GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
RewardDS: Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models via Reward Driven Data Synthesis
Authors: Jianwei Wang; Chengming Shi; Junyao Yang; Haoran Li; Qianli Ma; Huiping Zhuang; Cen Chen; Ziqian Zeng
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The success of large language models (LLMs) has attracted many individuals to fine-tune them for domain-specific tasks by uploading their data. However, in sensitive areas like healthcare and finance, privacy concerns often arise. One promising solution is to generate synthetic data with Differential Privacy (DP) guarantees to replace private data. However, these synthetic data contain significant flawed data, which are considered as noise. Existing solutions typically rely on naive filtering by comparing ROUGE-L scores or embedding similarities, which are ineffective in addressing the noise. To address this issue, we propose ***RewardDS***, a novel privacy-preserving framework that fine-tunes a reward proxy model and uses reward signals to guide the synthetic data generation. Our RewardDS introduces two key modules, Reward Guided Filtering and Self-Optimizing Refinement, to both filter and refine the synthetic data, effectively mitigating the noise. Extensive experiments across medical, financial, and code generation domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Synergizing Multimodal Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models for Social Relation Recognition
Authors: Haorui Wang; Zheng Wang; Yuxuan Zhang; Bo Wang; Bin Wu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, in the task of social relation recognition, Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter significant challenges due to their reliance on sequential training data, which inherently restricts their capacity to effectively model complex graph-structured relationships. To address this limitation, we propose a novel low-coupling method synergizing multimodal temporal Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models (mtKG-LLM) for social relation reasoning. Specifically, we extract multimodal information from the videos and model the social networks as spatial Knowledge Graphs (KGs) for each scene. Temporal KGs are constructed based on spatial KGs and updated along the timeline for long-term reasoning. Subsequently, we retrieve multi-scale information from the graph-structured knowledge for LLMs to recognize the underlying social relation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance in social relation recognition. Furthermore, our framework exhibits effectiveness in bridging the gap between KGs and LLMs. Our code will be released after acceptance.
LegalSearchLM: Rethinking Legal Case Retrieval as Legal Elements Generation
Authors: Chaeeun Kim; Jinu Lee; Wonseok Hwang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Legal Case Retrieval (LCR), which retrieves relevant cases from a query case, is a fundamental task for legal professionals in research and decision-making. However, existing studies on LCR face two major limitations. First, they are evaluated on relatively small-scale retrieval corpora (e.g., 100-55K cases) and use a narrow range of criminal query types, which cannot sufficiently reflect the complexity of real-world legal retrieval scenarios. Second, their reliance on embedding-based or lexical matching methods often results in limited representations and legally irrelevant matches. To address these issues, we present: (1) LEGAR BENCH, the first large-scale Korean LCR benchmark, covering 411 diverse crime types in queries over 1.2M candidate cases; and (2) LegalSearchLM, a retrieval model that performs legal element reasoning over the query case and directly generates content containing those elements, grounded in the target cases through constrained decoding. Experimental results show that LegalSearchLM outperforms baselines by 6 - 20% on LEGAR BENCH, achieving state-of-the-art performance. It also demonstrates strong generalization to out-of-domain cases, outperforming naive generative models trained on in-domain data by 15%.
ChartMind: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Complex Real-world Multimodal Chart Question Answering
Authors: Jingxuan Wei; Nan Xu; Junnan Zhu; Haoyanni; Gaowei Wu; Qi Chen; Bihui Yu; Lei Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Chart question answering (CQA) has become a critical multimodal task for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models. While early approaches have shown promising performance by focusing on visual features or leveraging large-scale pre-training, most existing evaluations rely on rigid output formats and objective metrics, thus ignoring the complex, real-world demands of practical chart analysis. In this paper, we introduce ChartMind, a new benchmark designed for complex CQA tasks in real-world settings. ChartMind covers seven task categories, incorporates multilingual contexts, supports open-domain textual outputs, and accommodates diverse chart formats, bridging the gap between real-world applications and traditional academic benchmarks. Furthermore, we propose a context-aware yet model-agnostic framework, ChartLLM, that focuses on extracting key contextual elements, reducing noise, and enhancing the reasoning accuracy of multimodal large language models. Extensive evaluations on ChartMind and three representative public benchmarks with 14 mainstream multimodal models show our framework significantly outperforms the previous three common CQA paradigms: instruction-following, OCR-enhanced, and chain-of-thought, highlighting the importance of flexible chart understanding for real-world CQA. These findings suggest new directions for developing more robust chart reasoning in future research.
