GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Attention on Multiword Expressions: A Multilingual Study of BERT-based Models with Regard to Idiomaticity and Microsyntax
Authors: Iuliia Zaitova; Vitalii Hirak; Badr M. Abdullah; Dietrich Klakow; Bernd Möbius; Tania Avgustinova
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: This study analyzes the attention patterns of fine-tuned encoder-only models based on the BERT architecture (BERT-based models) towards two distinct types of Multiword Expressions (MWEs): idioms and microsyntactic units (MSUs). Idioms present challenges in semantic non-compositionality, whereas MSUs demonstrate unconventional syntactic behavior that does not conform to standard grammatical categorizations. We aim to understand whether fine-tuning BERT-based models on specific tasks influences their attention to MWEs, and how this attention differs between semantic and syntactic tasks. We examine attention scores to MWEs in both pre-trained and fine-tuned BERT-based models. We utilize monolingual models and datasets in six Indo-European languages — English, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Our results show that fine-tuning significantly influences how models allocate attention to MWEs. Specifically, models fine-tuned on semantic tasks tend to distribute attention to idiomatic expressions more evenly across layers. Models fine-tuned on syntactic tasks show an increase in attention to MSUs in the lower layers, corresponding with syntactic processing requirements.
Perception Compressor: A Training-Free Prompt Compression Framework in Long Context Scenarios
Authors: Jiwei Tang; Jin Xu; Tingwei Lu; Zhicheng Zhang; Yiming Zhao; Lin Hai; Hai-Tao Zheng
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in various scenarios. However, they suffer from much redundant information and are sensitive to the position of key information in long context scenarios. To address these challenges, we present Perception Compressor, a training-free prompt compression framework. It includes a perception retriever that leverages guiding questions and instruction to retrieve the most relevant demonstrations, a dual-slope ratio allocator to dynamically allocate compression ratios and open-book ratios, and a semi-guided iterative compression that retains key information at the token level while removing tokens that distract the LLM. We conduct extensive experiments on long context benchmarks, i.e., NaturalQuestions, LongBench, and MuSiQue. Experiment results show that Perception Compressor outperforms existing methods by a large margin, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
MojoBench: Language Modeling and Benchmarks for Mojo
Authors: Nishat Raihan; Joanna C. S. Santos; Marcos Zampieri
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: The recently introduced Mojo programming language (PL) by Modular, has received significant attention in the scientific community due to its claimed significant speed boost over Python. Despite advancements in code Large Language Models (LLMs) across various PLs, Mojo remains unexplored in this context. To address this gap, we introduce MojoBench, the first framework for Mojo code generation. MojoBench includes HumanEval-Mojo, a benchmark dataset designed for evaluating code LLMs on Mojo, and Mojo-Coder, the first LLM pretrained and finetuned for Mojo code generation, which supports instructions in 5 natural languages (NLs). Our results show that Mojo-Coder achieves a 30-35% performance improvement over leading models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Furthermore, we provide insights into LLM behavior with underrepresented and unseen PLs, offering potential strategies for enhancing model adaptability. MojoBench contributes to our understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations in emerging programming paradigms fostering more robust code generation systems.
VLind-Bench: Measuring Language Priors in Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Kang-il Lee; Minbeom Kim; Seunghyun Yoon; Minsung Kim; Dongryeol Lee; Hyukhun Koh; Kyomin Jung
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across various multimodal tasks. However, they suffer from a problem known as language prior, where responses are generated based solely on textual patterns while disregarding image information. Addressing the issue of language prior is crucial, as it can lead to undesirable biases or hallucinations when dealing with images that are out of training distribution. Despite its importance, current methods for accurately measuring language priors in LVLMs are poorly studied. Although existing benchmarks based on counterfactual or out-of-distribution images can partially be used to measure language priors, they fail to disentangle language priors from other confounding factors. To this end, we propose a new benchmark called VLind-Bench, which is the first benchmark specifically designed to measure the language priors, or blindness, of LVLMs. It not only includes tests on counterfactual images to assess language priors but also involves a series of tests to evaluate more basic capabilities such as commonsense knowledge, visual perception, and commonsense biases. For each instance in our benchmark, we ensure that all these basic tests are passed before evaluating the language priors, thereby minimizing the influence of other factors on the assessment. The evaluation and analysis of recent LVLMs in our benchmark reveal that almost all models exhibit a significant reliance on language priors, presenting a strong challenge in the field.
