GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
SelfRACG: Enabling LLMs to Self-Express and Retrieve for Code Generation
Authors: Qian Dong; Jia Chen; Qingyao Ai; Hongning Wang; Haitao Li; Yiwu; Yao Hu; Yiqun Liu; Shaoping Ma
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Existing retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) methods typically use an external retrieval module to fetch semantically similar code snippets used for generating subsequent fragments. However, even for consecutive code fragments, the content often diverges due to logical progression, resulting in a content gap. This gap undermines the performance of current RACG methods, as external retrieval modules based on content matching fail to infer the specific information need of LLMs to generate the next code fragment. Therefore, we propose SelfRACG, a novel paradigm that enables large language models (LLMs) to Self-express their information needs to enhance RACG. Specifically, SelfRACG includes an information need expression module and a two-stage information need-guided training strategy, which encourages LLMs to express their information need. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SelfRACG can retrieve external knowledge that better aligns with the LLM’s own information needs, resulting in superior generation performance compared to vanilla RACG. Moreover, both the training and deployment costs for retrieval in our framework are much lower than those of the strongest retrieval model.
Probing Logical Reasoning of MLLMs in Scientific Diagrams
Authors: Yufei Wang; Adriana Kovashka
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We examine how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform logical inference grounded in visual information. We first construct a dataset of food web/chain images, along with questions that follow seven structured templates with progressively more complex reasoning involved. We show that complex reasoning about entities in the images remains challenging (even with elaborate prompts) and that visual information is underutilized.
AdamS: Momentum Itself Can Be A Normalizer for LLM Pretraining and Post-training
Authors: Huishuai Zhang; Bohan Wang; Luoxin Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We introduce AdamS, a simple yet effective alternative to Adam for large language model (LLM) pretraining and post-training. By leveraging a novel denominator, i.e., the root of weighted sum of squares of the momentum and the current gradient, AdamS eliminates the need for second-moment estimates. Hence, AdamS is efficient, matching the memory and compute footprint of SGD with momentum while delivering superior optimization performance. Moreover, AdamS is easy to adopt: it can directly inherit hyperparameters of AdamW, and is entirely model-agnostic, integrating seamlessly into existing pipelines without modifications to optimizer APIs or architectures. The motivation behind AdamS stems from the observed smoothness properties in transformer objectives, where local smoothness is governed by gradient magnitudes that can be further approximated by momentum magnitudes. We establish rigorous theoretical convergence guarantees and provide practical guidelines for hyperparameter selection. Empirically, AdamS demonstrates strong performance in various tasks, including pre-training runs on GPT-2 and Llama2 (up to 13B parameters) and reinforcement learning in post-training regimes. With its efficiency, simplicity, and theoretical grounding, AdamS stands as a compelling alternative to existing optimizers.
Demystifying Synthetic Data in LLM Pre-training: A Systematic Study of Scaling Laws, Benefits, and Pitfalls
Authors: Feiyang Kang; Newsha Ardalani; Michael Kuchnik; Youssef Emad; Mostafa Elhoushi; Shubhabrata Sengupta; Shang-Wen Li; Ramya Raghavendra; Ruoxi Jia; Carole-Jean Wu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Training data plays a crucial role in Large Language Models (LLM) scaling, yet high quality data is of limited supply. Synthetic data techniques offer a potential path toward sidestepping these limitations.We conduct a large-scale empirical investigation (>1000 LLMs with >100k GPU hours) using a unified protocol and scaling laws, comparing natural web data, diverse synthetic types (rephrased text, generated textbooks), and mixtures of natural and synthetic data. Specifically, we found pre-training on rephrased synthetic data alone is not faster than pre-training on natural web texts; while pre-training on 1/3 rephrased synthetic data mixed with 2/3 natural web texts can speed up 5-10x (to reach the same validation loss) at larger data budgets. Pre-training on textbook-style synthetic data alone results in notably higher loss on many downstream domains especially at small data budgets. “Good” ratios of synthetic data in training data mixtures depend on the model size and data budget, empirically converging to ~30% for rephrased synthetic data. Larger generator models do not necessarily yield better pre-training data than ~8B-param models. These results contribute mixed evidence on “model collapse” during large-scale single-round (n=1) model training on synthetic data–training on rephrased synthetic data shows no degradation in performance in foreseeable scales whereas training on mixtures of textbook-style pure-generated synthetic data shows patterns predicted by “model collapse”. Our work demystifies synthetic data in pre-training, validates its conditional benefits, and offers practical guidance.
