GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Mitigating Biases in Language Models via Bias Unlearning
Authors: Dianqing Liu; Yi Liu; Guoqing Jin; Zhendong Mao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Many studies have shown various biases targeting different demographic groups in language models, amplifying discrimination and harming fairness. Recent parameter modification debiasing approaches significantly degrade core capabilities such as text coherence and task accuracy. And Prompt-based debiasing methods, only effective for predefined trigger words, fail to address deeply embedded stereotypical associations in model parameters. In this paper, we propose BiasUnlearn, a novel model debiasing framework which achieves targeted debiasing via dual-pathway unlearning mechanisms coordinating stereotype forgetting with anti-stereotype retention, while preventing bias polarity reversal through adversarial forget set and dynamic dataset swapping. We conducted extensive experiments with multiple language models across various evaluation benchmarks. The results show that BiasUnlearn outperforms existing methods in mitigating bias in language models while retaining language modeling capabilities. Further experiments reveal that debiasing weights are transferable across model variants, confirming that bias representations become entrenched during pre-training and persist through fine-tuning phases.
UNComp: Can Matrix Entropy Uncover Sparsity? — A Compressor Design from an Uncertainty-Aware Perspective
Authors: Jing Xiong; Jianghan Shen; Fanghua Ye; Chaofan Tao; Zhongwei Wan; Jianqiao Lu; Xun Wu; Chuanyang Zheng; Zhijiang Guo; Min Yang; Lingpeng Kong; Ngai Wong
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Deploying large language models (LLMs) for long-context inference remains challenging due to their substantial memory and computational demands. While techniques such as Key-Value (KV) cache compression are designed to reduce memory usage, they often neglect the structured sparsity inherent in the relationship between hidden states and their corresponding KV cache. In this work, we explore the role of uncertainty as a potential indicator of sparsity within LLMs. We propose UNComp, an uncertainty-aware framework that leverages truncated matrix entropy to identify areas of low information content, thereby revealing sparsity patterns that can be used for adaptive compression. Unlike traditional methods that apply uniform compression, UNComp dynamically adjusts its approach to compression, guided by uncertainty measures that reflect the importance of various model components. Our analysis shows that sparsity patterns, when derived from uncertainty estimates, can be exploited to reveal special long-range dependencies, such as retrieval heads and retrieval layers. This perspective not only enhances our understanding of how compression can be optimized but also provides new insights into the inherent sparsity of LLMs during long-context inference. By focusing on uncertainty to analyze the sparsity pattern in detail, UNComp reduces the KV cache size to 4.74% of the original, achieves a 6% prefill speedup, and improves throughput by 6.4× — not only delivering strong lossless compression performance, but also validating the effectiveness of the underlying theoretical tool. Our codes are submitted with the paper.
Superpose Task-specific Features for Model Merging
Authors: Haiquan Qiu; You Wu; Dong Li; Jianmin Guo; Quanming Yao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Model merging enables powerful capabilities in neural networks without requiring additional training. In this paper, we introduce a novel perspective on model merging by leveraging the fundamental mechanisms of neural network representation. Our approach is motivated by the linear representation hypothesis, which states that neural networks encode information through linear combinations of feature vectors. We propose a method that superposes task-specific features from individual models into a merged model. Our approach specifically targets linear transformation matrices, which are crucial for feature activation and extraction in deep networks. By formulating the merging process as a linear system, we can preserve output feature directions from individual models and create merged models that effectively maintain multi-task capabilities compared to existing methods. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and models demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques.
FinRAGBench-V: A Benchmark for Multimodal RAG with Visual Citation in the Financial Domain
Authors: Suifeng Zhao; Zhuoran Jin; Sujian Li; Jun Gao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a vital role in the financial domain, powering applications such as real-time market analysis, trend forecasting, and interest rate computation. However, most existing RAG research in finance focuses predominantly on textual data, overlooking the rich visual content in financial documents, resulting in the loss of key analytical insights. To bridge this gap, we present FinRAGBench-V, a comprehensive visual RAG benchmark tailored for finance. This benchmark effectively integrates multimodal data and provides visual citation to ensure traceability. It includes a bilingual retrieval corpus with 60,780 Chinese and 51,219 English pages, along with a high-quality, human-annotated question-answering (QA) dataset spanning heterogeneous data types and seven question categories. Moreover, we introduce RGenCite, an RAG baseline that seamlessly integrates visual citation with generation. Furthermore, we propose an automatic citation evaluation method to systematically assess the visual citation capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Extensive experiments on RGenCite underscore the challenging nature of FinRAGBench-V, providing valuable insights for the development of multimodal RAG systems in finance.
