GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
NLP-ADBench: NLP Anomaly Detection Benchmark
Authors: Yuangang Li; Jiaqi Li; Zhuo Xiao; Tiankai Yang; Yi Nian; Xiyang Hu; Yue Zhao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with applications in fraud detection, content moderation, and user behavior analysis. However, AD is relatively understudied in a natural language processing (NLP) context, limiting its effectiveness in detecting harmful content, phishing attempts, and spam reviews. We introduce NLP-ADBench, the most comprehensive NLP anomaly detection (NLP-AD) benchmark to date, which includes eight curated datasets and 19 state-of-the-art algorithms. These span 3 end-to-end methods and 16 two-step approaches that adapt classical, non-AD methods to language embeddings from BERT and OpenAI. Our empirical results show that no single model dominates across all datasets, indicating a need for automated model selection. Moreover, two-step methods with transformer-based embeddings consistently outperform specialized end-to-end approaches, with OpenAI embeddings outperforming those of BERT. We release NLP-ADBench at https://github.com/USC-FORTIS/NLP-ADBench, providing a unified framework for NLP-AD and supporting future investigations.
Toward Inclusive Language Models: Sparsity-Driven Calibration for Systematic and Interpretable Mitigation of Social Biases in LLMs
Authors: Prommy Sultana Hossain; Chahat Raj; Ziwei Zhu; Jessica Lin; Emanuela Marasco
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT and LLaMA excel in natural language tasks, e.g., text generation and machine translation. However, inherent biases from training on vast Internet datasets potentially amplify harmful stereotypes—widely held, oversimplified, and often inaccurate generalizations about groups of people. Our contribution introduces a novel, systematic, and architecture-aware method to identify and mitigate stereotypical bias in decoder-only transformer models. This interpretable approach operates without gradient access or retraining from scratch. We first evaluate bias and then apply a bias localization mechanism that correlates internal activations with a newly defined Context Influence (CI) Score. Our method pinpoints specific attention heads that consistently align with biased shifts in model predictions. To mitigate this, we introduce a soft pruning strategy that scales attention head parameters based on their correlation strength, followed by lightweight fine-tuning to maintain fluent text generation. Experiments across five models demonstrate our approach reduces bias by up to 37% on BBQ, 32% on StereoSet, and 33% on CrowS-Pairs while simultaneously improving reasoning performance on MMLU by up to 10%.
Table-Text Alignment: Explaining Claim Verification Against Tables in Scientific Papers
Authors: Xanh Ho; Sunisth Kumar; Yun-Ang Wu; Florian Boudin; Atsuhiro Takasu; Akiko Aizawa
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Scientific claim verification against tables typically requires predicting whether a claim is supported or refuted given a table. However, we argue that predicting the final label alone is insufficient: it reveals little about the model’s reasoning and offers limited interpretability. To address this, we reframe table–text alignment as an explanation task, requiring models to identify the table cells essential for claim verification. We build a new dataset by extending the SciTab benchmark with human-annotated cell-level rationales. Annotators verify the claim label and highlight the minimal set of cells needed to support their decision. After the annotation process, we utilize the collected information and propose a taxonomy for handling ambiguous cases. Our experiments show that (i) incorporating table alignment information improves claim verification performance, and (ii) most LLMs, while often predicting correct labels, fail to recover human-aligned rationales, suggesting that their predictions do not stem from faithful reasoning.
DCRM: A Heuristic to Measure Response Pair Quality in Preference Optimization
Authors: Chengyu Huang; Tanya Goyal
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Recent research has attempted to associate preference optimization (PO) performance with the underlying preference datasets. In this work, our observation is that the differences between the preferred response y+ and dispreferred response y- influence what LLMs can learn, which may not match the desirable differences to learn. Therefore, we use distance and reward margin to quantify these differences, and combine them to get Distance Calibrated Reward Margin (DCRM), a metric that measures the quality of a response pair for PO. Intuitively, DCRM encourages minimal noisy differences and maximal desired differences. With this, we study three types of commonly used preference datasets, classified along two axes: the source of the responses and the preference labeling function. We establish a general correlation between higher DCRM of the training set and better learning outcome. Inspired by this, we propose a best-of-N2 pairing method that selects response pairs with the highest DCRM. Empirically, in various settings, our method produces training datasets that can further improve models’ performance on AlpacaEval, MT-Bench, and Arena-Hard over the existing training sets.
