GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Pi-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Guidance from Pivot Programming Languages
Authors: Yongdong Chi; Hanqing Wang; Yun Chen; Yan Yang; Jian Yang; Zonghan Yang; Xiao Yan; Guanhua Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Text-to-SQL transforms the user queries from natural language to executable SQL programs, enabling non-experts to interact with complex databases. Existing prompt-based methods craft meticulous text guidelines and examples to facilitate SQL generation, but their accuracy is hindered by the large semantic gap between the texts and the low-resource SQL programs. In this work, we propose Pi-SQL, which incorporates the high-resource Python program as a pivot to bridge between the natural language query and SQL program. In particular, Pi-SQL first generates Python programs that provide fine-grained step-by-step guidelines in their code blocks or comments, and then produces an SQL program following the guidance of each Python program. The final SQL program matches the reference Python program’s query results and, through selection from candidates generated by different strategies, achieves superior execution speed, with a reward-based valid efficiency score up to 4.55 higher than the best-performing baseline. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Pi-SQL, which improves the execution accuracy of the best-performing baseline by up to 3.20.
RAC: Efficient LLM Factuality Correction with Retrieval Augmentation
Authors: Changmao Li; Jeffrey Flanigan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive results across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet they can often produce factually incorrect outputs. This paper introduces a simple but effective low-latency post-correction method, Retrieval Augmented Correction (RAC), aimed at enhancing the factual performance of LLMs without requiring additional fine-tuning. Our method is general and can be used with any instruction-tuned LLM, and has greatly reduced latency compared to prior approaches. RAC decomposes the LLM’s output into atomic facts and applies a fine-grained verification and correction process with retrieved content to verify and correct the LLM-generated output. Our extensive experiments show that RAC yields up to 30% improvements over the LLM baselines across three popular factuality evaluation datasets, validating its efficacy and robustness with and without the integration of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) across different LLMs. Notably, our method has reduced latency up to 40x and reduced token consumption up to 7x compared to previous state-of-the-art post-correction approaches with similar or better performance.
Does It Run and Is That Enough? Revisiting Text-to-Chart Generation with a Multi-Agent Approach
Authors: James Ford; Anthony Rios
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large language models can translate natural-language chart descriptions into runnable code, yet approximately 15% of the generated scripts still fail to execute, even after supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. We investigate whether this persistent error rate stems from model limitations or from reliance on a single-prompt design. To explore this, we propose a lightweight multi-agent pipeline that separates drafting, execution, repair, and judgment, using only an off-the-shelf GPT-4o-mini model. On the Text2Chart31 benchmark, our system reduces execution errors to 4.5% within three repair iterations, outperforming the strongest fine-tuned baseline by nearly 5 percentage points while requiring significantly less compute. Similar performance is observed on the ChartX benchmark, with an error rate of 4.6%, demonstrating strong generalization. Under current benchmarks, execution success appears largely solved. However, manual review reveals that 6 out of 100 sampled charts contain hallucinations, and an LLM-based accessibility audit shows that only 33.3% (Text2Chart31) and 7.2% (ChartX) of generated charts satisfy basic colorblindness guidelines. These findings suggest that future work should shift focus from execution reliability toward improving chart aesthetics, semantic fidelity, and accessibility.
GeLoRA: Geometric Adaptive Ranks For Efficient LoRA Fine-tuning
Authors: Abdessalam Ed-dib; Zhanibek Datbayev; Amine M. Aboussalah
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive because it requires updating all model parameters. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reduces this cost by modifying a subset of weights, but selecting the appropriate rank introduces a trade-off: lower ranks improve efficiency at the expense of expressivity, while higher ranks enhance performance but increase computational burden. Existing adaptive LoRA methods lack a theoretical foundation to guide this trade-off optimally. We propose Geometric Low-Rank Adaptation (GeLoRA), a principled approach that estimates the intrinsic dimensionality of hidden data representations to adaptively select LoRA ranks. We show theoretically and empirically that the intrinsic dimension serves as a lower bound for the optimal rank of LoRA matrices, enabling a balance between efficiency and expressivity. Extensive experiments on GLUE, SQuAD (with DeBERTa), and MT-Bench (with LLaMA) demonstrate that GeLoRA consistently outperforms recent adaptive LoRA methods by up to +1.0%, while simultaneously reducing computational time by 13.5% to 64.2%, depending on the baseline, under the same parameter budget.