COLA: Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework with Dynamic Task Scheduling for GUI Automation
Authors: Di Zhao; Longhui Ma; Siwei Wang; Miao Wang; Zhao Lv
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: With the rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), an increasing number of studies have leveraged LLMs as the cognitive core of agents to address complex task decision-making challenges. Specially, recent research has demonstrated the potential of LLM-based agents on automating GUI operations. However, existing methodologies exhibit two critical challenges: (1) static agent architectures struggle to adapt to diverse GUI application scenarios, leading to inadequate scenario generalization; (2) the agent workflows lack fault tolerance mechanism, necessitating complete process re-execution for GUI agent decision error. To address these limitations, we introduce COLA, a collaborative multi-agent framework for automating GUI operations. In this framework, a scenario-aware agent Task Scheduler decomposes task requirements into atomic capability units, dynamically selects the optimal agent from a decision agent pool, effectively responds to the capability requirements of diverse scenarios. Furthermore, we develop an interactive backtracking mechanism that enables human to intervene to trigger state rollbacks for non-destructive process repair. Experiments on the GAIA dataset show that COLA achieves competitive performance among GUI Agent methods, with an average accuracy of 31.89%. On WindowsAgentArena, it performs particularly well in Web Browser (33.3%), Media & Video (33.3%), and Windows Utils (25.0%), suggesting the effectiveness of specialized agent design and dynamic strategy allocation. The code is available at https://github.com/Alokia/COLA-demo.
DASA-Trans-STM: Adaptive Efficient Transformer for Short Text Matching using Data Augmentation and Semantic Awareness
Authors: Jiguo Liu; Chao Liu; Meimei Li; Nan Li; Shihao Gao; Dali Zhu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Rencent advancements in large language models (LLM) have shown impressive versatility across various tasks. Short text matching is one of the fundamental technologies in natural language processing. In previous studies, the common approach to applying them to Chinese is segmenting each sentence into words, and then taking these words as input. However, existing approaches have three limitations: 1) Some Chinese words are polysemous, and semantic information is not fully utilized. 2) Some models suffer potential issues caused by word segmentation and incorrect recognition of negative words affects the semantic understanding of the whole sentence. 3) Fuzzy negation words in ancient Chinese are difficult to recognize and match. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive Transformer for Chinese short text matching using Data Augmentation and Semantic Awareness (DASA), which can fully mine the information expressed in Chinese text to deal with word ambiguity. DASA is based on a Graph Attention Transformer Encoder that takes two word lattice graphs as input and integrates sense information from N-HowNet to moderate word ambiguity. Specially, we use an LLM to generate similar sentences for the optimal text representation. Experimental results show that the augmentation done using DASA can considerably boost the performance of our system and achieve significantly better results than previous state-of-the-art methods on four available datasets, namely MNS, LCQMC, AFQMC, and BQ.
Pruning the Paradox: How CLIP’s Most Informative Heads Enhance Performance While Amplifying Bias
Authors: Avinash Madasu; Vasudev Lal; Phillip Howard
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: CLIP is one of the most popular foundation models and is heavily used for many vision-language tasks, yet little is known about its inner workings. As CLIP is increasingly deployed in real-world applications, it is becoming even more critical to understand its limitations and embedded social biases to mitigate potentially harmful downstream consequences. However, the question of what internal mechanisms drive both the impressive capabilities as well as problematic shortcomings of CLIP has largely remained unanswered. To bridge this gap, we study the conceptual consistency of text descriptions for attention heads in CLIP-like models. Specifically, we propose Concept Consistency Score (CCS), a novel interpretability metric that measures how consistently individual attention heads in CLIP models align with specific concepts. Our soft-pruning experiments reveal that high CCS heads are critical for preserving model performance, as pruning them leads to a significantly larger performance drop than pruning random or low CCS heads. Notably, we find that high CCS heads capture essential concepts and play a key role in out-of-domain detection, concept-specific reasoning, and video-language understanding. Moreover, we prove that high CCS heads learn spurious correlations which amplify social biases. These results position CCS as a powerful interpretability metric exposing the paradox of performance and social biases in CLIP models.