Static or Dynamic: Towards Query-Adaptive Token Selection for Video Question Answering
Authors: Yumeng Shi; Quanyu Long; Wenya Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Video question answering benefits from the rich information in videos, enabling various applications. However, the large volume of tokens generated from long videos presents challenges to memory efficiency and model performance. To alleviate this, existing works propose to compress video inputs, but often overlook the varying importance of static and dynamic information across different queries, leading to inefficient token usage within limited budgets. We propose a novel token selection strategy, explore-then-select, that adaptively adjusts static and dynamic information based on question requirements. Our framework first explores different token allocations between key frames, which preserve spatial details, and delta frames, which capture temporal changes. Then it employs a query-aware attention-based metric to select the optimal token combination without model updates. Our framework is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated within diverse video language models. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant performance improvements (up to 5.8%) on multiple video question answering benchmarks. Our code is available at *https://github.com/ANDgate99/Explore-Then-Select*.
DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor–Patient Communication at Discharge
Authors: Zonghai Yao; Michael Sun; Won Seok Jang; Sunjae Kwon; Soie Kwon; Hong Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Discharge communication is a critical yet underexplored component of patient care, where the goal shifts from diagnosis to education. While recent large language model (LLM) benchmarks emphasize in-visit diagnostic reasoning, they fail to evaluate models’ ability to support patients after the visit. We introduce DischargeSim, a novel benchmark that evaluates LLMs on their ability to act as personalized discharge educators. DischargeSim simulates post-visit, multi-turn conversations between LLM-driven DoctorAgents and PatientAgents with diverse psychosocial profiles (e.g., health literacy, education, emotion). Interactions are structured across six clinically grounded discharge topics and assessed along three axes: (1) dialogue quality via automatic and LLM-as-judge evaluation, (2) personalized document generation including free-text summaries and structured AHRQ checklists, and (3) patient comprehension through a downstream multiple-choice exam. Experiments across 18 LLMs reveal significant gaps in discharge education capability, with performance varying widely across patient profiles. Notably, model size does not always yield better education outcomes, highlighting trade-offs in strategy use and content prioritization. DischargeSim offers a first step toward benchmarking LLMs in post-visit clinical education and promoting equitable, personalized patient support.
Can Vision-Language Models Solve Visual Math Equations?
Authors: Monjoy Narayan Choudhury; Junling Wang; Yifan Hou; Mrinmaya Sachan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Despite strong performance in visual understanding and language-based reasoning, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with tasks requiring integrated perception and symbolic computation. We study this limitation through visual equation solving, where mathematical equations are embedded in images, variables are represented by object icons, and coefficients must be inferred by counting. While VLMs perform well on textual equations, they fail on visually grounded counterparts. To understand this gap, we decompose the task into coefficient counting and variable recognition, and find that counting is the primary bottleneck, even when recognition is accurate. We also observe that composing recognition and reasoning introduces additional errors, highlighting challenges in multi-step visual reasoning. Finally, as equation complexity increases, symbolic reasoning itself becomes a limiting factor. These findings reveal key weaknesses in current VLMs and point toward future improvements in visually grounded mathematical reasoning.
From Scores to Steps: Diagnosing and Improving LLM Performance in Evidence-Based Medical Calculations
Authors: Benlu Wang; Iris Xia; Yifan Zhang; Junda Wang; Feiyun Ouyang; Shuo Han; Arman Cohan; Hong Yu; Zonghai Yao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance on medical benchmarks; however, their ability to perform medical calculations, a crucial aspect of clinical decision-making, remains underexplored and poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks often assess only the final answer with a wide numerical tolerance, overlooking systematic reasoning failures and potentially causing serious clinical misjudgments. In this work, we revisit medical calculation evaluation with a stronger focus on clinical trustworthiness. First, we clean and restructure the MedCalc-Bench dataset and propose a new step-by-step evaluation pipeline that independently assesses formula selection, entity extraction, and arithmetic computation. Under this granular framework, the accuracy of GPT-4o drops from 62.7% to 43.6%, revealing errors masked by prior evaluations. Second, we introduce an automatic error analysis framework that generates structured attribution for each failure mode. Human evaluation confirms its alignment with expert judgment, enabling scalable and explainable diagnostics. Finally, we propose a modular agentic pipeline, MedRaC, that combines retrieval-augmented generation and Python-based code execution. Without any fine-tuning, MedRaC improves the accuracy of different LLMs from 16.35% up to 53.19%. Our work highlights the limitations of current benchmark practices and proposes a more clinically faithful methodology. By enabling transparent and transferable reasoning evaluation, we move closer to making LLM-based systems trustworthy for real-world medical applications.