GRAG: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Yuntong Hu; Zhihan Lei; Zheng Zhang; Bo Pan; Chen Ling; Liang Zhao
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Naive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) focuses on individual documents during retrieval and, as a result, falls short in handling networked documents which are very popular in many applications such as citation graphs, social media, and knowledge graphs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GRAG), which tackles the fundamental challenges in retrieving textual subgraphs and integrating the joint textual and topological information into Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance its generation. To enable efficient textual subgraph retrieval, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer strategy that retrieves the optimal subgraph structure in linear time. To achieve graph context-aware generation, incorporate textual graphs into LLMs through two complementary views—the text view and the graph view—enabling LLMs to more effectively comprehend and utilize the graph context. Extensive experiments on graph reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that in scenarios requiring multi-hop reasoning on textual graphs, our GRAG approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art RAG methods. Our datasets as well as codes of GRAG are available at https://github.com/HuieL/GRAG.
Sequence-level Large Language Model Training with Contrastive Preference Optimization
Authors: Zhili Feng; Dhananjay Ram; Cole Hawkins; Aditya Rawal; Jinman Zhao; Sheng Zha
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: The next token prediction loss is the dominant self-supervised training objective for large language models and has achieved promising results in a variety of downstream tasks. However, upon closer investigation of this objective, we find that it lacks an understanding of sequence-level signals, leading to a mismatch between training and inference processes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a contrastive preference optimization (CPO) procedure that can inject sequence-level information into the language model at any training stage without expensive human labeled data. Our experiments show that the proposed objective surpasses the next token prediction in terms of win rate in the instruction-following and text generation tasks.
Scaling Up Membership Inference: When and How Attacks Succeed on Large Language Models
Authors: Haritz Puerto; Martin Gubri; Sangdoo Yun; Seong Joon Oh
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Membership inference attacks (MIA) attempt to verify the membership of a given data sample in the training set for a model. MIA has become relevant in recent years, following the rapid development of large language models (LLM). Many are concerned about the usage of copyrighted materials for training them and call for methods for detecting such usage. However, recent research has largely concluded that current MIA methods do not work on LLMs. Even when they seem to work, it is usually because of the ill-designed experimental setup where other shortcut features enable “cheating.” In this work, we argue that MIA still works on LLMs, but only when multiple documents are presented for testing. We construct new benchmarks that measure the MIA performances at a continuous scale of data samples, from sentences (n-grams) to a collection of documents (multiple chunks of tokens). To validate the efficacy of current MIA approaches at greater scales, we adapt a recent work on Dataset Inference (DI) for the task of binary membership detection that aggregates paragraph-level MIA features to enable document- and dataset-level MIA. This baseline achieves the first successful MIA on pre-trained and fine-tuned LLMs.
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Summary-Guided Decoding
Authors: Kyungmin Min; Minbeom Kim; Kang-il Lee; Dongryeol Lee; Kyomin Jung
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in generating detailed and coherent responses from visual inputs.However, they are prone to generate hallucinations due to an over-reliance on language priors. To address this issue, we investigate the language priors in LVLMs and make two key observations: (1) Even when predicting the tokens associated with image-related part-of-speech (POS), models increasingly rely on linguistic priors as the token sequences grow, thereby amplifying hallucinations. (2) Methods that directly calibrate LVLM’s output distribution to mitigate language priors can lead to a degradation in text quality or even exacerbate hallucinations.Based on these findings, we propose a novel method, Summary-Guided Decoding (SumGD). This method naturally encourages the model to focus more on image information by reducing the text context through summaries, while controlling only the image-related POS tokens to maintain text quality.Through experiments, we demonstrate that SumGD achieves state-of-the-art performance on object hallucination benchmarks. Furthermore, in terms of the trade-off between precision and recall, SumGD achieves Pareto optimality among the existing methods.Lastly, we observe that although existing methods struggle to balance the reduction of object hallucinations with maintaining text quality, SumGD demonstrates robustness in handling this challenge.
