GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Creative Preference Optimization
Authors: Mete Ismayilzada; Antonio Laverghetta Jr.; Simone A. Luchini; Reet Patel; Antoine Bosselut; Lonneke Van Der Plas; Roger E. Beaty
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across natural language generation tasks, their ability to generate truly creative content—characterized by novelty, diversity, surprise, and quality—remains limited. Existing methods for enhancing LLM creativity often focus narrowly on diversity or specific tasks, failing to address creativity’s multifaceted nature in a generalizable way. In this work, we propose Creative Preference Optimization (CrPO), a novel alignment method that injects signals from multiple creativity dimensions into the preference optimization objective in a modular fashion. We train and evaluate creativity-augmented versions of several models using CrPO and MuCE, a new large-scale human preference dataset spanning over 200,000 human-generated responses and ratings from more than 30 psychological creativity assessments. Our models outperform strong baselines, including GPT-4o, on both automated and human evaluations, producing more novel, diverse, and surprising generations while maintaining high output quality. Additional evaluations on NoveltyBench further confirm the generalizability of our approach. Together, our results demonstrate that directly optimizing for creativity within preference frameworks is a promising direction for advancing the creative capabilities of LLMs without compromising output quality.
Assistant-Guided Mitigation of Teacher Preference Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge
Authors: Zhuo Liu; Moxin Li; Xun Deng; Qifan Wang; Fuli Feng
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge employs large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, to evaluate the quality of LLM-generated responses, gaining popularity for its cost-effectiveness and strong alignment with human evaluations. However, training proxy judge models using evaluation data generated by powerful teacher models introduces a critical yet previously overlooked issue: teacher preference bias, where the proxy judge model learns a biased preference for responses from the teacher model. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel setting that incorporates an additional assistant model, which is not biased toward the teacher model’s responses, to complement the training data. Building on this setup, we introduce AGDe-Judge, a three-stage framework designed to debias from both the labels and feedbacks in the training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AGDe-Judge effectively reduces teacher preference bias while maintaining strong performance across six evaluation benchmarks. .
Uplift-RAG: Uplift-Driven Knowledge Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Changle Qu; Sunhao Dai; Hengyi Cai; Yiyang Cheng; Jun Xu; Shuaiqiang Wang; Dawei Yin
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective in enhancing the knowledge coverage of large language models (LLMs) and mitigating hallucinations by incorporating external retrieved documents. However, documents deemed relevant by the retriever are not necessarily helpful for answer generation, and including misleading information can even degrade performance. Existing efforts to estimate document utility often rely on the downstream generation performance, which conflates the influence of external documents with the intrinsic knowledge of the LLM, thereby obscuring the actual contribution of the retrieved content. To address this, this paper proposes Uplit-RAG, a uplift-driven knowledge preference alignment framework for RAG. Specifically, we first propose an uplift-based definition of document utility that quantifies each document’s marginal benefit over the LLM’s internal knowledge. We then optimize the reranker with three alignment objectives to identify and prioritize documents based on their uplift. This enables dynamic selection of documents that address the LLM’s knowledge gaps, going beyond fixed top-k selection, while reducing reference redundancy and the computational overhead of the LLM’s input. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Uplift-RAG.
Sugar-Coated Poison: Benign Generation Unlocks Jailbreaking
Authors: Yuhang Wu; Yu-Jie Xiong; Hao Zhang; Jia-Chen Zhang; Zheng Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: With the increasingly deep integration of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains, the effectiveness of their safety mechanisms is encountering severe challenges. Currently, jailbreak attacks based on prompt engineering, which induce models to generate potentially harmful content, have become a major security threat. However, existing methods primarily rely on black-box manipulation of prompt templates, resulting in high costs and poor generalizability. To break through the bottleneck, this study reveals the potential impact of the generation of LLMs on safety for the first time that Defense Threshold Decay (DTD) phenomena: as benign content generation increases, the model’s attention to input instructions progressively diminishes. Building on this insight, we propose the Sugar-Coated Poison (SCP) attack paradigm, using a “semantic reversal” strategy, where benign inputs that are opposite in meaning to malicious intent are crafted to induce the model into a safety response mode. When the defense threshold decays, an adversarial reasoning mechanism easily bypasses safety mechanisms. Experiments show SCP outperforms existing baselines. For defense, we propose Part-of-Speech Defense (POSD), leveraging verb-noun dependencies for syntactic analysis to enhance robustness and security of LLMs. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SCP-9092.
