GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
LLM-Driven Implicit Target Augmentation and Fine-Grained Contextual Modeling for Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Stance Detection
Authors: Yanxu Ji; Jinzhong Ning; Yijia Zhang; Zhi Liu; Hongfei Lin
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Stance detection aims to identify the attitude expressed in text towards a specific target. Recent studies on zero-shot and few-shot stance detection focus primarily on learning generalized representations from explicit targets. However, these methods often neglect implicit yet semantically important targets and fail to adaptively adjust the relative contributions of text and target in light of contextual dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel two-stage framework: First, a data augmentation framework named Hierarchical Collaborative Target Augmentation (HCTA) employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and annotate implicit targets via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and multi-LLM voting, significantly enriching training data with latent semantic relations. Second, we introduce DyMCA, a Dynamic Multi-level Context-aware Attention Network, integrating a joint text-target encoding and a content-aware mechanism to dynamically adjust text-target contributions based on context. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, confirming the effectiveness of implicit target augmentation and fine-grained contextual modeling.
Dial-In LLM: Human-Aligned LLM-in-the-loop Intent Clustering for Customer Service Dialogues
Authors: Mengze Hong; Wailing Ng; Chen Jason Zhang; Yuanfeng Song; Di Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Discovering customer intentions is crucial for automated service agents, yet existing intent clustering methods often fall short due to their reliance on embedding distance metrics and neglect of underlying semantic structures. To address these limitations, we propose an **LLM-in-the-loop (LLM-ITL)** intent clustering framework, integrating the language understanding capabilities of LLMs into conventional clustering algorithms. Specifically, this paper (1) examines the effectiveness of fine-tuned LLMs in semantic coherence evaluation and intent cluster naming, achieving over 95% accuracy aligned with human judgments; (2) designs an LLM-ITL framework that facilitates the iterative discovery of coherent intent clusters and the optimal number of clusters; and (3) introduces context-aware techniques tailored for customer service dialogue. Since existing English benchmarks lack sufficient semantic diversity and intent coverage, we further present a comprehensive Chinese dialogue intent dataset comprising over 100k real customer service calls with 1,507 human-annotated clusters. The proposed approaches significantly outperform LLM-guided baselines, achieving notable improvements in clustering quality, cost efficiency, and downstream applications. Combined with several best practices, our findings highlight the prominence of LLM-in-the-loop techniques for scalable dialogue data mining.
Superficial Self-Improved Reasoners Benefit from Model Merging
Authors: Xiangchi Yuan; Chunhui Zhang; Zheyuan Liu; Dachuan Shi; Leyan Pan; Soroush Vosoughi; Wenke Lee
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) rely heavily on large-scale reasoning data, but as such data becomes increasingly scarce, model self-improvement offers a promising alternative. However, this process can lead to model collapse, as the model’s output becomes overly deterministic with reduced diversity. In this work, we identify a new risk beyond model collapse, which we term the Superficial Self-Improved Reasoners phenomenon. This phenomenon indicates that while self-improvement enhances in-domain (ID) reasoning accuracy, it degrades the model’s generalized reasoning capability on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets, as the model tends to memorize the training data. Our analyses of layer importance and parameter changes reveal that reasoning-critical layers receive fewer updates compared to less relevant layers during self-improvement. To address this, we propose Iterative Model Merging (IMM), which balances reasoning improvements and generalization by merging the weights of the original and self-improved models. IMM effectively mitigates model collapse and improves generalized reasoning capability. Code is available at https://github.com/xiangchi-yuan/merge_syn
CARFT: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Contrastive Learning with Annotated Chain-of-Thought-based Reinforced Fine-Tuning
Authors: Wenqiao Zhu; Ji Liu; Rongjunchen Zhang; Haipang Wu; Yulun Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Reasoning capability plays a significantly critical role in the the broad applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). To enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs, diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based fine-tuning approaches have been proposed to address the limited generalization capability of LLMs trained solely via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Despite their effectiveness, two major limitations hinder the advancement of LLMs. First, vanilla RL-based approaches ignore annotated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and incorporate unstable reasoning path sampling, which typically results in model collapse, unstable training process, and suboptimal performance. Second, existing SFT approaches generally overemphasize the annotated CoT, potentially leading to performance degradation due to insufficient exploitation of potential CoT. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive learning with annotated CoT-based Reinforced Fine-Tuning approach, i.e., CARFT, to enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs while addressing the aforementioned limitations. Specifically, we propose learning a representation for each CoT. Based on this representation, we design novel contrastive signals to guide the fine-tuning process. Our approach not only fully exploits the available annotated CoT but also stabilizes the fine-tuning procedure by incorporating an additional unsupervised learning signal. We conduct comprehensive experiments and in-depth analysis with three baseline approaches, two foundation models, and two datasets to demonstrate significant advantages of CARFT in terms of robustness, performance (up to 10.15%), and efficiency (up to 30.62%).