Exploring Hybrid Sampling Inference for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Xiaoyi Bao; Minjie Qiang; Jinghang Gu; Zhongqing Wang; Chu-Ren Huang
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: As the training of large language models (LLMs) will encounter high computational costs, massive works are now focusing on inference. Their methods can be generally summarised as re-sampling the target multiple times and performing a vote upon the outputs. Despite bringing significant performance improvements, it is a high-cost method that requires multiple sampling with the preset size. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient inference strategies named __Hybrid Sampling__ that combining both multiple and single sampling to greatly reduce the cost of multiple sampling without sacrificing performance. __Hybrid Sampling__ could dynamically choose the essential part of generated sequence for multiple sampling and proceed the rest with single sampling, achieving a performance-cost balance. Extensive experiments in several benchmarks underscore the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed Hybrid Sampling and more importantly, it is much faster.
Effective Self-Mining of In-Context Examples for Unsupervised Machine Translation with LLMs
Authors: Abdellah El Mekki; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, primarily through in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, the LLM is provided with examples that represent a given task such that it learns to generate answers for test inputs. However, access to these in-context examples is not guaranteed especially for low-resource or massively multilingual tasks. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach to mine in-context examples for machine translation (MT), enabling unsupervised MT (UMT) across different languages. Our approach begins with word-level mining to acquire word translations that are then used to perform sentence-level mining. As the quality of mined parallel pairs may not be optimal due to noise or mistakes, we introduce a filtering criterion to select the optimal in-context examples from a pool of unsupervised parallel sentences. We evaluate our approach using two multilingual LLMs on 288 directions from the FLORES-200 dataset (CITATION) and analyze the impact of various linguistic features on performance. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our unsupervised approach in mining in-context examples for MT, leading to better or comparable translation performance as translation with regular in-context samples (extracted from human-annotated data), while also outperforming the other state-of-the-art UMT methods by an average of 7 BLEU points.
GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models
Authors: Shuhe Wang; Xiaofei Sun; Xiaoya Li; Rongbin Ouyang; Fei Wu; Tianwei Zhang; Jiwei Li; Guoyin Wang; Chen Guo
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Despite the fact that large-scale Language Models (LLM) have achieved SOTA performances on a variety of NLP tasks, its performance on NER is still significantly below supervised baselines. This is due to the gap between the two tasks the NER and LLMs: the former is a sequence labeling task in nature while the latter is a text-generation model.In this paper, we propose GPT-NER to resolve this issue. GPT-NER bridges the gap by transforming the sequence labeling task to a generation task that can be easily adapted by LLMs e.g., the task of finding location entities in the input text “Columbus is a city” is transformed to generate the text sequence "@@Columbus## is a city”, where special tokens @@## marks the entity to extract. To efficiently address the hallucination issue of LLMs, where LLMs have a strong inclination to over-confidently label NULL inputs as entities, we propose a self-verification strategy by prompting LLMs to ask itself whether the extracted entities belong to a labeled entity tag.We conduct experiments on five widely adopted NER datasets, and GPT-NER achieves comparable performances to fully supervised baselines, which is the first time as far as we are concerned. More importantly, we find that GPT-NER exhibits a greater ability in the low-resource and few-shot setups, when the amount of training data is extremely scarce, GPT-NER performs significantly better than supervised models. This demonstrates the capabilities of GPT-NER in real-world NER applications where the number of labeled examples is limited.
QPruner: Probabilistic Decision Quantization for Structured Pruning in Large Language Models
Authors: Changhai Zhou; Yuhua Zhou; Yibin Wang; Shijie Han; Qian Qiao; Hongguang Li
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the resource demands of these models pose substantial challenges. Structured pruning is an effective approach to reducing model size, but it often results in significant accuracy degradation, necessitating parameter updates to adapt. Unfortunately, such fine-tuning requires substantial memory, which limits its applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce quantization into the structured pruning framework to reduce memory consumption during both fine-tuning and inference. However, the combined errors from pruning and quantization increase the difficulty of fine-tuning, requiring a more refined quantization scheme. To this end, we propose QPruner, a novel framework that employs structured pruning to reduce model size, followed by a layer-wise mixed-precision quantization scheme. Quantization precisions are assigned to each layer based on their importance to the target task, and Bayesian optimization is employed to refine precision allocation strategies, ensuring a balance between model accuracy and memory efficiency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that QPruner significantly outperforms existing methods in memory savings while maintaining or improving model performance.
