GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
GmSLM : Generative Marmoset Spoken Language Modeling
Authors: Talia Sternberg; Michael London; David Omer; Yossi Adi
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Marmoset monkeys exhibit complex vocal communication, challenging the view that nonhuman primates’ vocal communication is entirely innate, and show similar features of human speech, such as vocal labeling of others and turn-taking. Studying their vocal communication offers a unique opportunity to link it with brain activity—especially given the difficulty of accessing the human brain in speech and language research. Since Marmosets communicate primarily through vocalizations, applying standard LLM approaches is not straightforward. We introduce Generative Marmoset Spoken Language Modeling (GmSLM), an optimized spoken language model pipeline for Marmoset vocal communication. We designed a novel zero-shot evaluation metrics using unsupervised in-the-wild data, alongside weakly labeled conversational data, to assess GmSLM and demonstrate its advantage over a basic human-speech-based baseline. GmSLM generated vocalizations closely matched real resynthesized samples acoustically and performed well on downstream tasks. Despite being fully unsupervised, GmSLM effectively distinguish real from artificial conversations and may support further investigations of the neural basis of vocal communication and provides a practical framework linking vocalization and brain activity. We believe GmSLM stands to benefit future work in neuroscience, bioacoustics, and evolutionary biology. Samples are provided under: https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/GmSLM/.
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA
Authors: Jacob Dineen; Aswin Rrv; Qin Liu; Zhikun Xu; Xiao Ye; Ming Shen; Zhaonan Li; Shijie Lu; Chitta Baral; Muhao Chen; Ben Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with principles like helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness typically relies on scalar rewards that obscure which objectives drive the training signal. We introduce QA-LIGN, which decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations through structured natural language programs. Models learn through a draft, critique, and revise pipeline, where symbolic evaluation against the rubrics provides transparent feedback for both initial and revised responses during GRPO training. Applied to uncensored Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate, achieving Pareto optimal safety-helpfulness performance and outperforming both DPO and GRPO with state-of-the-art reward models given equivalent training. These results demonstrate that making reward signals interpretable and modular improves alignment effectiveness, suggesting transparency enhances LLM safety.
Characterizing Positional Bias in Large Language Models: A Multi-Model Evaluation of Prompt Order Effects
Authors: Patrick Schilcher; Dominik Karasin; Michael Schöpf; Haisam Saleh; Antonela Tommasel; Markus Schedl
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for a variety of tasks such as text generation, ranking, and decision-making. However, their outputs can be influenced by various forms of biases. One such bias is positional bias, where models prioritize items based on their position within a given prompt rather than their content or quality, impacting on how LLMs interpret and weigh information, potentially compromising fairness, reliability, and robustness. To assess positional bias, we prompt a range of LLMs to generate descriptions for a list of topics, systematically permuting their order and analyzing variations in the responses. Our analysis shows that ranking position affects structural features and coherence, with some LLMs also reordering or omitting topics. Nonetheless, the impact of positional bias varies across different LLMs and topics, indicating an interplay with other related biases.
You Only Use Reactive Attention Slice When Retrieving From Long Context
Authors: Yun Joon Soh; Hanxian Huang; Yuandong Tian; Jishen Zhao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation is a powerful method for enhancing language models (LMs), but existing retrieval techniques are limited.Embedding-based methods are often inaccurate due to their reliance on lexical similarity, while neural retrievers are computationally expensive to train.To overcome these issues, we introduce You Only Use Reactive Attention slice (YOURA), a training-free and fine-tuning-free attention-based retrieval technique. When retrieving, YOURA uses a novel reaction score heuristic, which quantifies how an LM’s self-attention “reacts” to a user query. We also propose a sentence extraction algorithm to efficiently preprocess the context.Evaluations on three open-source LMs using the LongBench and BABILong datasets show YOURA’s effectiveness. Our framework improves QA task accuracy by up to 15% and inference throughput by up to 31% compared to embedding-based retrieval.