Advancing Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf LLMs: A Semantic Structure Perspective
Authors: Pengfei He; Zitao Li; Yue Xing; Yaliang Li; Jiliang Tang; Bolin Ding
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in zero-shot reasoning and generalization to new tasks. However, the zero-shot performance of general LLMs on complex tasks, such as multi-hop reasoning, remains suboptimal, while reasoning LLMs suffer from hallucinations and unfaithfulness. In this paper, to handle these limitations, we introduce a novel structure analysis method that helps LLMs better understand the question structure and guide the problem-solving process. We demonstrate that existing reasoning strategies, such as Chain-of-Thought and ReAct, significantly benefit from the LLM’s inherent understanding of semantic structure. We further ground our method in the theory of probabilistic graphical models to support its effectiveness. To enhance the reasoning process, we augment the structure analysis with refinement and retrieval capabilities, forming a multi-agent reasoning system called Structure-oriented Autonomous Reasoning Agents (SARA). Extensive experiments show that SARA significantly improves zero-shot performance on knowledge-intensive and mathematical tasks. Remarkably, our approach makes a general LLM competitive with dedicated reasoning models in several benchmarks and demonstrates strong robustness against corrupted reasoning paths.
LLM-based Open Domain Planning by Leveraging Entity-Attribute-Level Domain Models
Authors: Dongning Rao; Songlin He; Zhihua Jiang; Ruishi Liang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Currently, large language models (LLMs) based Open domain Natural language planning (LONG) has considerable room for improvement. E.g., non-reusable plans with incomplete intermediate states and missing steps hinder real-world applications. To remedy these flaws, this paper establishes a dataset with a baseline for LONG. The GOLD dataset provides the largest dataset for textual procedures, along with corresponding reusable formal planning domain definitions, to date. The baseline, DIGGER, leverages entity-attribute-level action models, which reveal relevant implicit physical properties (aka attributes) of salient entities in actions. DIGGER first extracts action models and builds typed entity lists from textual procedures. Then, it builds goal states for new tasks and instantiates grounded actions using domain prediction. At last, plans are generalized and translated into textual procedures by LLM. Reference-based metrics, LLM-as-a-Judge, and human evaluation are employed to comprehensively evaluate LONG. Experiments on GOLD validate that DIGGER is stronger and more generalizable than recently proposed approaches and LLMs. I.e., DIGGER is the best in seen domains and applicable to unseen domains without adaptation. Specifically, the BLEU-1 score increased from 0.385 to 0.408 on seen domains and rose to 0.310 on unseen domains.
DICP: Deep In-Context Prompt for Event Causality Identification
Authors: Lin Mu; Jun Shen; Li Ni; Lei Sang; Zhize Wu; Peiquan Jin; Yiwen Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Event causality identification (ECI) is a challenging task that involves predicting causal relationships between events in text. Existing prompt-learning-based methods typically concatenate in-context examples only at the input layer, this shallow integration limits the model’s ability to capture the abstract semantic cues necessary for identifying complex causal relationships. To address this limitation, we propose a novel model called Deep In-Context Prompt (DICP), which injects in-context examples into the deeper layer of a pre-trained language model (PLM). This strategy enables the model to leverage the hierarchical semantic representations formed in deeper layers, thereby enhancing its capacity to learn high-level causal abstractions. Moreover, DICP introduces a multi-layer prompt injection mechanism, distributing diverse in-context examples across multiple transformer layers. This design allows the model to recognize a broader range of causal patterns and improves its generalization across different contexts. We evaluate the DICP model through extensive experiments on two widely used datasets, demonstrating its significant improvement in ECI performance compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, we explore the impact of varying the number of deep layers on performance, providing valuable insights into the optimal layer configuration for ECI tasks.
Seeing is Believing: Emotion-Aware Audio-Visual Language Modeling for Expressive Speech Generation
Authors: Weiting Tan; Jiachen Lian; Hirofumi Inaguma; Paden Tomasello; Philipp Koehn; Xutai Ma
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: We present an Audio-Visual Language Model (AVLM) for expressive speech generation by integrating full-face visual cues into a pre-trained expressive speech model. We explore multiple visual encoders and multimodal fusion strategies during pre-training to identify the most effective integration approach. Subsequent fine-tuning on emotion recognition and expressive dialogue tasks yields substantial gains over speech-only baselines (e.g., +5 F1 in emotion recognition). AVLM highlights the value of expressive visual information in guiding speech generation and offers a foundation for end-to-end multimodal conversational systems.