Uncovering Scaling Laws for Large Language Models via Inverse Problems
Authors: Arun Verma; Zhaoxuan Wu; Zijian Zhou; Xiaoqiang Lin; Zhiliang Chen; Rachael Hwee Ling Sim; Rui Qiao; Jingtan Wang; Nhung Bui; Xinyuan Niu; Wenyang Hu; Gregory Kang Ruey Lau; Zi-Yu Khoo; Zitong Zhao; Xinyi Xu; Apivich Hemachandra; See-Kiong Ng; Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are large-scale pretrained models that have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. These successes have been driven by unprecedented complexity and scale in both data and computations. However, due to the high costs of training such models, brute-force trial-and-error approaches to improve LLMs are not feasible. Inspired by the success of inverse problems in uncovering fundamental scientific laws, this position paper advocates that inverse problems can also efficiently uncover scaling laws that guide the building of LLMs to achieve the desirable performance with significantly better cost-effectiveness.
UIPE: Enhancing LLM Unlearning by Removing Knowledge Related to Forgetting Targets
Authors: Wenyu Wang; Mengqi Zhang; Xiaotian Ye; Zhaochun Ren; Pengjie Ren; Zhumin Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) inevitably acquire harmful information during training on massive datasets. LLM unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of such harmful information while maintaining the model’s overall performance. Existing unlearning methods, represented by gradient ascent-based approaches, primarily focus on forgetting target data while overlooking the crucial impact of logically related knowledge on the effectiveness of unlearning. In this paper, through both theoretical and experimental analyses, we first demonstrate that a key reason for the suboptimal unlearning performance is that models can reconstruct the target content through reasoning with logically related knowledge. To address this issue, we propose Unlearning Improvement via Parameter Extrapolation (UIPE), a method that removes knowledge highly correlated with the forgetting targets. Experimental results show that UIPE significantly enhances the performance of GA-based method and its variants on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks.
FicSim: A Dataset for Multi-Faceted Semantic Similarity in Long-Form Fiction
Authors: Natasha Johnson; Amanda Bertsch; Maria-Emil Deal; Emma Strubell
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: As language models become capable of processing increasingly long and complex texts, there has been growing interest in their application within computational literary studies. However, evaluating the usefulness of these models for such tasks remains challenging due to the cost of fine-grained annotation for long-form texts and the data contamination concerns inherent in using public-domain literature. Current embedding similarity datasets are not suitable for evaluating literary-domain tasks because of a focus on coarse-grained similarity and primarily on very short text. We assemble and release a dataset, FicSim, of long-form, recently written fiction, including scores along 12 axes of similarity informed by author-produced metadata and validated by digital humanities scholars. We evaluate a suite of embedding models on this task, demonstrating a tendency across models to focus on surface-level features over semantic categories that would be useful for computational literary studies tasks. Throughout our data-collection process, we prioritize author agency and rely on continual, informed author consent.
Masked Diffusion Captioning for Visual Feature Learning
Authors: Chao Feng; Zihao Wei; Andrew Owens
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: We learn visual features by captioning images with an image-conditioned masked diffusion language model, a formulation we call masked diffusion captioning (MDC). During training, text tokens in each image–caption pair are masked at a randomly chosen ratio, and a decoder conditioned on visual features is trained to reconstruct the original text. After training, the learned visual features can be applied to downstream vision tasks. Unlike autoregressive captioning, the strength of the visual learning signal in MDC does not depend on each token’s position in the sequence, reducing the need for auxiliary objectives. Linear probing experiments across a variety of academic-scale models and datasets show that the learned visual features are competitive with those produced by autoregressive and contrastive approaches.
Diverse Multi-tool Aggregation with Large Language Models for Enhanced Math Reasoning
Authors: Bohan Yao; Vikas Yadav
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Tool usage is a proven technique for developing high-performance reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Our work is focused on emphasizing the utility of leveraging multiple diverse tools for complex reasoning tasks. We present Multi-TAG, a Multi-Tool AGgregation-based LLM framework that utilizes multiple diverse tools to solve complex math problems over multiple reasoning steps. At each reasoning step, Multi-TAG invokes multiple tools and accepts the solution of the respective step by tools that have majority agreement on the final answer estimate. Multi-TAG strongly outperforms several standard baselines that use individual tools with the same number of runs, highlighting the importance of multi-tool invocation for solving complex reasoning tasks. We also show that naive aggregation of multiple tools at each reasoning step also leads to substantial improvements of up to 35% accuracy. Multi-TAG then further improves these gains by 7.4% on average on MATH500, AIME, AMC, and OlympiadBench.
Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Dynamic Multi-dimensional Consistency Optimization
Authors: Didi Zhang; Yaxin Fan; Peifeng Li; Qiaoming Zhu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Previous work on goal-oriented proactive dialogue systems frequently failed to address the multi-dimensional consistency issue between generated responses and key contextual elements (e.g., user profile, dialogue history, domain knowledge, and subgoal). To address this issue, we propose a novel Dynamic Multi-dimensional Consistency Reinforcement Learning (DMCRL) framework, which adaptively measures the impact of each consistency dimension on overall dialogue quality and provides targeted feedback to improve response quality. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our DMCRL significantly improves the consistency of generated responses.
Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Zirui Song; Bin Yan; Yuhan Liu; Miao Fang; Mingzhe Li; Rui Yan; Xiuying Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various tasks such as natural language understanding, text summarization, and machine translation. However, their general-purpose nature often limits their effectiveness in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge, such as healthcare, chemistry, or legal analysis. To address this, researchers have explored diverse methods to enhance LLMs by integrating domain-specific knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of these methods, which we categorize into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. Each approach offers unique mechanisms to equip LLMs with domain expertise, balancing trade-offs between flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. We discuss how these methods enable LLMs to tackle specialized tasks, compare their advantages and disadvantages, evaluate domain-specific LLMs against general LLMs, and highlight the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. For those interested in delving deeper into this area, we also summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source at: blueofficial-repo.com, dedicated to documenting research in the field of specialized LLM.
Who’s the Author? How Explanations Impact User Reliance in AI-Assisted Authorship Attribution
Authors: Calvin Bao; Connor Baumler; Hal Daumé Iii; Marine Carpuat
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Despite growing interest in explainable NLP, it remains unclear how explanation strategies shape user behavior in tasks like authorship identification, where relevant textual features may be difficult for lay users to pinpoint. To support their analysis of text style, we consider two explanation types: example-based style rewrites and feature-based rationales, generated using a LLM-based pipeline. We measured how explanations impact user behavior in a controlled study (n=95) where participants completed authorship identification tasks with our types of assistance. While no explanation type improved overall task accuracy, fine-grained reliance patterns (CITATION) revealed that rewrites supported appropriate reliance, whereas presenting both explanation types increased AI overreliance, minimizing participant self-reliance. We find that participants exhibiting better reliance behaviors had focused explanation needs, contrasting with the diffused preferences of those who overrelied on AI, or incorrectly self-relied. These findings highlight the need for adaptive explanation systems that tailor support based on specific user reliance behaviors.
UniSpeaker: A Unified Approach for Multimodality-driven Speaker Generation
Authors: Zhengyan Sheng; Zhihao Du; Heng Lu; ShiLiang Zhang; Zhen-Hua Ling
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: While recent advances in reference-based speaker cloning have significantly improved the authenticity of synthetic speech, speaker generation driven by multimodal cues such as visual appearance, textual descriptions, and other biometric signals remains in its early stages. To pioneer truly multimodal-controllable speaker generation, we propose UniSpeaker, the first framework supporting unified voice synthesis from arbitrary modality combinations. Specifically, self-distillation is firstly applied to a large-scale speech generation model for speaker disentanglement. To overcome data sparsity and one-to-many mapping challenges, a novel KV-Former based unified voice aggregator is introduced, where multiple modalities are projected into a shared latent space through soft contrastive learning to ensure accurate alignment with user-specified vocal characteristics. Additionally, to advance the field, the first Multimodal Voice Control (MVC) benchmark is established to evaluate voice suitability, diversity, and quality. When tested across five MVC tasks, UniSpeaker is shown to surpass existing modality-specific models. Speech samples and the MVC benchmark are available at https://UniSpeaker.github.io.
On the Fine-Grained Planning Abilities of VLM Web Agents
Authors: Surgan Jandial; Yinong Oliver Wang; Andrea Bajcsy; Fernando De la Torre
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise as web agents, yet their planning—the ability to devise strategies or action sequences to complete tasks—remains understudied. While prior works focus on VLM’s perception and overall success rates (i.e., goal completion), fine-grained investigation of their planning has been overlooked. To address this gap, we examine VLMs’ capability to (1) understand temporal relationships within web contexts, and (2) assess plans of actions across diverse scenarios. We design four simple yet effective tests to delve into these nuanced aspects around planning. Our results across nineteen VLMs reveal that these models exhibit limited performance in the aforementioned skills and are not reliable to function as web agents. To facilitate future work, we release our planning evaluations and data, providing a foundation for advancing the future research in this area.
