GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
KBM: Delineating Knowledge Boundary for Adaptive Retrieval in Large Language Models
Authors: Zhen Zhang; Xinyu Wang; Yong Jiang; Zile Qiao; Zhuo Chen; Guangyu Li; Feiteng Mu; Mengting Hu; Pengjun Xie; Fei Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with dynamically changing knowledge and handling unknown static information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges and has a significant impact on improving LLM performance. In fact, we find that not all questions need to trigger RAG. By retrieving parts of knowledge unknown to the LLM and allowing the LLM to answer the rest, we can effectively reduce both time and computational costs. In our work, we propose a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) to express the known/unknown of a given question, and to determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered. Experiments conducted on 11 English and Chinese datasets illustrate that the KBM effectively delineates the knowledge boundary, significantly decreasing the proportion of retrievals required for optimal end-to-end performance. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of KBM in three complex scenarios: dynamic knowledge, long-tail static knowledge, and multi-hop problems, as well as its functionality as an external LLM plug-in.
TABARD: A Novel Benchmark for Tabular Anomaly Analysis, Reasoning and Detection
Authors: Manan Roy Choudhury; Anirudh Iyengar Kaniyar Narayana Iyengar; Shikhhar Siingh; Sugeeth Puranam; Vivek Gupta
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: We study the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in detecting fine-grained anomalies in tabular data. Specifically, we examine: (1) how well LLMs can identify diverse anomaly types including factual, logical, temporal, and value-based errors; (2) the impact of prompt design and prompting strategies; and (3) the effect of table structure and anomaly type on detection accuracy. To this end, we introduce TABARD, a new benchmark constructed by perturbing tables from WikiTQ, FeTaQA, Spider, and BEAVER. The dataset spans multiple domains and eight anomaly categories, including paired clean and corrupted tables. We evaluate LLMs using direct, indirect, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. Our results reveal notable limitations in standard prompting, especially for complex reasoning tasks and longer tables. To overcome these issues, we propose a unified framework combining multi-step prompting, self-verification, and constraint-based rule execution. Our approach significantly improves precision and recall, offering a promising direction for robust and interpretable anomaly detection in tables.
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Synthetic Image Generation
Authors: Ge Chen; Zhongqing Wang; Guodong Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Recent advancements in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) have shown promising results, yet the semantics derived solely from textual data remain limited. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach by venturing into the unexplored territory of generating sentimental images. Our method introduce a synthetic image generation framework tailored to produce images that are highly congruent with both textual and sentimental information for aspect-based sentiment analysis. Specifically, we firstly develop a supervised image generation model to generate synthetic images with alignment to both text and sentiment information. Furthermore, we employ a visual refinement technique to substantially enhance the quality and pertinence of the generated images. After that, we propose a multi-modal model to integrate both the original text and the synthetic images for aspect-based sentiment analysis. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. These results highlight the effectiveness of our supervised image generation approach in enhancing ABSA.
IntrEx: A Dataset for Modeling Engagement in Educational Conversations
Authors: Xingwei Tan; Mahathi Parvatham; Chiara Gambi; Gabriele Pergola
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Engagement and motivation are crucial for second-language acquisition, yet maintaining learner interest in educational conversations remains a challenge. While prior research has explored what makes educational texts interesting, still little is known about the linguistic features that drive engagement in conversations. To address this gap, we introduce IntrEx, the first large dataset annotated for interestingness and expected interestingness in teacher-student interactions. Built upon the Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus (TSCC), IntrEx extends prior work by incorporating sequence-level annotations, allowing for the study of engagement beyond isolated turns to capture how interest evolves over extended dialogues. We employ a rigorous annotation process with over 100 second-language learners, using a comparison-based rating approach inspired by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to improve agreement. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can predict human interestingness judgments. We find that LLMs (7B/8B parameters) fine-tuned on interestingness ratings outperform larger proprietary models like GPT-4o, demonstrating the potential for specialised datasets to model engagement in educational settings. Finally, we analyze how linguistic and cognitive factors, such as concreteness, comprehensibility (readability), and uptake, influence engagement in educational dialogues.
