GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Parameter-free and Accessible Prompt Learning to Enhance Adversarial Robustness for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models
Authors: Xingran Zhou; Kun Yang; Changtao Miao; Bingyu Hu; Zhuoer Xu; Shiwen Cui; Changhua Meng; Dan Hong
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 pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized both computer vision and natural language processing. Despite their success, adversarial examples can still mislead VLMs into producing incorrect results. This work focuses on boosting the adversarial robustness of VLMs by searching for text prompts at the word level, rather than optimizing continuous textual embeddings. We introduce Parameter-Free Prompt Tuning (PFPT) to learn defense words that enhance resilience against adversarial attacks when appended to existing prompts, thereby offering ease of use due to the simplicity of this approach. These defense words are naturally present in the inherent vocabulary of VLMs, providing a human-readable property. PFPT employs a coarse-to-fine strategy with carefully designed optimization objectives to guide the word search. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method’s superiority over hand-engineered prompts and other state-of-the-art methods. PFPT significantly boosts accuracy and robustness, outperforming hand-engineered prompts with average gains of +4.9% and +5.8%, respectively (epsilon=1/255).
Fine-grained Fallacy Detection with Human Label Variation
Authors: Alan Ramponi; Agnese Daffara; Sara Tonelli
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 introduce FAINA, the first dataset for fallacy detection that embraces multiple plausible answers and natural disagreement. FAINA includes over 11K span-level annotations with overlaps across 20 fallacy types on social media posts in Italian about migration, climate change, and public health given by two expert annotators. Through an extensive annotation study that allowed discussion over multiple rounds, we minimize annotation errors whilst keeping signals of human label variation. Moreover, we devise a framework that goes beyond “single ground truth” evaluation and simultaneously accounts for multiple (equally reliable) test sets and the peculiarities of the task, i.e., partial span matches, overlaps, and the varying severity of labeling errors. Our experiments across four fallacy detection setups show that multi-task and multi-label transformer-based approaches are strong baselines across all settings. We release our data, code, and annotation guidelines to foster research on fallacy detection and human label variation more broadly.
Does Liking Yellow Imply Driving a School Bus? Semantic Leakage in Language Models
Authors: Hila Gonen; Terra Blevins; Alisa Liu; Luke Zettlemoyer; Noah A. Smith
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: Despite their wide adoption, the biases and unintended behaviors of language models remain poorly understood. In this paper, we identify and characterize a phenomenon never discussed before, which we call semantic leakage, where models leak irrelevant information from the prompt into the generation in unexpected ways. We propose an evaluation setting to detect semantic leakage both by humans and automatically, curate a diverse test suite for diagnosing this behavior, and measure significant semantic leakage in 13 flagship models. We also show that models exhibit semantic leakage in languages besides English and across different settings and generation scenarios. This discovery highlights yet another type of bias in language models that affects their generation patterns and behavior.
SELFGOAL: Your Language Agents Already Know How to Achieve High-level Goals
Authors: Ruihan Yang; Jiangjie Chen; Yikai Zhang; Siyu Yuan; Aili Chen; Kyle Richardson; Yanghua Xiao; Deqing Yang
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: Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly valuable as decision-making tools in domains such as gaming and programming. However, these agents often face challenges in achieving high-level goals without detailed instructions and in adapting to environments where feedback is delayed. In this paper, we present SELFGOAL, a novel automatic approach designed to enhance agents’ capabilities to achieve high-level goals with limited human prior and environmental feedback. The core concept of SELFGOAL involves adaptively breaking down a high-level goal into a tree structure of more practical subgoals during the interaction with environments while identifying the most useful subgoals and progressively updating this structure. Experimental results demonstrate that SELFGOAL significantly enhances the performance of language agents across various tasks, including competitive, cooperative, and deferred feedback environments.