QualBench: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs with Localized Professional Qualifications for Vertical Domain Evaluation
Authors: Mengze Hong; Wailing Ng; Chen Jason Zhang; Di Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The rapid advancement of Chinese LLMs underscores the need for vertical-domain evaluations to ensure reliable applications. However, existing benchmarks often lack domain coverage and provide limited insights into the Chinese working context. Leveraging qualification exams as a unified framework for expertise evaluation, we introduce QualBench, the first multi-domain Chinese QA benchmark dedicated to localized assessment of Chinese LLMs. The dataset includes over 17,000 questions across six vertical domains, drawn from 24 Chinese qualifications to align with national policies and professional standards. Results reveal an interesting pattern of Chinese LLMs consistently surpassing non-Chinese models, with the Qwen2.5 model outperforming the more advanced GPT-4o, emphasizing the value of localized domain knowledge in meeting qualification requirements. The average accuracy of 53.98% reveals the current gaps in domain coverage within model capabilities. Furthermore, we identify performance degradation caused by LLM crowdsourcing, assess data contamination, and illustrate the effectiveness of prompt engineering and model fine-tuning, suggesting opportunities for future improvements through multi-domain RAG and Federated Learning. Data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/mengze-hong/QualBench.
VideoEraser: Concept Erasure in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
Authors: Naen Xu; Jinghuai Zhang; Changjiang Li; Zhi Chen; Chunyi Zhou; Qingming Li; Tianyu Du; Shouling Ji
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The rapid growth of text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models has raised concerns about privacy, copyright, and safety due to their potential misuse in generating harmful or misleading content. These models are often trained on numerous datasets, including unauthorized personal identities, artistic creations, and harmful materials, which can lead to uncontrolled production and distribution of such content. To address this, we propose VideoEraser, a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts, even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. Designed as a plug-and-play module, VideoEraser can seamlessly integrate with representative T2V diffusion models via a two-stage process: Selective Prompt Embedding Adjustment (SPEA) and Adversarial-Resilient Noise Guidance (ARNG). We conduct extensive evaluations across four tasks, including object erasure, artistic style erasure, celebrity erasure, and explicit content erasure. Experimental results show that VideoEraser consistently outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. Notably, VideoEraser achieves state-of-the-art performance in suppressing undesirable content during T2V generation, reducing it by 46% on average across four tasks compared to baselines.
Diagram-Driven Course Questions Generation
Authors: Xinyu Zhang; Lingling Zhang; Yanrui Wu; Muye Huang; Wenjun Wu; Bo Li; Shaowei Wang; Basura Fernando; Jun Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Visual Question Generation (VQG) research focuses predominantly on natural images while neglecting the diagram, which is a critical component in educational materials. To meet the needs of pedagogical assessment, we propose the Diagram-Driven Course Questions Generation (DDCQG) task and construct DiagramQG, a comprehensive dataset with 15,720 diagrams and 25,798 questions across 37 subjects and 371 courses. Our approach employs course and input text constraints to generate course-relevant questions about specific diagram elements. We reveal three challenges of DDCQG: domain-specific knowledge requirements across courses, long-tail distribution in course coverage, and high information density in diagrams. To address these, we propose the Hierarchical Knowledge Integration framework (HKI-DDCQG), which utilizes trainable CLIP for identifying relevant diagram patches, leverages frozen vision-language models for knowledge extraction, and generates questions with trainable T5. Experiments demonstrate that HKI-DDCQG outperforms existing models on DiagramQG while maintaining strong generalizability across natural image datasets, establishing a strong baseline for DDCQG.