Fine-Tuned Thoughts: Leveraging Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Industrial Asset Health Monitoring
Authors: Shuxin Lin; Dhaval C Patel; Christodoulos Constantinides
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Small Language Models (SLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in specialized fields, such as industrial applications, due to their efficiency, lower computational requirements, and ability to be fine-tuned for domain-specific tasks, enabling accurate and cost-effective solutions. However, performing complex reasoning using SLMs in specialized fields such as Industry 4.0 remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a knowledge distillation framework for industrial asset health, which transfers reasoning capabilities via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation from Large Language Models (LLMs) to smaller, more efficient models (SLMs). We discuss the advantages and the process of distilling LLMs using multi-choice question answering (MCQA) prompts to enhance reasoning and refine decision-making. We also perform in-context learning to verify the quality of the generated knowledge and benchmark the performance of fine-tuned SLMs with generated knowledge against widely used LLMs. The results show that the fine-tuned SLMs with CoT reasoning outperform the base models by a significant margin, narrowing the gap to their LLM counterparts. Our code is open-sourced at: https://github.com/IBM/FailureSensorIQ.
CoViPAL: Layer-wise Contextualized Visual Token Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Zicong Tang; Ziyang Ma; Suqing Wang; Zuchao Li; Lefei Zhang; Hai Zhao; Yun Li; Qianren Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) process multimodal inputs consisting of text tokens and vision tokens extracted from images or videos. Due to the rich visual information, a single image can generate thousands of vision tokens, leading to high computational costs during the prefilling stage and significant memory overhead during decoding. Existing methods attempt to prune redundant vision tokens, revealing substantial redundancy in visual representations. However, these methods often struggle in shallow layers due to the lack of sufficient contextual information. We argue that many visual tokens are inherently redundant even in shallow layers and can be safely and effectively pruned with appropriate contextual signals. In this work, we propose CoViPAL, a layer-wise contextualized visual token pruning method that employs a Plug-and-Play Pruning Module (PPM) to predict and remove redundant vision tokens before they are processed by the LVLM. The PPM is lightweight, model-agnostic, and operates independently of the LVLM architecture, ensuring seamless integration with various models. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CoViPAL outperforms training-free pruning methods under equal token budgets and surpasses training-based methods with comparable supervision. CoViPAL offers a scalable and efficient solution to improve inference efficiency in LVLMs without compromising accuracy.
Large Language Models with Temporal Reasoning for Longitudinal Clinical Summarization and Prediction
Authors: Maya Kruse; Shiyue Hu; Nicholas Derby; Yifu Wu; Samantha Stonbraker; Bingsheng Yao; Dakuo Wang; Elizabeth M. Goldberg; Yanjun Gao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in clinical text summarization, but their ability to handle long patient trajectories with multi-modal data spread across time remains underexplored. This study systematically evaluates several state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, their Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) variants and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on long-context clinical summarization and prediction. We examine their ability to synthesize structured and unstructured Electronic Health Records (EHR) data while reasoning over temporal coherence, by re-engineering existing tasks, including discharge summarization and diagnosis prediction from two publicly available EHR datasets. Our results indicate that long context windows improve input integration but do not consistently enhance clinical reasoning, and LLMs are still struggling with temporal progression and rare disease prediction. While RAG shows improvements in hallucination in some cases, it does not fully address these limitations. Our work fills the gap in long clinical text summarization, establishing a foundation for evaluating LLMs with multi-modal data and temporal reasoning.
TransAlign: Machine Translation Encoders are Strong Word Aligners, Too
Authors: Benedikt Ebing; Christian Goldschmied; Goran Glavaš
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: In the absence of sizable training data for most world languages and NLP tasks, translation-based strategies such as translate-test—evaluating on noisy source language data translated from the target language—and translate-train—training on noisy target language data translated from the source language—have been established as competitive approaches for cross-lingual transfer (XLT). For token classification tasks, these strategies require label projection: mapping the labels from each token in the original sentence to its counterpart(s) in the translation. To this end, it is common to leverage multilingual word aligners (WAs) derived from encoder language models such as mBERT or LaBSE. Despite obvious associations between machine translation (MT) and WA, research on extracting alignments with MT models is largely limited to exploiting cross-attention in encoder-decoder architectures, yielding poor WA results. In this work, in contrast, we propose TransAlign, a novel word aligner that utilizes the encoder of a massively multilingual MT model. We show that TransAlign not only achieves strong WA performance but substantially outperforms popular WA and state-of-the-art non-WA-based label projection methods in MT-based XLT for token classification.