Familiarity: Better Evaluation of Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition by Quantifying Label Shifts in Synthetic Training Data
Authors: Jonas Golde; Patrick Haller; Max Ploner; Fabio Barth; Nicolaas Jedema; Alan Akbik
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: Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) is the task of detecting named entities of specific types (such as Person or Medicine) without any training examples. Current research increasingly relies on large synthetic datasets, automatically generated to cover tens of thousands of distinct entity types, to train zero-shot NER models. However, in this paper, we find that these synthetic datasets often contain entity types that are semantically highly similar to (or even the same as) those in standard evaluation benchmarks. Because of this overlap, we argue that reported F1 scores for zero-shot NER overestimate the true capabilities of these approaches. Further, we argue that current evaluation setups provide an incomplete picture of zero-shot abilities since they do not quantify the label shift (i.e., the similarity of labels) between training and evaluation datasets. To address these issues, we propose Familarity, a novel metric that captures both the semantic similarity between entity types in training and evaluation, as well as their frequency in the training data, to provide an estimate of label shift. It allows researchers to contextualize reported zero-shot NER scores when using custom synthetic training datasets. Further, it enables researchers to generate evaluation setups of various transfer difficulties for fine-grained analysis of zero-shot NER.
Learning to Summarize from LLM-generated Feedback
Authors: Hwanjun Song; Taewon Yun; Yuho Lee; Jihwan Oh; Gihun Lee; Jason Cai; Hang Su
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: Developing effective text summarizers remains a challenge due to issues like hallucinations, key information omissions, and verbosity in LLM-generated summaries. This work explores using LLM-generated feedback to improve summary quality by aligning the summaries with human preferences for faithfulness, completeness, and conciseness. We introduce FeedSum, a large-scale dataset containing multi-dimensional LLM feedback on summaries of varying quality across diverse domains. Our experiments show how feedback quality, dimensionality, and granularity influence preference learning, revealing that high-quality, multi-dimensional, fine-grained feedback significantly improves summary generation. We also compare two methods for using this feedback: supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Finally, we introduce SummLlama3-8b, a model that outperforms the nearly 10x larger Llama3-70b-instruct in generating human-preferred summaries, demonstrating that smaller models can achieve superior performance with appropriate training. The full dataset and SummLlama3-8B model are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DISLab/FeedSum and https://huggingface.co/DISLab/SummLlama3-8B.
Hybrid Graphs for Table-and-Text based Question Answering using LLMs
Authors: Ankush Agarwal; Chaitanya Devaguptapu; Ganesh S
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: Answering questions that require reasoning and aggregation across both structured (tables) and unstructured (raw text) data sources presents significant challenges. Current methods rely on fine-tuning and high-quality, human-curated data, which is difficult to obtain. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results for multi-hop question answering (QA) over single-source text data in a zero-shot setting, yet exploration into multi-source Table-Text QA remains limited. In this paper, we present a novel Hybrid Graph-based approach for Table-Text QA that leverages LLMs without fine-tuning. Our method constructs a unified Hybrid Graph from textual and tabular data, pruning information based on the input question to provide the LLM with relevant context concisely. We evaluate our approach on the challenging Hybrid-QA and OTT-QA datasets using state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMA-3. Our method achieves the best zero-shot performance on both datasets, improving Exact Match scores by up to 10% on Hybrid-QA and 5.4% on OTT-QA. Moreover, our approach reduces token usage by up to 53% compared to the original context.