Bridging External and Parametric Knowledge: Mitigating Hallucination of LLMs with Shared-Private Semantic Synergy in Dual-Stream Knowledge
Authors: Yi Sui; Chaozhuo Li; Chen Zhang; Dawei Song; Qiuchi Li
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to mitigate the hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving and incorporating relevant external knowledge into the generation process. However, the external knowledge may contain noise and conflict with the parametric knowledge of LLMs, leading to degraded performance. Current LLMs lack inherent mechanisms for resolving such conflicts. To fill this gap, we propose a Dual-Stream Knowledge-Augmented Framework for Shared-Private Semantic Synergy (DSSP-RAG). Central to it is the refinement of the traditional self-attention into a mixed-attention that distinguishes shared and private semantics for a controlled knowledge integration. An unsupervised hallucination detection method that captures the LLMs’ intrinsic cognitive uncertainty ensures that external knowledge is introduced only when necessary. To reduce noise in external knowledge, an Energy Quotient (EQ), defined by attention difference matrices between task-aligned and task-misaligned layers, is proposed. Extensive experiments show that DSSP-RAG achieves a superior performance over strong baselines.
Deep Associations, High Creativity: A Simple yet Effective Metric for Evaluating Large Language Models
Authors: Ziliang Qiu; Renfen Hu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The evaluation of LLMs’ creativity represents a crucial research domain, though challenges such as data contamination and costly human assessments often impede progress. Drawing inspiration from human creativity assessment, we propose PACE, asking LLMs to generate Parallel Chains of Associations to Evaluate their creativity. PACE minimizes the risk of data contamination and offers a straightforward, highly efficient evaluation, as evidenced by its strong correlation with Arena Creative Writing (Spearman’s 𝜌 = 0.739, p < 0.001) on various proprietary and open-source models. A comparative analysis of associative creativity between LLMs and humans reveals that while high-performing LLMs achieve scores comparable to average human performance, top-performing humans consistently outperform LLMs. Furthermore, linguistic analysis reveals that both humans and LLMs exhibit a trend of decreasing concreteness in their associations, and humans demonstrating a greater diversity of associative patterns.
Identifying Unlearned Data in LLMs via Membership Inference Attacks
Authors: Advit Deepak; Megan Mou; Jing Huang; Diyi Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Unlearning evaluation has traditionally followed the retrieval paradigm, where adversaries attempt to extract residual knowledge of an unlearning target by issuing queries to a language model. However, the absence of retrievable knowledge does not necessarily prevent an adversary from inferring which targets have been intentionally unlearned in the post-training optimization. Such inferences can still pose significant privacy risks, as they may reveal the sensitive data in the model’s training set and the internal policies of model creators. To quantify such privacy risks, we propose a new evaluation framework **Forensic Unlearning Membership Attacks (FUMA)**, drawing on principles from membership inference attacks. FUMA assesses whether unlearning leaves behind detectable artifacts that can be exploited to infer membership in the forget set. Specifically, we evaluate four major optimization-based unlearning methods on 258 models across diverse unlearned settings and show that examples in the forget set can be identified up to 99% accuracy. This highlights privacy risks not covered in existing retrieval-based benchmarks. We conclude by discussing recommendations to mitigate these vulnerabilities.
Feature Extraction and Steering for Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models
Authors: Zihao Li; Xu Wang; Yuzhe Yang; Ziyu Yao; Haoyi Xiong; Mengnan Du
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to solve reasoning and mathematical problems using the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique. Expanding CoT length, as seen in models such as DeepSeek-R1, significantly enhances this reasoning for complex problems, but requires costly and high-quality long CoT data and fine-tuning. This work, inspired by the deep thinking paradigm of DeepSeek-R1, utilizes a steering technique to enhance the reasoning ability of an LLM without external datasets. Our method first employs Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract interpretable features from vanilla CoT. These features are then used to steer the LLM’s internal states during generation. Recognizing that many LLMs do not have corresponding pre-trained SAEs, we further introduce a novel SAE-free steering algorithm, which directly computes steering directions from the residual activations of an LLM, obviating the need for an explicit SAE. Experimental results demonstrate that both our SAE-based and subsequent SAE-free steering algorithms significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.