Pruning Weights but Not Truth: Safeguarding Truthfulness While Pruning LLMs
Authors: Yao Fu; Runchao Li; Xianxuan Long; Haotian Yu; Xiaotian Han; Yu Yin; Pan Li
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Neural network pruning has emerged as a promising approach for deploying LLMs in low-resource scenarios while preserving downstream task performance. However, for the first time, we reveal that such pruning disrupts LLMs’ internal activation features crucial for lie detection, where probing classifiers (typically small logistic regression models) trained on these features assess the truthfulness of LLM-generated statements. This discovery raises a crucial open question: how can we prune LLMs without sacrificing these critical lie detection capabilities? Our investigation further reveals that naively adjusting layer-wise pruning sparsity based on importance inadvertently removes crucial weights, failing to improve lie detection performance despite its reliance on the most crucial LLM layer. To address this issue, we propose Truthful Pruning aligned by Layer-wise Outliers (TPLO), which places greater emphasis on layers with more activation outliers and stronger discriminative features simultaneously. This preserves LLMs’ original performance while retaining critical features of inner states needed for robust lie detection. Moreover, we introduce a prompting rule to enrich the TruthfulQA benchmark for better calibrating LLM pruning. Empirical results show that our approach improves the hallucination detection for pruned LLMs (achieving 88% accuracy at 50% sparsity) and enhances their performance on TruthfulQA.
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion
Authors: Yujian Liu; Jiabao Ji; Tong Yu; Ryan A. Rossi; Sungchul Kim; Handong Zhao; Ritwik Sinha; Yang Zhang; Shiyu Chang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Table question answering is a popular task that assesses a model’s ability to understand and interact with structured data. However, the given table often does not contain sufficient information to answer the question, necessitating the integration of external knowledge. Existing methods either convert both the table and external knowledge into text, which neglects the structured nature of the table; or they embed queries for external sources in the interaction with the table, which complicates the process. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information in a given table. Our method first constructs an augmenting table containing the missing information and then generates a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks.
Evaluating Large Language Models for Belief Inference: Mapping Belief Networks at Scale
Authors: Trisevgeni Papakonstantinou; Antonina Zhiteneva; Ana Yutong Ma; Derek Powell; Zachary Horne
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Beliefs are interconnected, influencing how people process and update what they think. To study the interconnectedness of beliefs at scale, we introduce a novel analytical pipeline leveraging a finetuned GPT-4o model to infer belief structures from large-scale social media data. We evaluate the model’s performance by (1) comparing it to human annotated data (2) and its inferences to human-generated survey data. Our results show that a fine-tuned GPT-4o model can effectively recover belief structures, allowing for a level of scalability and efficiency that is impossible using traditional survey methods of data collection. This work demonstrates the potential for large language models to perform belief inference tasks and provides a framework for future research on the analysis of belief structures.
Distinguishing fair from unfair compositional generalization tasks
Authors: Ahmad Jabbar; Cleo Condoravdi; Christopher Potts
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Compositional generalization benchmarks seek to assess whether learning agents can successfully combine familiar concepts in novel ways. COGS (Kim & Linzen 2020, COGS, EMNLP) provides a suite of such tasks in the area of interpretive semantics (mapping sentences to logical forms). A noteworthy finding for COGS is that model performance varies widely across tasks. In this paper, we argue that these performance differences reflect deep properties of these tasks. We focus on two COGS tasks: an easy task (models are generally successful) and a hard task (no present-day models get any traction). Using both experiments and conceptual analysis, we argue that the easy task requires only a single distributional generalization that is well-supported by the training data, whereas the hard task involves a learning target that is ambiguous or even contradicted by the training data. We additionally argue that pretraining can disambiguate the hard task without compromising the goal of testing compositional generalization. Overall, our findings offer practical guidance to designers of compositional generalization benchmarks and also yield new insights into the nature of compositionality itself.
SA-CLIP: Language Guided Image Spatial and Action Feature Learning
Authors: Guanlin Li; Wenhao Shao; Praboda Rajapaksha; Noel Crespi
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: We observed that Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models struggle with real-world downstream tasks such as road traffic anomaly detection, due to their inability to effectively capture spatial and action relationships between objects within images. To address this, we compile and curate a dataset with 1M samples of images using language supervision provided by the common image caption dataset, in which each image is paired with subject-relationship-object descriptions emphasizing spatial and action interactions, and train a Spatial and Action relationship aware CLIP (SA-CLIP) model. We evaluated the proposed model on the Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR) dataset and further verified its effectiveness on the Detection-of-Traffic-Anomaly (DoTA) dataset. Experiment results show that the proposed SA-CLIP demonstrates strong abilities in understanding spatial relationships while achieving good zero-shot performance on the traffic anomaly detection task.