BacktrackAgent: Enhancing GUI Agent with Error Detection and Backtracking Mechanism
Authors: Qinzhuo Wu; Pengzhi Gao; Wei Liu; Jian Luan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have gained substantial attention due to their impressive capabilities to complete tasks through multiple interactions within GUI environments. However, existing agents primarily focus on enhancing the accuracy of individual actions and often lack effective mechanisms for detecting and recovering from errors. To address these shortcomings, we propose the BacktrackAgent, a robust framework that incorporates a backtracking mechanism to improve task completion efficiency. BacktrackAgent includes verifier, judger, and reflector components as modules for error detection and recovery, while also applying judgment rewards to further enhance the agent’s performance. Additionally, we develop a training dataset specifically designed for the backtracking mechanism, which considers the outcome pages after action executions. Experimental results show that BacktrackAgent has achieved performance improvements in both task success rate and step accuracy on Mobile3M and Auto-UI benchmarks. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.
Diffusion vs. Autoregressive Language Models: A Text Embedding Perspective
Authors: Siyue Zhang; Yilun Zhao; Liyuan Geng; Arman Cohan; Anh Tuan Luu; Chen Zhao
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models, benefiting from large scale pre-training and post-training, have begun to surpass BERT and T5-based models on general-purpose text embedding tasks such as document retrieval. However, a fundamental limitation of LLM embeddings lies in the unidirectional attention used during autoregressive pre-training, which misaligns with the bidirectional nature of text embedding tasks. To this end, We propose adopting diffusion language models for text embeddings, motivated by their inherent bidirectional architecture and recent success in matching or surpassing LLMs especially on reasoning tasks. We present the first systematic study of the diffusion language embedding model, which outperforms the LLM-based embedding model by 20% on long-document retrieval, 8% on reasoning-intensive retrieval, 2% on instruction-following retrieval, and achieve competitive performance on traditional text embedding benchmarks. Our analysis verifies that bidirectional attention is crucial for encoding global context in long and complex text.
BannerAgency: Advertising Banner Design with Multimodal LLM Agents
Authors: Heng Wang; Yotaro Shimose; Shingo Takamatsu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Advertising banners are critical for capturing user attention and enhancing advertising campaign effectiveness. Creating aesthetically pleasing banner designs while conveying the campaign messages is challenging due to the large search space involving multiple design elements. Additionally, advertisers need multiple sizes for different displays and various versions to target different sectors of audiences. Since design is intrinsically an iterative and subjective process, flexible editability is also in high demand for practical usage. While current models have served as assistants to human designers in various design tasks, they typically handle only segments of the creative design process or produce pixel-based outputs that limit editability. This paper introduces a training-free framework for fully automated banner ad design creation, enabling frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to streamline the production of effective banners with minimal manual effort across diverse marketing contexts. We present BannerAgency, an MLLM agent system that collaborates with advertisers to understand their brand identity and banner objectives, generates matching background images, creates blueprints for foreground design elements, and renders the final creatives as editable components in Figma or SVG formats rather than static pixels. To facilitate evaluation and future research, we introduce BannerRequest400, a benchmark featuring 100 unique logos paired with 400 diverse banner requests. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness, emphasizing the quality of the generated banner designs, their adaptability to various banner requests, and their strong editability enabled by this component-based approach.
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training
Authors: Weijie Shi; Jipeng Zhang; Yaguang Wu; Jingzhi Fang; Shibo Zhang; Yao Zhao; Hao Chen; Ruiyuan Zhang; Yue Cui; Jia Zhu; Sirui Han; Jiajie Xu; Xiaofang Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are commonly trained on multi-domain datasets, where domain sampling strategies significantly impact model performance due to varying domain importance across downstream tasks. Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. In this paper, we present Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling (DIDS). To ensure intra-domain consistency, a gradient clustering algorithm is proposed to group training data based on their learning effects, where a proxy language model and dimensionality reduction are employed to reduce computational overhead. To accurately measure domain impact, we develop a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) guided metric that quantifies how domain-specific parameter updates affect the model’s output distributions on downstream tasks, with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, to determine optimal sampling ratios, DIDS combines both the FIM-guided domain impact assessment and loss learning trajectories that indicate domain-specific potential, while accounting for diminishing marginal returns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIDS achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/shiweijiezero/DIDS.
Training LLMs to be Better Text Embedders through Bidirectional Reconstruction
Authors: Chang Su; Dengliang Shi; Siyuan Huang; Jintao Du; Changhua Meng; Yu Cheng; Weiqiang Wang; Zhouhan Lin
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been explored as powerful text embedders. Existing LLM-based text embedding approaches often leverage the embedding of the final token, typically a reserved special token such as ‘[EOS]‘. However, these tokens have not been intentionally trained to capture the semantics of the whole context, limiting their capacity as text embeddings, especially for retrieval and re-ranking tasks. We propose to add a new training stage before contrastive learning to enrich the semantics of the final token embedding. This stage employs bidirectional generative reconstruction tasks, namely EBQ2D (Embedding-Based Query-to-Document) and EBD2Q (Embedding-Based Document-to-Query), which interleave to anchor the ‘[EOS]‘ embedding and reconstruct either side of Query-Document pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that our additional training stage significantly improves LLM performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), achieving new state-of-the-art results across different LLM base models and scales.