GRV-KBQA: A Three-Stage Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Decoupled Logical Structure, Semantic Grounding and Structure-Aware Validation
Authors: Yuhang Tian; Pan Yang; Dandan Song; Zhijing Wu; Hao Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) is a fundamental task that enables natural language interaction with structured knowledge bases (KBs).Given a natural language question, KBQA aims to retrieve the answers from the KB. However, existing approaches, including retrieval-based, semantic parsing-based methods and large-language model-based methods often suffer from generating non-executable queries and inefficiencies in query execution. To address these challenges, we propose GRV-KBQA, a three-stage framework that decouples logical structure generation from semantic grounding and incorporates structure-aware validation to enhance accuracy. Unlike previous methods, GRV-KBQA explicitly enforces KB constraints to improve alignment between generated logical forms and KB structures. Experimental results on WebQSP and CWQ show that GRV-KBQA significantly improves performance over existing approaches. The ablation study conducted confirms the effectiveness of the decoupled logical form generation and validation mechanism of our framework.
Improving Prompt Generalization for Cross-prompt Essay Trait Scoring from the Scoring-invariance Perspective
Authors: Jiong Wang; Shengquan Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Cross-prompt trait scoring task aims to learn generalizable scoring capabilities from source- prompt data, enabling automatic scoring across multiple dimensions on unseen essays. Existing research on cross-prompt trait essay scoring primarily focuses on improving model generalization by obtaining prompt-invariant representations. In this paper, we approach the research problem from a different perspective on invariance learning and propose a scoring-invariant learning objective. This objective encourages the model to focus on intrinsic information within the essay that reflects its quality during training, thereby learning generic scoring features. To further enhance the model’s ability to score across multiple dimensions, we introduce a trait feature extraction network based on routing gates into the scoring architecture and propose a trait consistency scoring objective to encourage the model to balance the diversity of trait-specific features with scoring consistency across traits when learning trait-specific essay features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing advantages in multi-trait scoring performance and achieving significant improvements with low-resource prompts.
When Format Changes Meaning: Investigating Semantic Inconsistency of Large Language Models
Authors: Cheongwoong Kang; Jongeun Baek; Yeonjea Kim; Jaesik Choi
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks. However, they remain vulnerable to semantic inconsistency, where minor formatting variations result in divergent predictions for semantically equivalent inputs. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that this brittleness persists even in state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o, posing a serious challenge to their reliability. Through a mechanistic analysis, we find that semantic-equivalent input changes induce instability in internal representations, ultimately leading to divergent predictions. This reflects a deeper structural issue, where form and meaning are intertwined in the embedding space. We further demonstrate that existing mitigation strategies, including direct fine-tuning on format variations, do not fully address semantic inconsistency, underscoring the difficulty of the problem. Our findings highlight the need for deeper mechanistic understanding to develop targeted methods that improve robustness.
ASTPrompter: Preference-Aligned Automated Language Model Red-Teaming to Generate Low-Perplexity Unsafe Prompts
Authors: Amelia Hardy; Houjun Liu; Allie Griffith; Bernard Lange; Duncan Eddy; Mykel Kochenderfer
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Existing LLM red-teaming approaches prioritize high attack success rate, often resulting in high-perplexity prompts. This focus overlooks low-perplexity attacks that are more difficult to filter, more likely to arise during benign usage, and more impactful as negative downstream training examples. In response, we introduce ASTPrompter, a single-step optimization method that uses contrastive preference learning to train an attacker to maintain low perplexity while achieving a high attack success rate (ASR). ASTPrompter achieves an attack success rate 5.1 times higher on Llama-8.1B while using inputs that are 2.1 times more likely to occur according to the frozen LLM. Furthermore, our attack transfers to Mistral-7B, Qwen-7B, and TinyLlama in both black- and white-box settings. Lastly, by tuning a single hyperparameter in our method, we discover successful attack prefixes along an efficient frontier between ASR and perplexity, highlighting perplexity as a previously under-considered factor in red-teaming.
How Do Large Language Models Perform on PDE Discovery: A Coarse-to-fine Perspective
Authors: Xiao Luo; Changhu Wang; Yizhou Sun; Wei Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of how to use large language models (LLMs) to identify the underlying partial differential equations (PDEs) out of very limited observations of a physical system. Previous methods usually utilize physical-informed neural networks (PINNs) to learn the PDE solver and coefficient of PDEs simultaneously, which could suffer from performance degradation under extreme data scarcity. Towards this end, this paper attempts to utilize LLMs to solve this problem without further fine-tuning by proposing a novel framework named LLM for PDE Discovery (LLM4PD). The core of our LLM4PD is to utilize a coarse-to-fine paradigm to automatically discover underlying PDEs. In the coarse phase, LLM4PD selects the crucial terms from a library with hierarchical prompts and incorporates a review agent to enhance the accuracy. In the fine phase, LLM4PD interacts with a PDE solver to optimize the coefficient of the selected terms with the optimization trajectory. We also provide an adaptive hybrid optimization strategy switching between fine-tuning and exploration to balance stability and efficiency. Extensive experiments on several systems validate the effectiveness of our proposed LLM4PD in different settings.