Bridging the Capability Gap: Joint Alignment Tuning for Harmonizing LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems
Authors: Minghang Zhu; Zhengliang Shi; Zhiwei Xu; Shiguang Wu; Lingjie Wang; Pengjie Ren; Zhaochun Ren; Zhumin Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the construction of multi-agent systems to solve complex tasks by dividing responsibilities among specialized agents, such as a planning agent for subgoal generation and a grounding agent for executing tool-use actions. Most existing methods typically fine-tune these agents independently, leading to capability gaps among them with poor coordination. To address this, we propose MOAT, a Multi-Agent Joint Alignment Tuning framework that improves agents collaboration through iterative alignment. MOAT alternates between two key stages: (1) Planning Agent Alignment, which optimizes the planning agent to generate subgoal sequences that better guide the grounding agent; and (2) Grounding Agent Improving, which fine-tunes the grounding agent using diverse subgoal-action pairs generated by the agent itself to enhance its generalization capablity. Theoretical analysis proves that MOAT ensures a non-decreasing and progressively convergent training process. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that MOAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving average improvements of 3.1% on held-in tasks and 4.4% on held-out tasks.
Safety Through Reasoning: An Empirical Study of Reasoning Guardrail Models
Authors: Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar; Traian Rebedea; Christopher Parisien
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Reasoning-based language models have demonstrated strong performance across various domains, with the most notable gains seen in mathematical and coding tasks. Recent research has shown that reasoning also offers significant benefits for LLM safety and guardrail applications. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of training reasoning-based guardrail models for content moderation, with an emphasis on generalization to custom safety policies at inference time. Our study focuses on two key dimensions: data efficiency and inference efficiency. On the data front, we find that reasoning-based models exhibit strong sample efficiency, achieving competitive performance with significantly fewer training examples than their non-reasoning counterparts. This unlocks the potential to repurpose the remaining data for mining high-value, difficult samples that further enhance model performance. On the inference side, we evaluate practical trade-offs by introducing reasoning budgets, examining the impact of reasoning length on latency and accuracy, and exploring dual-mode training to allow runtime control over reasoning behavior. Our findings will provide practical insights for researchers and developers to effectively and efficiently train and deploy reasoning-based guardrails models in real-world systems.
Context-Aware Reasoning On Parametric Knowledge for Inferring Causal Variables
Authors: Ivaxi Sheth; Sahar Abdelnabi; Mario Fritz
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Scientific discovery catalyzes human intellectual advances, driven by the cycle of hypothesis generation, experimental design, evaluation, and assumption refinement. Central to this process is causal inference, uncovering the mechanisms behind observed phenomena. While randomized experiments provide strong inferences, they are often infeasible due to ethical or practical constraints. However, observational studies are prone to confounding or mediating biases. While crucial, identifying such backdoor paths is expensive and heavily depends on scientists’ domain knowledge to generate hypotheses. We introduce a novel benchmark where the objective is to complete a partial causal graph. We design a benchmark with varying difficulty levels with over 4000 queries. We show the strong ability of LLMs to hypothesize the backdoor variables between a cause and its effect. Unlike simple knowledge memorization of fixed associations, our task requires the LLM to reason according to the context of the entire graph.
LoRE-Merging: Exploring Low-Rank Estimation For Large Language Model Merging
Authors: Zehua Liu; Han Wu; Yuxuan Yao; Xiaojin Fu; Ruifeng She; Xiongwei Han; Tao Zhong; Mingxuan Yuan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: While most current approaches rely on further training techniques, such as fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, to enhance model capacities, model merging stands out for its ability of improving models without requiring any additional training. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for model merging based on low-rank estimation of task vectors without the need for access to the base model, named LoRE-Merging. Our approach is motivated by the observation that task vectors from fine-tuned models frequently exhibit a limited number of dominant singular values, making low-rank estimations less prone to interference. We implement the method by formulating the merging problem as an optimization problem. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in mitigating interference and preserving task-specific information, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art performance in model merging techniques.
Benchmarking Foundation Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Olympic-Level Physics Problem Solving
Authors: Shunfeng Zheng; Yudi Zhang; Meng Fang; Zihan Zhang; Zhitan Wu; Mykola Pechenizkiy; Ling Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with foundation models has achieved strong performance across diverse tasks, but their capacity for expert-level reasoning—such as solving Olympiad-level physics problems—remains largely unexplored. Inspired by the way students prepare for competitions by reviewing past problems, we investigate the potential of RAG to enhance physics reasoning in foundation models. We introduce PhoPile, a high-quality multimodal dataset specifically designed for Olympiad-level physics, enabling systematic study of retrieval-based reasoning. PhoPile includes diagrams, graphs, and equations, capturing the inherently multimodal nature of physics problem solving. Using PhoPile, we benchmark RAG-augmented foundation models, covering both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) with multiple retrievers. Our results demonstrate that integrating retrieval with physics corpora can improve model performance, while also highlighting challenges that motivate further research in retrieval-augmented physics reasoning.