ECC: An Emotion-Cause Conversation Dataset for Empathy Response
Authors: Yuanyuan He; Yongsen Pan; Wei Li; Jiali You; Jiawen Deng; Fuji Ren
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The empathy dialogue system requires understanding emotions and their underlying causes. However, existing datasets mainly focus on emotion labels, while cause annotations are added post hoc through costly and subjective manual processes. This leads to three limitations: subjective bias in cause labels, weak rationality due to ambiguous cause-emotion relationships, and high annotation costs that hinder scalability. To address these challenges, we propose ECC (Emotion-Cause Conversation Dataset), a scalable dataset with 2.4K dialogues, which is also the first dialogue dataset where conversations and their emotion-cause labels are automatically generated synergistically during creation. We create an automatic extension framework EC-DD for ECC that utilizes knowledge and large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate conversations, and train a causality-aware empathetic response model CAER on this dataset. Experimental results show that ECC can achieve comparable or even superior performance to artificially constructed empathy dialogue datasets. Our code will be publicly released on https://github.com/Yuan-23/ECC
ThoughtProbe: Classifier-Guided LLM Thought Space Exploration via Probing Representations
Authors: Zijian Wang; Chang Xu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper introduces ThoughtProbe, a novel inference-time framework that leverages the hidden reasoning features of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve their reasoning performance. Unlike previous works that manipulate the hidden representations to steer LLM generation, we harness them as discriminative signals to guide the tree-structured response space exploration. In each node expansion, a classifier serves as a scoring and ranking mechanism that efficiently allocates computational resources by prioritizing higher score candidates for continuation. After completing the tree expansion, we collect answers from all branches to form a candidate answer pool. We then propose a branch-aggregation method that marginalizes over all supporting branches by aggregating their CoT scores, thereby identifying the optimal answer from the pool. Experimental results show that our framework’s comprehensive exploration not only covers valid reasoning chains but also effectively identifies them, achieving significant improvements across multiple arithmetic reasoning benchmarks.
JOLT-SQL: Joint Loss Tuning of Text-to-SQL with Confusion-aware Noisy Schema Sampling
Authors: Jinwang Song; Hongying Zan; Kunli Zhang; Lingling Mu; Yingjie Han; Haobo Hua; Min Peng
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Text-to-SQL, which maps natural language to SQL queries, has benefited greatly from recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs offer various paradigms for this task, including prompting and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), SFT approaches still face challenges such as complex multi-stage pipelines and poor robustness to noisy schema information. To address these limitations, we present JOLT-SQL, a streamlined single-stage SFT framework that jointly optimizes schema linking and SQL generation via a unified loss. JOLT-SQL employs discriminative schema linking, enhanced by local bidirectional attention, alongside a confusion-aware noisy schema sampling strategy with selective attention to improve robustness under noisy schema conditions. Experiments on the Spider and BIRD benchmarks demonstrate that JOLT-SQL achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy among comparable-size open-source models, while significantly improving both training and inference efficiency.
DMDTEval: An Evaluation and Analysis of LLMs on Disambiguation in Multi-domain Translation
Authors: Zhibo Man; Yuanmeng Chen; Yujie Zhang; Jinan Xu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Currently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results in machine translation. However, their performance in multi-domain translation (MDT) is less satisfactory, the meanings of words can vary across different domains, highlighting the significant ambiguity inherent in MDT. Therefore, evaluating the disambiguation ability of LLMs in MDT, remains an open problem. To this end, we present an evaluation and analysis of LLMs on disambiguation in multi-domain translation (DMDTEval), our systematic evaluation framework consisting of three aspects: (1) we construct a translation test set with multi-domain ambiguous word annotation, (2) we curate a diverse set of disambiguation prompt strategies, and (3) we design precise disambiguation metrics, and study the efficacy of various prompt strategies on multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. We conduct comprehensive experiments across 4 language pairs and 13 domains, our extensive experiments reveal a number of crucial findings that we believe will pave the way and also facilitate further research in the critical area of improving the disambiguation of LLMs.
