GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
EcoLoRA: Communication-Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Authors: Han Liu; Ruoyao Wen; Srijith Nair; Jia Liu; Wenjing Lou; Chongjie Zhang; William Yeoh; Yevgeniy Vorobeychik; Ning Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: To address data locality and privacy restrictions, Federated Learning (FL) has recently been adopted to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), enabling improved performance on various downstream tasks without requiring aggregated data. However, the repeated exchange of model updates in FL can result in prohibitively high communication costs, hindering the distributed learning process. To address this challenge, we propose EcoLoRA, a novel communication-efficient federated fine-tuning framework for LLMs. Leveraging the modular structure, we propose a round-robin segment sharing scheme, where each client uploads only a complementary LoRA segment per round to reduce network bandwidth. It is further combined with adaptive sparsification methods tailored to LoRA’s training dynamics and lossless encoding techniques. We conduct extensive evaluations on both question-answering and value-alignment tasks across multiple datasets and models. The results show that EcoLoRA significantly reduces communication overhead without compromising performance. For instance, it reduces communication time by up to 79% and total training time by up to 65%.
Memorization ≠ Understanding: Do Large Language Models Have the Ability of Scenario Cognition?
Authors: Boxiang Ma; Ru Li; Wang Yuanlong; Hongye Tan; Xiaoli Li
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Driven by vast and diverse textual data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, a critical question persists: does their generalization arise from mere memorization of training data or from deep semantic understanding? To investigate this, we propose a bi-perspective evaluation framework to assess LLMs’ scenario cognition—the ability to link semantic scenario elements with their arguments in context. Specifically, we introduce a novel scenario-based dataset comprising diverse textual descriptions of fictional facts, annotated with scenario elements. LLMs are evaluated through their capacity to answer scenario-related questions (model output perspective) and via probing their internal representations for encoded scenario elements-argument associations (internal representation perspective). Our experiments reveal that current LLMs predominantly rely on superficial memorization, failing to achieve robust semantic scenario cognition, even in simple cases. These findings expose critical limitations in LLMs’ semantic understanding and offer cognitive insights for advancing their capabilities.
Priority on High-Quality: Selecting Instruction Data via Consistency Verification of Noise Injection
Authors: Hong Zhang; Feng Zhao; Ruilin Zhao; Cheng Yan; Kangzheng Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a remarkable understanding of language nuances through instruction tuning, enabling them to effectively tackle various natural language processing tasks. Recent research has focused on the quality of instruction data rather than the quantity of instructions. However, existing high-quality instruction selection methods rely on external models or rules, overlooking the intrinsic association between pre-trained model and instruction data, making it difficult to select data that align with the preferences of pre-trained model. To address this challenge, we propose a strategy that utilizes noise injection to identify the quality of instruction data, without relying on external model. We also implement the strategy of combining inter-class diversity and intra-class diversity to improve model performance. The experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the model trained on the entire dataset and established baselines. Our study provides a new perspective on noise injection in the field of instruction tuning, and also illustrates that the pre-trained model itself should be considered in defining high-quality. Additionally, we publish our selected high-quality instruction data.
Can Prompts Rewind Time for LLMs? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Prompted Knowledge Cutoffs
Authors: Xin Gao; Ruiyi Zhang; Daniel Du; Saurabh Mahindre; Sai Ashish Somayajula; Pengtao Xie
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for temporal prediction, but their reliance on pretraining data raises contamination concerns, as accurate predictions on pre-cutoff test data may reflect memorization rather than reasoning, leading to an overestimation of their generalization capability. With the recent emergence of prompting-based unlearning techniques, a natural question arises: Can LLMs be prompted to simulate an earlier knowledge cutoff? In this work, we investigate the capability of prompting to simulate earlier knowledge cutoff in LLMs. We construct three evaluation datasets to assess the extent to which LLMs can forget (1) direct factual knowledge, (2) semantic shifts, and (3) causally related knowledge. Results demonstrate that while prompt-based simulated knowledge cutoffs show effectiveness when directly queried with the information after that date, they struggle to induce forgetting when the forgotten content is not directly asked but causally related to the query. These findings highlight the need for more rigorous evaluation settings when applying LLMs for temporal prediction tasks. The full dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/gxx27/time_unlearn.