FiRST: Finetuning Router-Selective Transformers for Input-Adaptive Latency Reduction
Authors: Akriti Jain; Saransh Sharma; Koyel Mukherjee; Soumyabrata Pal
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Auto-regressive Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across different domains such as vision and language tasks. However, due to sequential processing through multiple transformer layers, autoregressive decoding faces significant computational challenges, particularly in resource-constrained environments like mobile and edge devices. Existing approaches in literature that aim to improve latency via skipping layers have two distinct flavors: (1) early exit, and (2) input-agnostic heuristics where tokens exit at pre-determined layers irrespective of input sequence. Both the above strategies have limitations, the former cannot be applied in the presence of KV caching, which is essential for speed-ups in modern inference frameworks, and the latter fails to capture variation in layer importance across tasks or, more generally, across input sequences. To address these limitations, we propose FiRST, a model-agnostic framework that reduces inference latency by using layer-specific routers to adaptively skip transformer layers during decoding, based on routing decisions made from the input prompt in the prefill stage. FiRST remains fully compatible with KV caching, enabling faster decoding while maintaining quality. Our method reveals that input adaptivity is essential: Different tasks rely on different subsets of layers to evolve meaningful representations. Extensive experiments show that FiRST significantly reduces latency while outperforming existing layer selection strategies in quality. It retains performance comparable to the base model without skipping. FiRST is thus a promising and efficient solution for LLM deployment in low-resource environments.
PolitiSky24: U.S. Political Bluesky Dataset with User Stance Labels
Authors: Peyman Rostami; Vahid Rahimzadeh; Ali Adibi; Azadeh Shakery
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Stance detection identifies the viewpoint expressed in text toward a specific target, such as a political figure. While previous datasets have focused primarily on tweet-level stances from established platforms, user-level stance resources—especially on emerging platforms like Bluesky—remain scarce. User-level stance detection provides a more holistic view by considering a user’s complete posting history rather than isolated posts. We present the first stance detection dataset for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, collected from Bluesky and centered on Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The dataset comprises 16,044 user-target stance pairs enriched with engagement metadata, interaction graphs, and user posting histories. PolitiSky24 was created using a carefully evaluated pipeline combining advanced information retrieval and large language models, which generates stance labels with supporting rationales and text spans for transparency. The labeling approach achieves 81% accuracy with scalable LLMs. This resource addresses gaps in political stance analysis through its timeliness, open-data nature, and user-level perspective. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15616911.
From Ground Trust to Truth: Disparities in Offensive Language Judgments on Contemporary Korean Political Discourse
Authors: Seunguk Yu; JungMin Yun; Jinhee Jang; YoungBin Kim
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Although offensive language continually evolves over time, even recent studies using LLMs have predominantly relied on outdated datasets and rarely evaluated the generalization ability on unseen texts. In this study, we constructed a large-scale dataset of contemporary political discourse and employed three refined judgments in the absence of ground truth. Each judgment reflects a representative offensive language detection method and is carefully designed for optimal conditions. We identified distinct patterns for each judgment and demonstrated tendencies of label agreement using a leave-one-out strategy. By establishing pseudo-labels as ground trust for quantitative performance assessment, we observed that a strategically designed single prompting achieves comparable performance to more resource-intensive methods. This suggests a feasible approach applicable in real-world settings with inherent constraints.
Misalignment Attack on Text-to-Image Models via Text Embedding Optimization and Inversion
Authors: Zhijie Du; Daizong Liu; Pan Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Text embedding serves not only as a core component of modern NLP models but also plays a pivotal role in multimodal systems such as text-to-image (T2I) models, significantly facilitating user-friendly image generation through natural language instructions. However, with the convenience being brought, it also introduces additional risks. Misalignment issues of T2I models, whether caused by unintentional user inputs or targeted attacks, can negatively impact the reliability and ethics of these models. In this paper, we introduce TEOI, which fully considers the continuity and distribution characteristics of text embeddings. The framework directly optimizes the embeddings using gradient-based methods and then inverts them to obtain misaligned prompts of discrete tokens. The TEOI framework is capable of conducting both text-modal and multimodal misalignment attacks, revealing the vulnerabilities of multimodal models that rely on text embeddings. Our work highlights the potential risks associated with embedding-based text representations in prevailing T2I models and provides a foundation for further research into robust and secure text-to-image generation systems.