Rethinking Data Selection at Scale: Random Selection is Almost All You Need
Authors: Tingyu Xia; Bowen Yu; Kai Dang; An Yang; Yuan Wu; Yuan Tian; Yi Chang; Junyang Lin
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions. The primary goal during SFT is to select a small yet representative subset of training data from the larger pool, such that fine-tuning with this subset achieves results comparable to or even exceeding those obtained using the entire dataset. However, most existing data selection techniques are designed for small-scale data pools, which fail to meet the demands of real-world SFT scenarios. In this paper, we replicated several self-scoring methods—those that do not rely on external model assistance—on two million-scale datasets, and found that nearly all methods struggled to significantly outperform random selection when dealing with such large-scale data pools. Moreover, our comparisons suggest that, during SFT, diversity in data selection is more critical than simply focusing on high-quality data. We also analyzed the limitations of several current approaches, explaining why they perform poorly on large-scale datasets and why they are unsuitable for such contexts. Finally, we found that filtering data by token length offers a stable and efficient method for improving results. This approach, particularly when training on long-text data, proves highly beneficial for relatively weaker base models, such as Llama3. The code is available at https://github.com/xiatingyu/SFT-DataSelection-at-scale.
PromptKeeper: Safeguarding System Prompts for LLMs
Authors: Zhifeng Jiang; Zhihua Jin; Guoliang He
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: System prompts are widely used to guide the outputs of large language models (LLMs). These prompts often contain business logic and sensitive information, making their protection essential. However, adversarial and even regular user queries can exploit LLM vulnerabilities to expose these hidden prompts. To address this issue, we propose PromptKeeper, a defense mechanism designed to safeguard system prompts by tackling two core challenges: reliably detecting leakage and mitigating side-channel vulnerabilities when leakage occurs. By framing detection as a hypothesis-testing problem, PromptKeeper effectively identifies both explicit and subtle leakage. Upon leakage detected, it regenerates responses using a dummy prompt, ensuring that outputs remain indistinguishable from typical interactions when no leakage is present. PromptKeeper ensures robust protection against prompt extraction attacks via either adversarial or regular queries, while preserving conversational capability and runtime efficiency during benign user interactions.
Automating eHMI Action Design with LLMs for Automated Vehicle Communication
Authors: Ding Xia; Xinyue Gui; Fan Gao; Dongyuan Li; Mark Colley; Takeo Igarashi
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: The absence of explicit communication channels between automated vehicles (AVs) and other road users requires the use of external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) to convey messages effectively in uncertain scenarios. Currently, most eHMI studies employ predefined text messages and manually designed actions to perform these messages, which limits the real-world deployment of eHMIs, where adaptability in dynamic scenarios is essential. Given the generalizability and versatility of large language models (LLMs), they could potentially serve as automated action designers for the message-action design task. To validate this idea, we make three contributions: (1) We propose a pipeline that integrates LLMs and 3D renderers, using LLMs as action designers to generate executable actions for controlling eHMIs and rendering action clips. (2) We collect a user-rated Action-Design Scoring dataset comprising a total of 320 action sequences for eight intended messages and four representative eHMI modalities. The dataset validates that LLMs can translate intended messages into actions close to a human level, particularly for reasoning-enabled LLMs. (3) We introduce two automated raters, Action Reference Score (ARS) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), to benchmark 18 LLMs, finding that the VLM aligns with human preferences yet varies across eHMI modalities. The source code, prompts, Blender scenarios, and rendered clips are available at https://github.com/ApisXia/AutoActionDesign.
A Dynamic Fusion Model for Consistent Crisis Response
Authors: Xiaoying Song; Anirban Saha Anik; Eduardo Blanco; Vanessa Frias-Martinez; Lingzi Hong
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: In response to the urgent need for effective communication with crisis-affected populations, automated responses driven by language models have been proposed to assist in crisis communications. A critical yet often overlooked factor is the consistency of response style, which could affect the trust of affected individuals in responders. Despite its importance, few studies have explored methods for maintaining stylistic consistency across generated responses. To address this gap, we propose a novel metric for evaluating style consistency and introduce a fusion-based generation approach grounded in this metric. Our method employs a two-stage process: it first assesses the style of candidate responses and then optimizes and integrates them at the instance level through a fusion process. This enables the generation of high-quality responses while significantly reducing stylistic variation between instances. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baselines in both response quality and stylistic uniformity.