge informativeness and usefulness of each augmented sample based on the model’s optimization direction. Our experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate that BPO outperforms other baseline methods in alignment tuning while maintaining training efficiency. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis of each component of BPO, providing guidelines for future research in preference data optimization.
UNDIAL: Self-Distillation with Adjusted Logits for Robust Unlearning in Large Language Models
Authors: Yijiang River Dong; Hongzhou Lin; Mikhail Belkin; Ramon Huerta; Ivan Vulić
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Mitigating the retention of sensitive or private information in large language models is essential for enhancing privacy and safety. Existing unlearning methods, like Gradient Ascent and Negative Preference Optimization, directly tune models to remove unwanted information. However, these methods often become unstable because they fine-tune by maximizing loss, which is the opposite of traditional loss minimization in learning. This reversal creates instability, especially on larger datasets, as the model struggles to balance unlearning with maintaining language capacity, leading to over-unlearning. In this paper, we introduce UnDIAL (Unlearning via Self-Distillation on Adjusted Logits), a novel and robust unlearning method. Our approach leverages self-distillation to adjust logits and selectively reduce the influence of targeted tokens. This technique ensures smooth convergence and avoids catastrophic forgetting, even in challenging unlearning tasks with large datasets and sequential unlearning requests. Extensive experiments show that UnDIAL is the first direct tuning method to achieve both robustness in unlearning and scalability, while maintaining stable training dynamics and resilience to hyperparameter tuning.
H-STAR: LLM-driven Hybrid SQL-Text Adaptive Reasoning on Tables
Authors: Nikhil Abhyankar; Vivek Gupta; Dan Roth; Chandan K. Reddy
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Tabular reasoning involves interpreting natural language queries about tabular data, which presents a unique challenge of combining language understanding with structured data analysis. Existing methods employ either textual reasoning, which excels in semantic interpretation but struggles with mathematical operations, or symbolic reasoning, which handles computations well but lacks semantic understanding. This paper introduces a novel algorithm H-STAR that integrates both symbolic and semantic (textual) approaches in a two-stage process to address these limitations. H-STAR employs: (1) step-wise table extraction using ‘multi-view’ column retrieval followed by row extraction, and (2) adaptive reasoning that adapts reasoning strategies based on question types, utilizing semantic reasoning for direct lookup and complex lexical queries while augmenting textual reasoning with symbolic reasoning support for quantitative and logical tasks. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that H-STAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three tabular question-answering (QA) and fact-verification datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and efficiency.
Kill two birds with one stone: generalized and robust AI-generated text detection via dynamic perturbations
Authors: Yinghan Zhou; Juan Wen; Wanli Peng; Xue Yiming; ZiWei Zhang; Wu Zhengxian
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The growing popularity of large language models has raised concerns regarding the potential to misuse AI-generated text (AIGT). It becomes increasingly critical to establish an excellent AIGT detection method with high generalization and robustness.While, existing methods either focus on model generalization or concentrate on robustness.The unified mechanism, to simultaneously address the challenges of generalization and robustness, is less explored. In this paper, we first empirically reveal an intrinsic mechanism for model generalization and robustness of AIGT detection task.Then, we proposed a novel AIGT detection method (DP-Net) via dynamic perturbations introduced by a reinforcement learning with elaborated reward and action.Experimentally, extensive results show that the proposed DP-Net significantly outperforms some state-of-the-art AIGT detection methods for generalization capacity in three cross-domain scenarios.Meanwhile, the DP-Net achieves best robustness under two text adversarial attacks.
Vision-Language Models Can Self-Improve Reasoning via Reflection
Authors: Kanzhi Cheng; Li YanTao; Fangzhi Xu; Jianbing Zhang; Hao Zhou; Yang Liu
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) has proven to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). However, due to the complexity of multimodal scenarios and the difficulty in collecting high-quality CoT data, CoT reasoning in multimodal LLMs has been largely overlooked. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective self-training framework, R3V, which iteratively enhances the model’s Vision-language Reasoning by Reflecting on CoT Rationales. Our framework consists of two interleaved parts: (1) iteratively bootstrapping positive and negative solutions for reasoning datasets, and (2) reflection on rationale for learning from mistakes. Specifically, we introduce the self-refine and self-select losses, enabling the model to refine flawed rationale and derive the correct answer by comparing rationale candidates. Experiments on a wide range of vision-language tasks show that R3V consistently improves multimodal LLM reasoning, achieving a relative improvement of 23% to 60% over GPT-distilled baselines. Additionally, our approach supports self-reflection on generated solutions, further boosting performance through test-time computation. Our code is available at https://github.com/njucckevin/MM-Self-Improve.