CFinBench: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Ying Nie; Binwei Yan; Tianyu Guo; Hao Liu; Haoyu Wang; Wei He; Binfan Zheng; Weihao Wang; Qiang Li; Weijian Sun; Yunhe Wang; Dacheng Tao
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 achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging task like finance, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we present CFinBench: a meticulously crafted, the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date, for assessing the financial knowledge of LLMs under Chinese context. In practice, to better align with the career trajectory of Chinese financial practitioners, we build a systematic evaluation from 4 first-level categories: (1) Financial Subject: whether LLMs can memorize the necessary basic knowledge of financial subjects, such as economics, statistics and auditing. (2) Financial Qualification: whether LLMs can obtain the needed financial qualified certifications, such as certified public accountant, securities qualification and banking qualification. (3) Financial Practice: whether LLMs can fulfill the practical financial jobs, such as tax consultant, junior accountant and securities analyst. (4) Financial Law: whether LLMs can meet the requirement of financial laws and regulations, such as tax law, insurance law and economic law. CFinBench comprises 99,100 questions spanning 43 second-level categories with 3 question types: single-choice, multiple-choice and judgment. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide spectrum of representative LLMs with various model size on CFinBench. The results show that GPT4 and some Chinese-oriented models lead the benchmark, with the highest average accuracy being 66.02%, highlighting the challenge presented by CFinBench. All the data and evaluation code are open sourced at https://cfinbench.github.io/
LLM-Based Explicit Models of Opponents for Multi-Agent Games
Authors: XiaoPeng Yu; Wanpeng Zhang; Zongqing Lu
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: In multi-agent scenarios, the ability to anticipate and respond to opponents is essential, particularly in environments involving adversarial and collaborative interactions. In this paper, we introduce Explicit Models of Opponents (EMO) based on Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling agents to better predict and adapt to diverse, dynamic multi-agent interactions. Unlike traditional methods that often simplify multi-agent interactions using a single opponent model, EMO constructs an individual model for each opponent and aligns these models working in synergy through a bi-level feedback-refinement framework. We test EMO alongside several reasoning methods in multi-player deduction games, where agents must infer hidden information about their opponents. The results show that EMO significantly enhances agents’ decision-making, outperforming traditional single-model approaches. Our findings demonstrate that EMO can be a powerful tool for enhancing LLM-based agents in complex multi-agent systems.
SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters
Authors: Yan Yang; Zeguan Xiao; Xin Lu; Hongru Wang; Xuetao Wei; Hailiang Huang; Guanhua Chen; Yun 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: The widespread applications of large language models (LLMs) have brought about concerns regarding their potential misuse. Although aligned with human preference data before release, LLMs remain vulnerable to various malicious attacks. In this paper, we adopt a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM safety and introduce SeqAR, a simple yet effective framework to design jailbreak prompts automatically. The SeqAR framework generates and optimizes multiple jailbreak characters and then applies sequential jailbreak characters in a single query to bypass the guardrails of the target LLM. Different from previous work which relies on proprietary LLMs or seed jailbreak templates crafted by human expertise, SeqAR can generate and optimize the jailbreak prompt in a cold-start scenario using open-sourced LLMs without any seed jailbreak templates. Experimental results show that SeqAR achieves attack success rates of 88% and 60% in bypassing the safety alignment of GPT-3.5-1106 and GPT-4, respectively. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate the transferability of the generated templates across different LLMs and held-out malicious requests, while also exploring defense strategies against the jailbreak attack designed by SeqAR.
EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction
Authors: Siyu Yuan; Kaitao Song; Jiangjie Chen; Xu Tan; Yongliang Shen; Kan Ren; Dongsheng Li; Deqing Yang
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: There has been a rising interest in utilizing tools in applications of autonomous agents based on large language models (LLMs) to address intricate real-world tasks. To develop LLMbased agents, it usually requires LLMs to understand many tool functions from different tool documentations. However, these documentations could be diverse, redundant, or incomplete, which immensely affects the capability of LLMs in using tools. Current LLMs exhibit satisfactory instruction-following capabilities based on instruction-following fine-tuning process. Motivated by this, in this paper, we introduce EASYTOOL, a framework transforming diverse and lengthy tool documentation into a unified and concise tool instruction to fully leverage instruction-following capabilities of LLMs for easier tool usage. EASYTOOL purifies essential information from extensive tool documentation of different sources, and elaborates a unified interface (i.e., tool instruction) to offer standardized tool descriptions and functionalities for LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments on multiple different tasks demonstrate that EASYTOOL can significantly reduce token consumption and improve the performance of LLM-based agents on tool utilization in real-world scenarios. Our code is available in supplemental materials. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS/tree/main/easytool.