DSVD: Dynamic Self-Verify Decoding for Faithful Generation in Large Language Models
Authors: YiQiu Guo; Yuchen Yang; Zhe Chen; Pingjie Wang; Yusheng Liao; Ya Zhang; Yanfeng Wang; Yu Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The reliability of large language models remains a critical challenge, particularly due to their susceptibility to hallucinations and factual inaccuracies during text generation. Existing solutions either underutilize models’ self-correction with preemptive strategies or use costly post-hoc verification. To further explore the potential of real-time self-verification and correction, we present Dynamic Self-Verify Decoding (DSVD), a novel decoding framework that enhances generation reliability through real-time hallucination detection and efficient error correction. DSVD integrates two key components: (1) parallel self-verification architecture for continuous quality assessment, (2) dynamic rollback mechanism for targeted error recovery. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate DSVD’s effectiveness, achieving significant improvement in truthfulness (Quesetion-Answering) and factual accuracy (FActScore). Results show the DSVD can be further incorporated with existing faithful decoding methods to achieve stronger performance. Our work establishes that real-time self-verification during generation offers a viable path toward more trustworthy language models without sacrificing practical deployability.
Metric Calculating Benchmark: Code-Verifiable Complicate Instruction Following Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Hyeonseok Moon; Seongtae Hong; Jaehyung Seo; Heuiseok Lim
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent frontier-level LLMs have saturated many previously difficult benchmarks, leaving little room for further differentiation. This progress highlights the need for challenging benchmarks that provide objective verification. In this paper, we introduce MCBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether LLMs can execute string-matching NLP metrics by strictly following step-by-step instructions. Unlike prior benchmarks that depend on subjective judgments or general reasoning, MCBench offers an objective, deterministic and code-verifiable evaluation. This setup allows us to systematically test whether LLMs can maintain accurate step-by-step execution, including instruction adherence, numerical computation, and long-range consistency in handling intermediate results. To ensure objective evaluation of these abilities, we provide a parallel reference code that can evaluate the accuracy of LLM output. We provide three evaluative metrics and three benchmark variants designed to measure the detailed instruction understanding capability of LLMs. Our analyses show that MCBench serves as an effective and objective tool for evaluating the capabilities of cutting-edge LLMs
Generative Annotation for ASR Named Entity Correction
Authors: Yuanchang Luo; Daimeng Wei; Shaojun Li; Hengchao Shang; Jiaxin Guo; Zongyao Li; Zhanglin Wu; Xiaoyu Chen; Zhiqiang Rao; Jinlong Yang; Hao Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems often fail to transcribe domain-speciffcnamed entities, causing catastrophic failuresin downstream tasks. Numerous fast and lightweight named entity correction (NEC) models have been proposed in recent years. These models, mainly leveraging phonetic-level edit distance algorithms, have shown impressive performances. However, when theforms of the wrongly-transcribed words(s) and the ground-truth entity are signiffcantly different, these methods often fail to locate the wrongly transcribed words in hypothesis, thus limiting their usage. We propose a novel NEC method that utilizes speech sound features to retrieve candidate entities. With speech sound features and candidate entities, we inovatively design a generative method to annotate entityerrors in ASR transcripts and replace the textwith correct entities. This method is effective inscenarios of word form difference. We test ourmethod using open-source and self-constructed test sets. The results demonstrate that our NEC method can bring signiffcant improvement to entity accuracy. We will open source our self constructed test set and training data.
SOLAR: Towards Characterizing Subjectivity of Individuals through Modeling Value Conflicts and Trade-offs
Authors: Younghun Lee; Dan Goldwasser
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) not only have solved complex reasoning problems but also exhibit remarkable performance in tasks that require subjective decision-making. Existing studies suggest that LLM generations can convey subjectivity to some extent, yet exploring whether LLMs can account for individual-level subjectivity has not been sufficiently studied. In this paper, we characterize the subjectivity of individuals on social media and infer their moral judgments using LLMs. We propose a framework, SolAr (Subjective Ground with Value Abstraction), that observes value conflicts and trade-offs in the user-generated texts to better represent subjective ground of individuals. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework enhances overall inference performance, with notable improvements for users with limited data and in controversial situations. Additionally, we qualitatively show that SolAr provides explanations about individuals’ value preferences, which can further account for their judgments.