DivScene: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation with Large Vision Language Models in Diverse Scenes
Authors: Zhaowei Wang; Hongming Zhang; Tianqing Fang; Ye Tian; Yue Yang; Kaixin Ma; Xiaoman Pan; Yangqiu Song; Dong Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress in tasks like visual question answering and document understanding. However, their potential to comprehend embodied environments and navigate within them remains underexplored. In this work, we first study the challenge of open-vocabulary object navigation by introducing DivScene, a large-scale dataset with 4,614 houses across 81 scene types and 5,707 kinds of target objects. Our dataset provides a much greater diversity of target objects and scene types than existing datasets, enabling a comprehensive task evaluation. We evaluated various methods with LVLMs and LLMs on our dataset and found that current models still fall short of open-vocab object navigation ability. Then, we fine-tuned LVLMs to predict the next action with CoT explanations. We observe that LVLM’s navigation ability can be improved substantially with only BFS-generated shortest paths without any human supervision, surpassing GPT-4o by over 20% in success rates.
Data-scarce Behavior Editing of Language Models
Authors: Joykirat Singh; Subhabrata Dutta; Tanmoy Chakraborty
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models trained on web-scale text acquire language generation abilities that can solve a wide range of tasks, particularly when task knowledge is refined into the generative prior using in-context examples. However, spurious features learned from noisy data hinder their generalizability. Supervised fine-tuning can enhance task specificity but may lead to data inefficiency. Prior studies indicate that (i) noisy neural circuitries coexist with generalizable ones within LLMs, and (ii) finetuning typically enhances (or suppresses) existing abilities without introducing newer ones. Building upon these, we propose TaRot, a novel method for task adaptation. TaRot intervenes in the neural circuitries using learnable rotation matrices that are optimized using Bayesian optimization, on labelled samples in the order of standard few-shot prompting examples. Experiments on multiple classification and generation tasks using LLMs of varying sizes reveal the efficacy of TaRot, improving upon both zero- as well as few-shot performance, with average improvements (across models and tasks) of 15.6% and 14%, respectively.
FIER: Fine-Grained and Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long-context LLM Inference
Authors: Dongwei Wang; Zijie Liu; Song Wang; Yuxin Ren; Jianing Deng; Jingtong Hu; Tianlong Chen; Huanrui Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: The Key-Value (KV) cache reading latency increases significantly with context lengths, hindering the efficiency of long-context LLM inference. To address this, previous works propose retaining a small fraction of KV cache based on token importance. For example, KV eviction uses static heuristics to retain tokens, while KV retrieval dynamically selects query-relevant tokens for more adaptive cache management. However, we observe that important tokens are often sparsely distributed across the long context. This sparsity makes existing page-level KV retrieval inaccurate, as each page may include irrelevant tokens and miss critical ones. In this work, we propose Fier, a **Fi**ne-Grained and **E**fficient KV cache **R**etrieval method. Fier uses 1-bit quantized keys to estimate the importance of each token, resulting in efficient and precise retrieval. Experiments show that Fier matches full KV performance using only 11% of the cache budget across various long-context tasks, reducing decoding latency by 1.2× to 1.5×.
SVeritas: Benchmark for Robust Speaker Verification under Diverse Conditions
Authors: Massa Baali; Sarthak Bisht; Francisco Teixeira; Kateryna Shapovalenko; Rita Singh; Bhiksha Raj
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Speaker verification (SV) models are increasingly integrated into security, personalization, and access control systems, yet their robustness to many real-world challenges remains inadequately benchmarked. Real-world systems can face diverse conditions, some naturally occurring, and others that may be purposely, or even maliciously created, which introduce mismatches between enrollment and test data, affecting their performance. Ideally, the effect of all of these on model performance must be benchmarked; however existing benchmarks fall short, generally evaluating only a subset of potential conditions, and missing others entirely. We introduce SVeritas, the Speaker Verification tasks benchmark suite, which evaluates the performance of speaker verification systems under an extensive variety of stressors, including “natural” variations such as duration, spontaneity and content of the recordings, background conditions such as noise, microphone distance, reverberation, and channel mismatches, recording condition influences such as audio bandwidth and the effect of various codecs, physical influences, such as the age and health conditions of the speaker, as well as the suspectibility of the models to spoofing and adversarial attacks. While several benchmarks do exist that each cover some of these issues, SVeritas is the first comprehensive evaluation that not only includes all of these, but also several other entirely new, but nonetheless important real-life conditions that have not previously been benchmarked. We use SVeritas to evaluate several state-of-the-art SV models and observe that while some architectures maintain stability under common distortions, they suffer substantial performance degradation in scenarios involving cross-language trials, age mismatches, and codec-induced compression. Extending our analysis across demographic subgroups, we further identify disparities in robustness across age groups, gender, and linguistic backgrounds. By standardizing evaluation under realistic and synthetic stress conditions, SVeritas enables precise diagnosis of model weaknesses and establishes a foundation for advancing equitable and reliable speaker verification systems.