Decoding Hate: Exploring Language Models’ Reactions to Hate Speech
Authors: Paloma Piot; Javier Parapar
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: Hate speech is a harmful form of online expression, often manifesting as derogatory posts. It is a significant risk in digital environments. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is concern about their potential to replicate hate speech patterns, given their training on vast amounts of unmoderated internet data. Understanding how LLMs respond to hate speech is crucial for their responsible deployment. However, the behaviour of LLMs towards hate speech has been limited compared. This paper investigates the reactions of seven state-of-the-art LLMs (LLaMA 2, Vicuna, LLaMA 3, Mistral, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Gemini Pro) to hate speech. Through qualitative analysis, we aim to reveal the spectrum of responses these models produce, highlighting their capacity to handle hate speech inputs. We also discuss strategies to mitigate hate speech generation by LLMs, particularly through fine-tuning and guideline guardrailing. Finally, we explore the models’ responses to hate speech framed in politically correct language.
Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations
Authors: Ziqiao Ma; Zekun Wang; Joyce Chai
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: Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning, recent advancements in large language models have primarily adopted a non-interactive training paradigm, and refined pre-trained models through feedback afterward. In this work, we explore how corrective feedback from interactions influences neural language acquisition from scratch through systematically controlled experiments, assessing whether it contributes to word learning efficiency in language models. We introduce a trial-and-demonstration (TnD) learning framework that incorporates three distinct components: student trials, teacher demonstrations, and a reward conditioned on language competence at various developmental stages. Our experiments reveal that the TnD approach accelerates word acquisition for student models of equal and smaller numbers of parameters, and we highlight the significance of both trials and demonstrations. We further show that the teacher’s choices of words influence students’ word-specific learning efficiency, and a practice-makes-perfect effect is evident by a strong correlation between the frequency of words in trials and their respective learning curves. Our findings suggest that interactive language learning, with teacher demonstrations and active trials, can facilitate efficient word learning in language models.
MoCE: Adaptive Mixture of Contextualization Experts for Byte-based Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Langlin Huang; Mengyu Bu; Yang Feng
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: Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages, enabling broad language scalability. However, byte-level tokenization results in sequences that are hard to interpret due to limited semantic information per byte. Local contextualization has proven effective in assigning initial semantics to tokens, improving sentence comprehension. Nevertheless, variations in encoding rules across languages necessitate an adaptive approach for effective contextualization. To this end, we propose Adaptive MultiScale-Headed Attention (Ada-MSHA), adaptively selecting and mixing attention heads, which are treated as contextualization experts. This enhances the flexibility of contextualization scales and improves the potential to discover a better strategy than previous methods. Experiment results show that our method outperforms existing methods without extensive manual adjustment of hyper-parameters and surpasses subword-based models with fewer parameters in Ted-59 dataset.
LLM-Human Pipeline for Cultural Grounding of Conversations
Authors: Rajkumar Pujari; Dan Goldwasser
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: Conversations often adhere to well-understood social norms that vary across cultures. For example, while addressing parents by name is commonplace in the West, it is rare in most Asian cultures. Adherence or violation of such norms often dictates the tenor of conversations. Humans are able to navigate social situations requiring cultural awareness quite adeptly. However, it is a hard task for NLP models.In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing a Cultural Context Schema for conversations. It comprises (1) conversational information such as emotions, dialogue acts, etc., and (2) cultural information such as social norms, violations, etc. We generate ~110k social norm and violation descriptions for ~23k conversations from Chinese culture using LLMs. We refine them using automated verification strategies which are evaluated against culturally aware human judgements. We organize these descriptions into meaningful structures we call Norm Concepts, using an interactive human-in-loop framework. We ground the norm concepts and the descriptions in conversations using symbolic annotation. Finally, we use the obtained dataset for downstream tasks such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue act detection. We show that it significantly improves the empirical performance.