LogicTree: Structured Proof Exploration for Coherent and Rigorous Logical Reasoning with Large Language Models
Authors: Kang He; Kaushik Roy
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable multi-step reasoning capabilities across various domains. However, LLMs still face distinct challenges in complex logical reasoning, as (1) proof-finding requires systematic exploration and the maintenance of logical coherence and (2) searching the right combination of premises at each reasoning step is inherently challenging in tasks with large premise space. To address this, we propose LogicTree, an inference-time modular framework employing algorithm-guided search to automate structured proof exploration and ensure logical coherence. Advancing beyond tree-of-thought (ToT), we incorporate caching mechanism into LogicTree to enable effective utilization of historical knowledge, preventing reasoning stagnation and minimizing redundancy. Furthermore, we address the combinatorial complexity of premise search by decomposing it into a linear process. The refined premise selection restricts subsequent inference to at most one derivation per step, enhancing reasoning granularity and enforcing strict step-by-step reasoning. Additionally, we introduce two LLM-free heuristics for premise prioritization, enabling strategic proof search. Experimental results on five datasets demonstrate that LogicTree optimally scales inference-time computation to achieve higher proof accuracy, surpassing chain-of-thought (CoT) and ToT with average gains of 23.6% and 12.5%, respectively, on GPT-4o. Moreover, within LogicTree, GPT-4o outperforms o3-mini by 7.6% on average.
Unmasking Fake Careers: Detecting Machine-Generated Career Trajectories via Multi-layer Heterogeneous Graphs
Authors: Michiharu Yamashita; Thanh Tran; Delvin Ce Zhang; Dongwon Lee
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled the generation of highly realistic synthetic data. We identify a new vulnerability, LLMs generating convincing career trajectories in fake resumes and explore effective detection methods. To address this challenge, we construct a dataset of machine-generated career trajectories using LLMs and various methods, and demonstrate that conventional text-based detectors perform poorly on structured career data. We propose CareerScape, a novel heterogeneous, hierarchical multi-layer graph framework that models career entities and their relations in a unified global graph built from genuine resumes. Unlike conventional classifiers that treat each instance independently, CareerScape employs a structure-aware framework that augments user-specific subgraphs with trusted neighborhood information from a global graph, enabling the model to capture both global structural patterns and local inconsistencies indicative of synthetic career paths. Experimental results show that CareerScape outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 5.8-85.0% relatively, highlighting the importance of structure-aware detection for machine-generated content. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/mickeymst/careerscape.
GAP: a Global Adaptive Pruning Method for Large Language Models
Authors: Zhihua Ban; Haotian Ma; Siheng Zhang; Shengyu Liu; Xichen Chen; Ming Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces significant challenges due to high computational costs,driving the demand for effective pruning techniques. Existing structured pruning methods employ uniform compression rates across network layers, neglecting the varying importance of different network depths. To address this limitation, we propose a novel optimization framework that directly minimizes global capability loss through layer-adaptive pruning rates. The framework formulates the pruning task as a combinatorial optimization problem constrained by a total parameter budget, and an efficient dynamic programming solution is derived to determine optimal layer-wise compression rates.Experiments demonstrate that, when tuning is not included, our approach achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods at high pruning rates (37-50% reduction), and shows significant advantages at low pruning rates (13-25% reduction). When tuning is included, our method achieves the best performance among the compared methods.
Distribution Prompting: Understanding the Expressivity of Language Models Through the Next-Token Distributions They Can Produce
Authors: Haojin Wang; Zining Zhu; Freda Shi
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Autoregressive neural language models (LMs) generate a probability distribution over tokens at each time step given a prompt. In this work, we attempt to systematically understand the probability distributions that LMs can produce, showing that some distributions are significantly harder to elicit than others. Specifically, for any target next-token distribution over the vocabulary, we attempt to find a prompt that induces the LM to output a distribution as close as possible to the target, using either soft or hard gradient-based prompt tuning. We find that (1) in general, distributions with very low or very high entropy are easier to approximate than those with moderate entropy; (2) among distributions with the same entropy, those containing ”outlier tokens” are easier to approximate; (3) target distributions generated by LMs – even LMs with different tokenizers – are easier to approximate than randomly chosen targets. These results offer insights into the expressiveness of LMs and the challenges of using them as probability distribution proposers.