CoLA: Compute-Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs via Low-Rank Activation
Authors: Ziyue Liu; Ruijie Zhang; Zhengyang Wang; Mingsong Yan; Zi Yang; Paul D. Hovland; Bogdan Nicolae; Franck Cappello; Sui Tang; Zheng Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The full-size MLPs and the projection layers in attention introduce tremendous model sizes of large language models (LLMs), consuming extensive computational resources in pre-training. We empirically observe that the activations of pre-trained LLMs exhibit low-rank property. Motivated by such observations, we propose **CoLA** and its memory-efficient implementation, **CoLA-M**, to replace these full-size layers with compute-efficient **auto-encoders** that naturally enforce low-rank activations throughout training. This fundamental architectural change eliminates the activation redundancy and significantly boosts model capacity and training efficiency. Experiments on LLaMA models with 60 million to 7 billion parameters show that CoLA reduces the computing cost by 2× and improves training throughput by 1.86× while maintaining full-rank level performance. CoLA-M further squeezes memory cost without sacrificing throughput, offering a pre-training approach with collectively superior parameter, computing, and memory efficiency. The LLMs produced are also 2× smaller, enabling faster inference with lower memory cost on resource-constrained platforms.
TS-CLIP: Time Series Understanding by CLIP
Authors: Ziwen Chen; Xiaoyuan Zhang; Ming Zhu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) has recently demonstrated remarkable success in aligning vision and language. Aligning time series with text leverages the rich semantic cues of language to enhance interpretability and generalization, addressing a largely underexplored area of research. Although applying the CLIP training paradigm to time-series and language pairs is promising, it may result in label collapse due to the sparse semantic annotations and the absence of visual cues in time-series data. To address this, we introduce Time Series CLIP (TS-CLIP), a novel approach that tackles label collapse using a synonym bank mechanism. Synonym bank exploits word analogy phenomena to generate potential synonym embeddings as alignment targets. Specifically, the synonym bank facilitates aligning time series with a word distribution instead of a precise textual description. We conducted extensive zero-shot and few-shot experiments on 128 sub-datasets from the UCR archive. The results show that TS-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in zero-shot settings on 51 datasets. Comprehensive ablation studies and visualization analyzes reveal that TS-CLIP effectively aligns time series with natural language. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first foundational model to achieve general time series and natural language alignment. TS-CLIP introduces a new paradigm for the semantic understanding of time series and opens the possibility of integrating the time series modality into multimodal large models.
MultiAgentESC: A LLM-based Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Emotional Support Conversation
Authors: Yangyang Xu; Jinpeng Hu; Zhuoer Zhao; Zhangling Duan; Xiao Sun; Xun Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The development of Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems is critical for delivering mental health support tailored to the needs of help-seekers. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have contributed to progress in this domain, while most existing studies focus on generating responses directly and overlook the integration of domain-specific reasoning and expert interaction.Therefore, in this paper, we propose a training-free Multi-Agent collaboration framework for ESC (MultiAgentESC).The framework is designed to emulate the human-like process of providing emotional support through three stages: dialogue analysis, strategy deliberation, and response generation.At each stage, a multi-agent system is employed to iteratively enhance information understanding and reasoning, simulating real-world decision-making processes by incorporating diverse interactions among these expert agents.Additionally, we introduce a novel response-centered approach to handle the one-to-many problem on strategy selection, where multiple valid strategies are initially employed to generate diverse responses, followed by the selection of the optimal response through multi-agent collaboration.Experiments on the ESConv dataset reveal that our proposed framework excels at providing emotional support as well as diversifying support strategy selection.
Continuously Steering LLMs Sensitivity to Contextual Knowledge with Proxy Models
Authors: Yilin Wang; Heng Wang; Yuyang Bai; Minnan Luo
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In Large Language Models (LLMs) generation, there exist knowledge conflicts, and scenarios where parametric knowledge contradicts knowledge provided in the context. Previous works studied tuning, decoding algorithms, or locating and editing context-aware neurons to adapt LLMs to be faithful to new contextual knowledge. However, they are usually inefficient or ineffective for large models, not workable for black-box models, or unable to continuously adjust LLMs’ sensitivity to the knowledge provided in the context. To mitigate these problems, we propose CSKS (Continuously Steering Knowledge Sensitivity), a simple framework that can steer LLMs’ sensitivity to contextual knowledge continuously at a lightweight cost. Specifically, we tune two small LMs (i.e. proxy models) and use the difference in their output distributions to shift the original distribution of an LLM without modifying the LLM weights. In the evaluation process, we not only design synthetic data and fine-grained metrics to measure models’ sensitivity to contextual knowledge but also use a real conflict dataset to validate CSKS’ practical efficacy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves continuous and precise control over LLMs’ sensitivity to contextual knowledge, enabling both increased sensitivity and reduced sensitivity, thereby allowing LLMs to prioritize either contextual or parametric knowledge as needed flexibly. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OliveJuiceLin/CSKS.