CAARMA: Class Augmentation with Adversarial Mixup Regularization
Authors: Massa Baali; Xiang Li; Hao Chen; Syed Abdul Hannan; Rita Singh; Bhiksha Raj
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Speaker verification is a typical zero-shot learning task, where inference of unseen classes is performed by comparing embeddings of test instances to known examples. The models performing inference must hence naturally generate embeddings that cluster same-class instances compactly, while maintaining separation across classes. In order to learn to do so, they are typically trained on a large number of classes (speakers), often using specialized losses. However real-world speaker datasets often lack the class diversity needed to effectively learn this in a generalizable manner. We introduce CAARMA, a class augmentation framework that addresses this problem by generating synthetic classes through data mixing in the embedding space, expanding the number of training classes. To ensure the authenticity of the synthetic classes we adopt a novel adversarial refinement mechanism that minimizes categorical distinctions between synthetic and real classes. We evaluate CAARMA on multiple speaker verification tasks, as well as other representative zero-shot comparison-based speech analysis tasks and obtain consistent improvements: our framework demonstrates a significant improvement of 8% over all baseline models. Code for CAARMA will be released.
Bringing Pedagogy into Focus: Evaluating Virtual Teaching Assistants’ Question-Answering in Asynchronous Learning Environments
Authors: Li Siyan; Zhen Xu; Vethavikashini Chithrra Raghuram; Xuanming Zhang; Renzhe Yu; Zhou Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Virtual Teaching Assistants (VTAs) can reduce the workload of teaching teams in Asynchronous Learning Environments (ALEs) where timely, personalized support is often limited. As VTA systems grow more capable, rigorous and pedagogically sound evaluation becomes essential. Existing assessments often rely on surface-level metrics and lack sufficient grounding in educational theory, making it difficult to meaningfully compare the pedagogical effectiveness of VTA systems. To bridge this gap, we propose a pedagogically-oriented evaluation framework that is rooted in learning sciences and tailored to asynchronous forum discussions, a common VTA deployment context in ALE. We construct classifiers using expert annotations of VTA responses on a diverse set of forum posts. We evaluate the effectiveness of our classifiers, identifying approaches that improve accuracy as well as challenges that hinder generalization. Our work establishes a foundation for theory-driven evaluation of VTA systems, paving the way for more pedagogically effective AI in education.
Demystifying Multilingual Reasoning in Process Reward Modeling
Authors: Weixuan Wang; Minghao Wu; Barry Haddow; Alexandra Birch
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are designed to perform a wide range of tasks. To improve their ability to solve complex problems requiring multi-step reasoning, recent research leverages process reward modeling to provide fine-grained feedback at each step of the reasoning process for reinforcement learning (RL), but it predominantly focuses on English. In this paper, we tackle the critical challenge of extending process reward models (PRMs) to multilingual settings. To achieve this, we train multilingual PRMs on a dataset spanning seven languages, which is translated from English. Through comprehensive evaluations on two widely used reasoning benchmarks across 11 languages, we demonstrate that multilingual PRMs not only improve average accuracy but also reduce early-stage reasoning errors. Furthermore, our results highlight the sensitivity of multilingual PRMs to both the number of training languages and the volume of English data, while also uncovering the benefits arising from more candidate responses and trainable parameters. This work opens promising avenues for robust multilingual applications in complex, multi-step reasoning tasks.