Inefficiencies of Meta Agents for Agent Design
Authors: Batu El; Mert Yuksekgonul; James Zou
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Recent works began to automate the design of agentic systems using meta-agents that propose and iteratively refine new agent architectures. In this paper, we examine three key challenges in a common class of meta-agents. First, we investigate how a meta-agent learns across iterations and find that simply expanding the context with all previous agents, as proposed by previous works, performs worse than ignoring prior designs entirely. We show that the performance improves with an evolutionary approach. Second, although the meta-agent designs multiple agents during training, it typically commits to a single agent at test time. We find that the designed agents have low behavioral diversity, limiting the potential for their complementary use. Third, we assess when automated design is economically viable. We find that only in a few cases—specifically, two datasets—the overall cost of designing and deploying the agents is lower than that of human-designed agents when deployed on over 15,000 examples. In contrast, the performance gains for other datasets do not justify the design cost, regardless of scale.
SCoder: Progressive Self-Distillation for Bootstrapping Small-Scale Data Synthesizers to Empower Code LLMs
Authors: Xinyu Zhang; Changzhi Zhou; Linmei Hu; Luhao Zhang; Xiancai Chen; Haomin Fu; Yang Yang; Mengdi Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Existing code large language models (LLMs) often rely on large-scale instruction data distilled from proprietary LLMs for fine-tuning, which typically incurs high costs. In this paper, we explore the potential of small-scale open-source LLMs (e.g., 7B) as synthesizers for high-quality code instruction data construction. We first observe that the data synthesis capability of small-scale LLMs can be enhanced by training on a few superior data synthesis samples from proprietary LLMs. Building on this, we propose a novel iterative self-distillation approach to bootstrap small-scale LLMs, transforming them into powerful synthesizers that reduce reliance on proprietary LLMs and minimize costs. Concretely, in each iteration, to obtain diverse and high-quality self-distilled data, we design multi-checkpoint sampling and multi-aspect scoring strategies for initial data selection. Furthermore, to identify the most influential samples, we introduce a gradient-based influence estimation method for final data filtering. Based on the code instruction datasets from the small-scale synthesizers, we develop SCoder, a family of code generation models fine-tuned from DeepSeek-Coder. SCoder models achieve state-of-the-art code generation capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.
Linguistically-Controlled Paraphrase Generation
Authors: Mohamed Elgaar; Hadi Amiri
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Controlled paraphrase generation produces paraphrases that preserve meaning while allowing precise control over linguistic attributes of the output. We introduce LingConv, an encoder-decoder framework that enables fine-grained control over 40 linguistic attributes in English. To improve reliability, we introduce a novel inference-time quality control mechanism that iteratively refines attribute embeddings to generate paraphrases that closely match target attributes without sacrificing semantic fidelity. LingConv reduces attribute error by up to 34% over existing models, with the quality control mechanism contributing an additional 14% improvement.
LAWCAT: Efficient Distillation from Quadratic to Linear Attention with Convolution across Tokens for Long Context Modeling
Authors: Zeyu Liu; Souvik Kundu; Lianghao Jiang; Anni Li; Srikanth Ronanki; Sravan Babu Bodapati; Gourav Datta; Peter Anthony Beerel
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Although transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art performance across diverse domains, their quadratic computational complexity with respect to sequence length remains a significant bottleneck, particularly for latency-sensitive long-context applications. While recent linear-complexity alternatives are increasingly powerful, effectively training them from scratch is still resource-intensive. To overcome these limitations, we propose LAWCAT (Linear Attention with Convolution Across Time), a novel linearization framework designed to efficiently transfer the capabilities of pretrained transformers into a performant linear attention architecture. LAWCAT integrates causal Conv1D layers to enhance local dependency modeling and employs normalized gated linear attention to improve generalization across varying context lengths. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that, distilling Mistral-7B with only 1K-length sequences yields over 90% passkey retrieval accuracy up to 22K tokens, significantly extending its effective context window. Similarly, Llama3.2-1B LAWCAT variant achieves competitive performance on S-NIAH 1&2&3 tasks (1K-8K context length) and BABILong benchmark (QA2&QA3, 0K-16K context length), requiring less than 0.1% pre-training tokens compared with pre-training models. Furthermore, LAWCAT exhibits faster prefill speeds than FlashAttention-2 for sequences exceeding 8K tokens. LAWCAT thus provides an efficient pathway to high-performance, long-context linear models suitable for edge deployment, reducing reliance on extensive long-sequence training data and computational resources.