SciRIFF: A Resource to Enhance Language Model Instruction-Following over Scientific Literature
Authors: David Wadden; Kejian Shi; Jacob Morrison; Alan Li; Aakanksha Naik; Shruti Singh; Nitzan Barzilay; Kyle Lo; Tom Hope; Luca Soldaini; Shannon Zejiang Shen; Doug Downey; Hannaneh Hajishirzi; Arman Cohan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We present ScIRIFF (Scientific Resource for Instruction-Following and Finetuning), a dataset of 137K instruction-following instances for training and evaluation, covering 54 tasks. These tasks span five core scientific literature understanding capabilities: information extraction, summarization, question answering, claim verification, and classification. ScIRIFF is unique in being the only entirely expert-written, high-quality instruction-following dataset designed for extracting and synthesizing information from research literature across diverse scientific fields. It features complex instructions with long input contexts, detailed task descriptions, and structured outputs. To demonstrate its utility, we finetune a series of large language models (LLMs) using a mix of general domain and ScIRIFF instructions. On nine out-of-distribution held-out tasks (referred to as SciRIFF-Eval), LLMs finetuned on SciRIFF achieve 70.6% average improvement over our baselines trained only on general-domain instructions. ScIRIFF facilitates the development and evaluation of LLMs to help researchers navigate the rapidly growing body of scientific literature.
MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Xinkui Lin; Yuhui Zhang; Yongxiu Xu; Kun Huang; Hongzhang Mu; Yubin Wang; Gaopeng Gou; Li Qian; Li Peng; Wei Liu; Jian Luan; Hongbo Xu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER), which aims to extract textual entities, their types, and corresponding visual regions from image-text data, has become a critical task in multimodal information extraction. However, existing methods face two major challenges. First, they fail to address the semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and the long-tail distribution of datasets. Second, unlike visual grounding which provides descriptive phrases, entity grounding only offers brief entity names which carry less semantic information. Current methods lack sufficient semantic interaction between text and image, hindering accurate entity-visual region matching. To tackle these issues, we propose MAKAR, a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning, comprising three agents: Knowledge Enhancement, Entity Correction, and Entity Reasoning Grounding. Specifically, in the named entity recognition phase, the Knowledge Enhancement Agent leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as an implicit knowledge base to enhance ambiguous image-text content with its internal knowledge. For samples with low-confidence entity boundaries and types, the Entity Correction Agent uses web search tools to retrieve and summarize relevant web content, thereby correcting entities using both internal and external knowledge. In the entity grounding phase, the Entity Reasoning Grounding Agent utilizes multi-step Chain-of-Thought reasoning to perform grounding for each entity. Extensive experiments show that MAKAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/Nikol-coder/MAKAR.
VisCRA: A Visual Chain Reasoning Attack for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Bingrui Sima; Linhua Cong; Wenxuan Wang; Kun He
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The emergence of Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) has enabled sophisticated visual reasoning capabilities by integrating reinforcement learning and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. However, while these enhanced reasoning capabilities improve performance, they also introduce new and underexplored safety risks. In this work, we systematically investigate the security implications of advanced visual reasoning in MLRMs. Our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off: as visual reasoning improves, models become more vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Motivated by this critical finding, we introduce VisCRA (Visual Chain Reasoning Attack), a novel jailbreak framework that exploits the visual reasoning chains to bypass safety mechanisms. VisCRA combines targeted visual attention masking with a two-stage reasoning induction strategy to precisely control harmful outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate VisCRA’s significant effectiveness, achieving high attack success rates on leading closed-source MLRMs: 76.48% on Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, 68.56% on QvQ-Max, and 56.60% on GPT-4o. Our findings highlight a critical insight: the very capability that empowers MLRMs — their visual reasoning — can also serve as an attack vector, posing significant security risks. Warning: This paper contains unsafe examples.
Investigating Neurons and Heads in Transformer-based LLMs for Typographical Errors
Authors: Kohei Tsuji; Tatsuya Hiraoka; Yuchang Cheng; Eiji Aramaki; Tomoya Iwakura
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper investigates how LLMs encode inputs with typos. We hypothesize that specific neurons and attention heads recognize typos and fix them internally using local and global contexts. We introduce a method to identify typo neurons and typo heads that work actively when inputs contain typos. Our experimental results suggest the following: 1) LLMs can fix typos with local contexts when the typo neurons in either the early or late layers are activated, even if those in the other are not. 2) Typo neurons in the middle layers are the core of typo-fixing with global contexts. 3) Typo heads fix typos by widely considering the context not focusing on specific tokens. 4) Typo neurons and typo heads work not only for typo-fixing but also for understanding general contexts.