Emergence of Episodic Memory in Transformers: Characterizing Changes in Temporal Structure of Attention Scores During Training
Authors: Deven Mahesh Mistry; Anooshka Bajaj; Yash Aggarwal; Sahaj Singh Maini; Zoran Tiganj
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: We investigate in-context temporal biases in attention heads and transformer outputs. Using cognitive science methodologies, we analyze attention scores and outputs of the GPT-2 models of varying sizes. Across attention heads, we observe effects characteristic of human episodic memory, including temporal contiguity, primacy and recency. Transformer outputs demonstrate a tendency toward in-context serial recall. Importantly, this effect is eliminated after the ablation of the induction heads, which are the driving force behind the contiguity effect. Our findings offer insights into how transformers organize information temporally during in-context learning, shedding light on their similarities and differences with human memory and learning.
Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation
Authors: Xiangrong Zhu; Yuexiang Xie; Yi Liu; Yaliang Li; Wei Hu
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising technology for addressing hallucination issues in the responses generated by large language models (LLMs). Existing studies on RAG primarily focus on applying semantic-based approaches to retrieve isolated relevant chunks, which ignore their intrinsic relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation (KG2RAG) framework that utilizes knowledge graphs (KGs) to provide fact-level relationships between chunks, improving the diversity and coherence of the retrieved results. Specifically, after performing a semantic-based retrieval to provide seed chunks, KG2RAG employs a KG-guided chunk expansion process and a KG-based chunk organization process to deliver relevant and important knowledge in well-organized paragraphs. Extensive experiments conducted on the HotpotQA dataset and its variants demonstrate the advantages of KG2RAG compared to existing RAG-based approaches, in terms of both response quality and retrieval quality.
Amphista: Bi-directional Multi-head Decoding for Accelerating LLM Inference
Authors: Zeping Li; Xinlong Yang; Ziheng Gao; Ji Liu; Guanchen Li; Zhuang Liu; Dong Li; Jinzhang Peng; Lu Tian; Emad Barsoum
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently use autoregressive decoding, which lacks parallelism in inference and results in significantly slow inference speed. While methods such as Medusa constructs parallelized heads, they lack adequate information interaction across different prediction positions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Amphista, an enhanced speculative decoding framework that builds upon Medusa. Specifically, Amphista models an *Auto-embedding Block* capable of parallel inference, incorporating bi-directional attention to enable interaction between different drafting heads. Additionally, Amphista integrates *Staged Adaptation Layers*, which ensure a seamless transition of semantic information from the target model’s autoregressive inference to the drafting heads’ non-autoregressive inference, effectively achieving paradigm shift and feature fusion. Experimental results on Vicuna models using MT-Bench and Spec-Bench demonstrate that Amphista achieves substantial acceleration while maintaining generation quality. On MT-Bench, Amphista delivers up to **2.75×** speedup over vanilla autoregressive decoding and **1.40×** over Medusa on Vicuna 33B in wall-clock time.
CAVE: Controllable Authorship Verification Explanations
Authors: Sahana Ramnath; Kartik Pandey; Elizabeth Boschee; Xiang Ren
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Authorship Verification (AV) (do two documents have the same author?) is essential in many real-life applications. AV is often used in privacy-sensitive domains that require an offline proprietary model that is deployed on premises, making publicly served online models (APIs) a suboptimal choice. Current offline AV models however have lower downstream utility due to limited accuracy (eg: traditional stylometry AV systems) and lack of accessible post-hoc explanations. In this work, we address the above challenges by developing a trained, offline model CAVE (Controllable Authorship Verification Explanations). CAVE generates free-text AV explanations that are controlled to be (1) accessible (uniform structure that can be decomposed into sub-explanations grounded to relevant linguistic features), and (2) easily verified for explanation-label consistency. We generate silver-standard training data grounded to the desirable linguistic features by a prompt-based method Prompt-CAVE. We then filter the data based on rationale-label consistency using a novel metric Cons-R-L. Finally, we fine-tune a small, offline model (Llama-3-8B) with this data to create our model CAVE. Results on three difficult AV datasets show that CAVE generates high quality explanations (as measured by automatic and human evaluation) as well as competitive task accuracy. We have submitted our code and datasets as supplementary material.