MES-RAG: Bringing Multi-modal, Entity-Storage, and Secure Enhancements to RAG
Authors: Pingyu Wu; Daiheng Gao; Jing Tang; Huimin Chen; Wenbo Zhou; Weiming Zhang; Nenghai Yu
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves Large Language Models (LLMs) by using external knowledge, but it struggles with precise entity information retrieval. Our proposed **MES-RAG** framework enhances entity-specific query handling and provides accurate, secure, and consistent responses. MES-RAG introduces proactive security measures that ensure system integrity by applying protections prior to data access. Additionally, the system supports real-time multi-modal outputs, including text, images, audio, and video, seamlessly integrating into existing RAG architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that MES-RAG significantly improves both accuracy and recall, highlighting its effectiveness in advancing the security and utility of question-answering, increasing accuracy to **0.83 (+0.25)** on targeted task. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/wpydcr/MES-RAG.
LVPruning: An Effective yet Simple Language-Guided Vision Token Pruning Approach for Multi-modal Large Language Models
Authors: Yizheng Sun; Yanze Xin; Hao Li; Jingyuan Sun; Chenghua Lin; Riza Batista-Navarro
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success by integrating visual and textual modalities. However, they incur significant computational overhead due to the large number of vision tokens processed, limiting their practicality in resource-constrained environments. We introduce Language-Guided Vision Token Pruning (LVPruning) for MLLMs, an effective yet simple method that significantly reduces the computational burden while preserving model performance. LVPruning employs cross-attention modules to compute the importance of vision tokens based on their interaction with language tokens, determining which to prune. Importantly, LVPruning can be integrated without modifying the original MLLM parameters, which makes LVPruning simple to apply or remove. Our experiments show that LVPruning can effectively reduce up to 90% of vision tokens by the middle layer of LLaVA-1.5, resulting in a 62.1% decrease in inference Tera Floating-Point Operations Per Second (TFLOPs), with an average performance loss of just 0.45% across nine multi-modal benchmarks.
How Much Knowledge Can You Pack into a LoRA Adapter without Harming LLM?
Authors: Sergey Pletenev; Maria Marina; Daniil Moskovskiy; Vasily Konovalov; Pavel Braslavski; Alexander Panchenko; Mikhail Salnikov
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on many tasks is greatly limited by the knowledge learned during pre-training and stored in the model’s parameters. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a popular and efficient training technique for updating or domain-specific adaptation of LLMs. In this study, we investigate how new facts can be incorporated into the LLM using LoRA without compromising the previously learned knowledge. We fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-instruct using LoRA with varying amounts of new knowledge. Our experiments have shown that the best results are obtained when the training data contains a mixture of known and new facts. However, this approach is still potentially harmful because the model’s performance on external question-answering benchmarks declines after such fine-tuning. When the training data is biased towards certain entities, the model tends to regress to few overrepresented answers. In addition, we found that the model becomes more confident and refuses to provide an answer in only few cases. These findings highlight the potential pitfalls of LoRA-based LLM updates and underscore the importance of training data composition and tuning parameters to balance new knowledge integration and general model capabilities.
TART: An Open-Source Tool-Augmented Framework for Explainable Table-based Reasoning
Authors: Xinyuan Lu; Liangming Pan; Yubo Ma; Preslav Nakov; Min-Yen Kan
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025)

Abstract: Current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit limited ability to understand table structures and to apply precise numerical reasoning, which is crucial for tasks such as table question answering and table-based fact verification. To address these challenges, we introduce our Tool-Augmented Reasoning framework for Tables (TART), which integrates LLMs with specialized tools. TART contains three key components: a table formatter to ensure accurate data representation, a tool maker to develop specific computational tools, and an explanation generator to maintain explainability. We also present the TOOLTAB dataset, a new benchmark designed specifically for training LLMs in table–tool integration. Our experiments indicate that TART achieves substantial improvements over existing methods (e.g., Chain-of-Thought) by improving both the precision of data processing and the clarity of the reasoning process. Notably, TART paired with CodeLlama achieves 90.0% of the accuracy of the closed-sourced LLM GPT-3.5-turbo, highlighting its robustness in diverse real-world scenarios. Both code and data are openly available at https://github.com/XinyuanLu00/TART.