Probing LLM World Models: Enhancing Guesstimation with Wisdom of Crowds Decoding
Authors: Yun-Shiuan Chuang; Sameer Narendran; Nikunj Harlalka; Alexander Cheung; Sizhe Gao; Siddharth Suresh; Junjie Hu; Timothy T. Rogers
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Guesstimation—the task of making approximate quantitative estimates about objects or events—is a common real-world skill, yet remains underexplored in large language model (LLM) research. We introduce three guesstimation datasets: MARBLES, FUTURE, and ELECPRED, spanning physical estimation (e.g., how many marbles fit in a cup) to abstract predictions (e.g., the 2024 U.S. presidential election). Inspired by the social science concept of Wisdom of Crowds (WOC)—where the median of multiple estimates improves accuracy—we propose WOC decoding for LLMs. We replicate WOC effects in human participants and find that LLMs exhibit similar benefits: median aggregation across sampled responses consistently improves accuracy over greedy, self-consistency decoding, and mean decoding. This suggests that LLMs encode a world model that supports approximate reasoning. Our results position guesstimation as a useful probe of LLM world knowledge and highlight WOC decoding as a strategy for enhancing LLM guesstimation performance on real-world tasks.
Recall with Reasoning: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Mamba’s Long-Context Memory and Extrapolation
Authors: Jun-Yu Ma; Tianqing Fang; Zhisong Zhang; Hongming Zhang; Haitao Mi; Dong Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Mamba’s theoretical infinite-context potential is limited in practice when sequences far exceed training lengths. This work explores unlocking Mamba’s long-context memory ability by a simple-yet-effective method, Recall with Reasoning (RwR), by distilling chain-of-thought (CoT) summarization from a teacher model. Specifically, RwR prepends these summarization as CoT prompts during fine-tuning, teaching Mamba to actively recall and reason over long contexts. Experiments on LONGMEMEVAL and HELMET show that RwR outperforms existing long-term memory methods on the Mamba model. Furthermore, under similar pre-training conditions, RwR improves the long-context performance of Mamba relative to comparable Transformer/hybrid baselines while preserving short-context capabilities, all without changing the architecture.
Scalable Data Synthesis through Human-like Cognitive Imitation and Data Recombination
Authors: Zhongyi Ye; Weitai Zhang; Xinyuan Zhou; Yongxin Zhu; Ninghui Rao; Enhong Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) rely on massive amounts of training data, however, the quantity of empirically observed data is limited. To alleviate this issue, lots of LLMs leverage synthetic data to enhance the quantity of training data. Despite significant advancements in LLMs, the efficiency and scalability characteristics of data synthesis during pre-training phases remain insufficiently explored. In this work, we propose a novel data synthesis framework, Cognitive Combination Synthesis (CCS), designed to achieve highly efficient and scalable data synthesis. Specifically, our methodology mimics human cognitive behaviors by recombining and interconnecting heterogeneous data from diverse sources thereby enhancing advanced reasoning capabilities in LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) effective data organization is essential, and our mapping-based combination learning approach significantly improves data utilization efficiency; (2) by enhancing data diversity, accuracy, and complexity, our synthetic data scales beyond 100B tokens, revealing CCS’s strong scalability. Our findings highlight the impact of data organization methods on LLM learning efficiency and the significant potential of scalable synthetic data to enhance model reasoning capabilities.
BeSimulator: A Large Language Model Powered Text-based Behavior Simulator
Authors: Jianan Wang; Bin Li; Jingtao Qi; Xueying Wang; Fu Li; Lihanxun
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Traditional robot simulators focus on physical process modeling and realistic rendering, often suffering from high computational costs, inefficiencies, and limited adaptability. To handle this issue, we concentrate on behavior simulation in robotics to analyze and validate the logic behind robot behaviors, aiming to achieve preliminary evaluation before deploying resource-intensive simulators and thus enhance simulation efficiency. In this paper, we propose BeSimulator, a modular and novel LLM-powered framework, as an attempt towards behavior simulation in the context of text-based environments. By constructing text-based virtual environments and performing semantic-level simulation, BeSimulator can generalize across scenarios and achieve long-horizon complex simulation. Inspired by human cognition paradigm, it employs a “consider-decide-capture-transfer” four-phase simulation process, termed Chain of Behavior Simulation (CBS), which excels at analyzing action feasibility and state transition. Additionally, BeSimulator incorporates code-driven reasoning to enable arithmetic operations and enhance reliability, and reflective feedback to refine simulation. Based on our manually constructed behavior-tree-based simulation benchmark, BTSIMBENCH, our experiments show a significant performance improvement in behavior simulation compared to baselines, ranging from 13.60% to 24.80%. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Dawn888888/BeSimulator.