Domain Pre-training Impact on Representations
Authors: Cesar Gonzalez-Gutierrez; Ariadna Quattoni
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: This empirical study analyzes how the choice of pre-training corpus affects the quality of learned transformer representations. We focus specifically on the representation quality achieved through pre-training alone. Our experiments demonstrate that pre-training on a small, specialized corpus can produce effective representations, and that the effectiveness of combining a generic and a specialized corpora depends on the distributional similarity between the target task and the specialized corpus.
KoACD: The First Korean Adolescent Dataset for Cognitive Distortion Analysis via Role-Switching Multi-LLM Negotiation
Authors: Jun Seo Kim; Hye Hyeon Kim
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Cognitive distortion refers to negative thinking patterns that can lead to mental health issues like depression and anxiety in adolescents. Previous studies using natural language processing (NLP) have focused mainly on small-scale adult datasets, with limited research on adolescents. This study introduces KoACD, the first large-scale dataset of cognitive distortions in Korean adolescents, containing 108,717 instances. We applied a multi-Large Language Model (LLM) negotiation method to refine distortion classification, enabling iterative feedback and role-switching between models to reduce bias and improve label consistency. In addition, we generated synthetic data using two approaches: cognitive clarification for textual clarity and cognitive balancing for diverse distortion representation. Validation through LLMs and expert evaluations showed that while LLMs classified distortions with explicit markers, they struggled with context-dependent reasoning, where human evaluators demonstrated higher accuracy. KoACD aims to enhance future research on cognitive distortion detection. The dataset and implementation details are publicly accessible.
Refined Assessment for Translation Evaluation: Rethinking Machine Translation Evaluation in the Era of Human-Level Systems
Authors: Dmitry Popov; Vladislav Negodin; Ekaterina Enikeeva; Iana Matrosova; Nikolay Karpachev; Max Ryabinin
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: As machine translation systems approach human-level quality, traditional evaluation methodologies struggle to detect subtle translation errors. We critically examine limitations in current gold-standard approaches (MQM and ESA), including inconsistencies from variable annotator expertise, excessive categorization complexity, coarse severity granularity, accuracy bias over fluency, and time constraints. To address this issue, we introduce a high-quality dataset consisting of human evaluations for English–Russian translations from WMT24, created by professional linguists. We show that expert assessments without time pressure yield substantially different results from standard evaluations. To enable consistent and rich annotation by these experts, we developed the RATE (Refined Assessment for Translation Evaluation) protocol. RATE provides a streamlined error taxonomy, expanded severity ratings, and multidimensional scoring balancing accuracy and fluency, facilitating deeper analysis of MT outputs. Our analysis, powered by this expert dataset, reveals that state-of-the-art MT systems may have surpassed human translations in accuracy while still lagging in fluency – a critical distinction obscured by existing accuracy-biased metrics. Our findings highlight that advancing MT evaluation requires not only better protocols but crucially, high-quality annotations from skilled linguists.
Pre-Storage Reasoning for Episodic Memory: Shifting Inference Burden to Memory for Personalized Dialogue
Authors: Sangyeop Kim; Yohan Lee; Sanghwa Kim; Hyunjong Kim; Sungzoon Cho
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Effective long-term memory in conversational AI requires synthesizing information across multiple sessions. However, current systems place excessive reasoning burden on response generation, making performance significantly dependent on model sizes. We introduce PREMem (Pre-storage Reasoning for Episodic Memory), a novel approach that shifts complex reasoning processes from inference to memory construction. PREMem extracts fine-grained memory fragments categorized into factual, experiential, and subjective information; it then establishes explicit relationships between memory items across sessions, capturing evolution patterns like extensions, transformations, and implications. By performing this reasoning during pre-storage rather than when generating a response, PREMem creates enriched representations while reducing computational demands during interactions. Experiments show significant performance improvements across all model sizes, with smaller models achieving results comparable to much larger baselines while maintaining effectiveness even with constrained token budgets. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/sangyeop-kim/PREMem.