BehaviorSFT: Behavioral Token Conditioning for Health Agents Across the Proactivity Spectrum
Authors: Yubin Kim; Zhiyuan Hu; Hyewon Jeong; Eugene W Park; Shuyue Stella Li; Chanwoo Park; Shiyun Xiong; MingYu Lu; Hyeonhoon Lee; Xin Liu; Daniel McDuff; Cynthia Breazeal; Samir Tulebaev; Hae Won Park
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents require careful behavioral adaptation. While adept at reactive tasks (e.g., medical reasoning), LLMs often struggle with proactive engagement, like unprompted identification of critical missing information or risks. We introduce **BehaviorBench**, a comprehensive dataset to evaluate agent behaviors across a clinical assistance spectrum. To rigorously test the current models, we also introduce **BehaviorBench-Hard**, a challenging subset where the performance of state-of-the-art models drops significantly, revealing weaknesses. To address these challenges, we propose **BehaviorSFT**, a novel training strategy using behavioral tokens to explicitly condition LLMs for dynamic behavioral selection which boosts performance on both benchmarks. Crucially, a blind clinician evaluation confirmed that our trained agents exhibit more realistic clinical behavior, striking a superior balance between helpful proactivity and necessary restraint versus standard fine-tuning or explicitly instructed agents. Project Page: https://behavior-adaptation.github.io/
LaMP-Cap: Personalized Figure Caption Generation With Multimodal Figure Profiles
Authors: Ho Yin Sam Ng; Edward Hsu; Aashish Anantha Ramakrishnan; Branislav Kveton; Nedim Lipka; Franck Dernoncourt; Dongwon Lee; Tong Yu; Sungchul Kim; Ryan A. Rossi; Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Figure captions are crucial for helping readers understand and remember a figure’s key message. Many models have been developed to generate these captions, helping authors compose better quality captions more easily. Yet, authors almost always need to revise generic AI-generated captions to match their writing style and the domain’s style, highlighting the need for personalization. Despite language models’ personalization (LaMP) advances, these technologies often focus on text-only settings and rarely address scenarios where both inputs and profiles are multimodal. This paper introduces LaMP-Cap, a dataset for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles. For each target figure, LaMP-Cap provides not only the needed inputs, such as figure images, but also up to three other figures from the same document—each with its image, caption, and figure-mentioning paragraphs—as a profile to characterize the context. Experiments with four LLMs show that using profile information consistently helps generate captions closer to the original author-written ones. Ablation studies reveal that images in the profile are more helpful than figure-mentioning paragraphs, highlighting the advantage of using multimodal profiles over text-only ones.
Efficient Dynamic Clustering-Based Document Compression for Retrieval-Augmented-Generation
Authors: Weitao Li; Xiangyu Zhang; Kaiming Liu; Xuanyu Lei; Weizhi Ma; Yang Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for knowledge injection during large language model (LLM) inference in recent years. However, due to their limited ability to exploit fine-grained inter-document relationships, current RAG implementations face challenges in effectively addressing the retrieved noise and redundancy content, which may cause error in the generation results. To address these limitations, we propose an **E**fficient **D**ynamic **C**lustering-based document **C**ompression framework (**EDC2-RAG**) that utilizes latent inter-document relationships while simultaneously removing irrelevant information and redundant content. We validate our approach, built upon GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o-mini, on widely used knowledge-QA and Hallucination-Detection datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent performance improvements across various scenarios and experimental settings, demonstrating strong robustness and applicability. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/EDC-2-RAG.
HebID: Detecting Social Identities in Hebrew-language Political Text
Authors: Guy Mor-Lan; Naama Rivlin-Angert; Yael R. Kaplan; Tamir Sheafer; Shaul R. Shenhav
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts, existing NLP datasets are predominantly English-centric and focus on coarse-grained identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection. The corpus contains 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians’ Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), with each sentence manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g., Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) selected based on their salience in national survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter decoder LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-F1 = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians’ Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, comparing the identities portrayed in elite discourse with those prioritized by the public. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts
Dub-S2ST: Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation for Seamless Dubbing
Authors: Jeongsoo Choi; Jaehun Kim; Joon Son Chung
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025)

Abstract: This paper introduces a cross-lingual dubbing system that translates speech from one language to another while preserving key characteristics such as duration, speaker identity, and speaking speed. Despite the strong translation quality of existing speech translation approaches, they often overlook the transfer of speech patterns, leading to mismatches with source speech and limiting their suitability for dubbing applications. To address this, we propose a discrete diffusion-based speech-to-unit translation model with explicit duration control, enabling time-aligned translation. We then synthesize speech based on the translated units and source speaker’s identity using a conditional flow matching model. Additionally, we introduce a unit-based speed adaptation mechanism that guides the translation model to produce speech at a rate consistent with the source, without relying on any text. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates natural and fluent translations that align with the original speech’s duration and speaking pace, while achieving competitive translation performance.