LGA: LLM-GNN Aggregation for Temporal Evolution Attribute Graph Prediction
Authors: Feng Zhao; Ruoyu Chai; Kangzheng Liu; Xianggan Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Temporal evolution attribute graph prediction, a key task in graph machine learning, aims to forecast the dynamic evolution of node attributes over time. While recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled their use in enhancing node representations for integration with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), their potential to directly perform GNN-like aggregation and interaction remains underexplored. Furthermore, traditional approaches to initializing attribute embeddings often disregard structural semantics, limiting the provision of rich prior knowledge to GNNs. Current methods also primarily focus on 1-hop neighborhood aggregation, lacking the capability to capture complex structural interactions. To address these limitations, we propose a novel prediction framework that integrates structural information into attribute embeddings through the introduction of an attribute embedding loss. We design specialized prompts to enable LLMs to perform GNN-like aggregation and incorporate a relation-aware Graph Convolutional Network to effectively capture long-range and complex structural dependencies. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating significant improvements in predictive performance over existing methods.
EIFBENCH: Extremely Complex Instruction Following Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Tao Zou; Xinghua Zhang; Haiyang Yu; Minzheng Wang; Fei Huang; Yongbin Li
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: With the development and widespread application of large language models (LLMs), the new paradigm of “Model as Product” is rapidly evolving, and demands higher capabilities to address complex user needs, often requiring precise workflow execution which involves the accurate understanding of multiple tasks. However, existing benchmarks focusing on single-task environments with limited constraints, lack the complexity required to fully reflect To bridge this gap, we present the Extremely Complex Instruction Following Benchmark (EIFBENCH), meticulously crafted to facilitate a more realistic and robust evaluation of LLMs. EIFBENCH not only includes multi-task scenarios that enable comprehensive assessment across diverse task types concurrently, but also integrates a variety of constraints, replicating complex operational environments. Furthermore, we propose the Segment Policy Optimization (SegPO) algorithm to enhance the LLM’s ability to accurately fulfill multi-task workflow. Evaluations on EIFBENCH have unveiled considerable performance discrepancies in existing LLMs when challenged with these extremely complex instructions. This finding underscores the necessity for ongoing optimization to navigate the intricate challenges posed by real-world LLM applications.
Tool Preferences in Agentic LLMs are Unreliable
Authors: Kazem Faghih; Wenxiao Wang; Yize Cheng; Siddhant Bharti; Gaurang Sriramanan; Sriram Balasubramanian; Parsa Hosseini; Soheil Feizi
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can now access a wide range of external tools, thanks to the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This greatly expands their abilities as various agents. However, LLMs rely entirely on the text descriptions of tools to decide which ones to use—a process that is surprisingly fragile. In this work, we expose a vulnerability in prevalent tool/function-calling protocols by investigating a series of edits to tool descriptions, some of which can drastically increase a tool’s usage from LLMs when competing with alternatives. Through controlled experiments, we show that tools with properly edited descriptions receive **over 10 times more usage** from GPT-4.1 and Qwen2.5-7B than tools with original descriptions. We further evaluate how various edits to tool descriptions perform when competing directly with one another and how these trends generalize or differ across a broader set of 17 different models. These phenomena, while giving developers a powerful way to promote their tools, underscore the need for a more reliable foundation for agentic LLMs to select and utilize tools and resources. Our code is publicly available at [https://github.com/kazemf78/llm-unreliable-tool-preferences](https://github.com/kazemf78/llm-unreliable-tool-preferences).
Enhancing Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion via Structure-Aware Alignment-Tuning
Authors: Yu Liu; Yanan Cao; Xixun Lin; Yanmin Shang; Shi Wang; Shirui Pan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer new knowledge and make predictions from knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities. LLM-enhanced KGC methods primarily focus on designing task-specific instructions, achieving promising advancements. However, there are still two critical challenges. First, existing methods often ignore the inconsistent representation spaces between natural language and graph structures. Second, most approaches develop separate instructions for different KGC tasks, leading to duplicate works and time-consuming processes. To address these challenges, we propose SAT, a novel framework that enhances LLMs for KGC via structure-aware alignment-tuning. Specifically, we first introduce hierarchical knowledge alignment to align graph embeddings with the natural language space through multi-task contrastive learning. Then, we propose structural instruction tuning to guide LLMs in performing structure-aware reasoning over KGs, using a unified graph instruction combined with a lightweight knowledge adapter. Experimental results on two KGC tasks across four benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in the link prediction task with improvements ranging from 8.7% to 29.8%