InterFeedback: Unveiling Interactive Intelligence of Large Multimodal Models with Human Feedback
Authors: Henry Hengyuan Zhao; Wenqi Pei; Yifei Tao; Haiyang Mei; Mike Zheng Shou
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Existing benchmarks do not test Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on their interactive intelligence with human users which is vital for developing general-purpose AI assistants. We design InterFeedback, an interactive framework, which can be applied to any LMM and dataset to assess this ability autonomously. On top of this, we introduce InterFeedback-Bench that evaluates interactive intelligence using two representative datasets, MMMU-Pro and MathVerse, to test 10 different open-source LMMs. Additionally, we present InterFeedback-Human, a newly collected dataset of 120 cases designed for manually testing interactive performance in leading models such as OpenAI-o1 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Our evaluation results show that state-of-the-art LMM (e.g., OpenAI-o1) can correct their results through human feedback less than 50%. Our findings point to the need for methods that can enhance LMMs’ capabilities to interpret and benefit from feedback.
ReFLAIR: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning via Structured Reflection and Reward-Guided Learning
Authors: Jiazhou Ji; Xinru Lu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large models can achieve higher performance on complex problems through iterative self-reflection. Yet when reflection is uncontrolled, it often leads to longer outputs, higher inference cost, and an increased risk of hallucination. Existing training methods rarely address this trade off. We introduce ReFLAIR, a unified framework that teaches multimodal large models to perform structured reflection via an explicit $think re-think answer $ format and hybrid reward learning. ReFLAIR begins with supervised cold start training on the ReFLAIR-cold dataset of curated multimodal reasoning trajectories, and then trains a Reflection Quality Scorer (RQS) to quantify the utility of rethinking steps. A modified Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm optimizes a hybrid reward that combines answer correctness, structural fidelity, reflection utility, and sample difficulty. Evaluated on challenging mathematical benchmarks including MathVista, MathVerse, MM-Math and GSM8K, ReFLAIR yields improvements up to +12.2% absolute accuracy, produces higher quality reflective traces, and reduces harmful or redundant revisions. An adaptive test time reflection scheduler further reduces inference cost by nearly 23% while maintaining or improving accuracy. These results demonstrate that structured, reward guided reflection offers a scalable pathway to more reliable and interpretable reasoning in multimodal models.
ControlText: Unlocking Controllable Fonts in Multilingual Text Rendering without Font Annotations
Authors: Bowen Jiang; Yuan Yuan; Xinyi Bai; Zhuoqun Hao; Alyson Yin; Yaojie Hu; Wenyu Liao; Lyle Ungar; Camillo Jose Taylor
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: This work demonstrates that diffusion models can achieve font-controllable multilingual text rendering using just raw images without font label annotations. Visual text rendering remains a significant challenge. While recent methods condition diffusion on glyphs, it is impossible to retrieve exact font annotations from large-scale, real-world datasets, which prevents user-specified font control. To address this, we propose a data-driven solution that integrates the conditional diffusion model with a text segmentation model, utilizing segmentation masks to capture and represent fonts in pixel space in a self-supervised manner, thereby eliminating the need for any ground-truth labels and enabling users to customize text rendering with any multilingual font of their choice. The experiment provides a proof of concept of our algorithm in zero-shot text and font editing across diverse fonts and languages, providing valuable insights for the community and industry toward achieving generalized visual text rendering.
STA-CoT: Structured Target-Centric Agentic Chain-of-Thought for Consistent Multi-Image Geological Reasoning
Authors: Beibei Yu; Tao Shen; Ling Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Reliable multi-image geological reasoning is essential for automating expert tasks in remote-sensing mineral exploration, yet remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the need for locating target areas, accurate cross-image referencing, and consistency over long reasoning chains. We propose STA-CoT, a Structured Target-centric Agentic Chain-of-Thought framework that orchestrates planning, execution, and verification agents to decompose, ground, and iteratively refine reasoning steps over geological and hyperspectral image sets. By aligning each reasoning step to specific image target areas and enforcing consistency through agentic verification and majority voting, STA-CoT robustly mitigates tool errors, long-chain inconsistencies, and error propagation. We rigorously evaluate STA-CoT on MineBench, a dedicated benchmark for multi-image mineral exploration, demonstrating substantial improvements over existing multimodal chain-of-thought and agentic baselines. Our results establish STA-CoT as a reliable and robust solution for consistent multi-image geological reasoning, advancing automated scientific discovery in mineral exploration.