LLMs cannot spot math errors, even when allowed to peek into the solution
Authors: Kv Aditya Srivatsa; Kaushal Kumar Maurya; Ekaterina Kochmar
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on math word problems, yet they have been shown to struggle with meta-reasoning tasks such as identifying errors in student solutions. In this work, we investigate the challenge of locating the first error step in stepwise solutions using two error reasoning datasets: VtG and PRM800K. Our experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to locate the first error step in student solutions even when given access to the reference solution. To that end, we propose an approach that generates an intermediate corrected student solution, aligning more closely with the original student’s solution, which helps improve performance.
Can LLMs be Good Graph Judge for Knowledge Graph Construction?
Authors: Haoyu Huang; Chong Chen; Zeang Sheng; Yang Li; Wentao Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In real-world scenarios, most of the data obtained from the information retrieval (IR) system is unstructured. Converting natural language sentences into structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) remains a critical challenge. We identified three limitations with respect to existing KG construction methods: (1) There could be a large amount of noise in real-world documents, which could result in extracting messy information. (2) Naive LLMs usually extract inaccurate knowledge from some domain-specific documents. (3) Hallucination phenomenon cannot be overlooked when directly using LLMs to construct KGs. In this paper, we propose GraphJudge, a KG construction framework to address the aforementioned challenges. In this framework, we designed an entity-centric strategy to eliminate the noise information in the documents. And we fine-tuned a LLM as a graph judge to finally enhance the quality of generated KGs. Experiments conducted on two general and one domain-specific text-graph pair datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance against various baseline methods with strong generalization abilities.
NeuroAda: Activating Each Neuron’s Potential for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Zhi Zhang; Yixian Shen; Congfeng Cao; Ekaterina Shutova
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods primarily fall into two categories: addition-based and selective in-situ adaptation. The former, such as LoRA, introduce additional modules to adapt the model to downstream tasks, offering strong memory efficiency. However, their representational capacity is often limited, making them less suitable for fine-grained adaptation. In contrast, the latter directly fine-tunes a carefully chosen subset of the original model parameters, allowing for more precise and effective adaptation, but at the cost of significantly increased memory consumption.To reconcile this trade-off, we propose NeuroAda, a novel PEFT method that enables fine-grained model finetuning while maintaining high memory efficiency. Our approach first identifies important parameters (i.e., connections within the network) as in selective adaptation, and then introduces bypass connections for these selected parameters. During finetuning, only the bypass connections are updated, leaving the original model parameters frozen.Empirical results on 23+ tasks spanning both natural language generation and understanding demonstrate that NeuroAda achieves state-of-the-art performance with as little as ≤ 0.02% trainable parameters, while reducing CUDA memory usage by up to 60%.We release our code here: https://github.com/FightingFighting/NeuroAda.git.
NileChat: Towards Linguistically Diverse and Culturally Aware LLMs for Local Communities
Authors: Abdellah El Mekki; Houdaifa Atou; Omer Nacar; Shady Shehata; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Enhancing the linguistic capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to include low-resource languages is a critical research area. Current research directions predominantly rely on synthetic data generated by translating English corpora, which, while demonstrating promising linguistic understanding and translation abilities, often results in models aligned with source language culture. These models frequently fail to represent the cultural heritage and values of local communities. This work proposes a methodology to create both synthetic and retrieval-based pre-training data tailored to a specific community, considering its (i) language, (ii) cultural heritage, and (iii) cultural values. We demonstrate our methodology using Egyptian and Moroccan dialects as testbeds, chosen for their linguistic and cultural richness and current underrepresentation in LLMs. As a proof-of-concept, we develop NileChat, a 3B parameter Egyptian and Moroccan Arabic LLM adapted for Egyptian and Moroccan communities, incorporating their language, cultural heritage, and values. Our results on various understanding, translation, and cultural and values alignment benchmarks show that NileChat outperforms existing Arabic-aware LLMs of similar size and performs on par with larger models. This work addresses Arabic dialect in LLMs with a focus on cultural and values alignment via controlled synthetic data generation and retrieval-augmented pre-training for Moroccan Darija and Egyptian Arabic, including Arabizi variants, advancing Arabic NLP for low-resource communities.We share our methods, data, and models with the community to promote the inclusion and coverage of more diverse communities in cultural LLM development: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/nilechat.