ReMedy: Learning Machine Translation Evaluation from Human Preferences with Reward Modeling
Authors: Shaomu Tan; Christof Monz
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: A key challenge in MT evaluation is the inherent noise and inconsistency of human ratings. Regression-based neural metrics struggle with this noise, while prompting LLMs shows promise at system-level evaluation but performs poorly at segment level. In this work, we propose ReMedy, a novel MT metric framework that reformulates translation evaluation as a reward modeling task. Instead of regressing on imperfect human ratings directly, ReMedy learns relative translation quality using pairwise preference data, resulting in a more reliable evaluation. In extensive experiments across WMT22-24 shared tasks (39 language pairs, 111 MT systems), ReMedy achieves state-of-the-art performance at both segment- and system-level evaluation. Specifically, ReMedy-9B surpasses larger WMT winners and massive closed LLMs such as MetricX-13B, XCOMET-Ensemble, GEMBA-GPT-4, PaLM-540B, and finetuned PaLM2. Further analyses demonstrate that ReMedy delivers superior capability in detecting translation errors and evaluating low-quality translations.
SolEval: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Repository-level Solidity Smart Contract Generation
Authors: Zhiyuan Peng; Xin Yin; Rui Qian; Peiqin Lin; YongKang Liu; Hao Zhang; Chenhao Ying; Yuan Luo
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed code generation.However, most existing approaches focus on mainstream languages such as Python and Java, neglecting the Solidity language, the predominant programming language for Ethereum smart contracts.Due to the lack of adequate benchmarks for Solidity, LLMs’ ability to generate secure, cost-effective smart contracts remains unexplored.To fill this gap, we construct SolEval, the first repository-level benchmark designed for Solidity smart contract generation, to evaluate the performance of LLMs on Solidity.SolEval consists of 1,507 samples from 28 different repositories, covering 6 popular domains, providing LLMs with a comprehensive evaluation benchmark.Unlike the existing Solidity benchmark, SolEval not only includes complex function calls but also reflects the real-world complexity of the Ethereum ecosystem by incorporating Gas@k and Vul@k.We evaluate 16 LLMs on SolEval, and our results show that the best-performing LLM achieves only 26.29% Pass@10, highlighting substantial room for improvement in Solidity code generation by LLMs.Additionally, we conduct supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on Qwen-7B using SolEval, resulting in a significant performance improvement, with Pass@5 increasing from 16.67% to 58.33%, demonstrating the effectiveness of fine-tuning LLMs on our benchmark.We release our data and code at https://github.com/pzy2000/SolEval.
In-Context Learning Boosts Speech Recognition via Human-like Adaptation to Speakers and Language Varieties
Authors: Nathan Roll; Calbert Graham; Yuka Tatsumi; Kim Tien Nguyen; Meghan Sumner; Dan Jurafsky
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Human listeners readily adjust to unfamiliar speakers and language varieties through exposure, but do these adaptation benefits extend to state-of-the-art spoken language models (SLMs)? We introduce a scalable framework that allows for in-context learning (ICL) in Phi-4 Multimodal (Phi-4-MM) using interleaved task prompts and audio-text pairs, and find that as few as 12 example utterances (~50 seconds) at inference time reduce word error rates by a relative 19.7% (1.2 pp.) on average across diverse English corpora. These improvements are most pronounced in low-resource varieties, when the context and target speaker match, and when more examples are provided—though scaling our procedure yields diminishing marginal returns to context length. Overall, we find that our novel ICL adaptation scheme (1) reveals a similar performance profile to human listeners, and (2) demonstrates consistent improvements to automatic speech recognition (ASR) robustness across diverse speakers and language backgrounds. While adaptation succeeds broadly, significant gaps remain for certain varieties, revealing where current models still fall short of human flexibility. We release our prompts and code on GitHub.
Reasoning Model Unlearning: Forgetting Traces, Not Just Answers, While Preserving Reasoning Skills
Authors: Changsheng Wang; Chongyu Fan; Yihua Zhang; Jinghan Jia; Dennis Wei; Parikshit Ram; Nathalie Baracaldo; Sijia Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have enabled strong multi-step reasoning capabilities. However, existing machine unlearning algorithms are tailored to standard language modeling and fail to address the unique challenges posed by LRMs. In this work, we present the first systematic study of LRM unlearning and reveal that conventional unlearning methods often overlook critical information leakage in reasoning traces, even when final answers are successfully removed. To address this, we propose Reasoning-aware Representation Misdirection for Unlearning (R2MU), a method that suppresses sensitive reasoning traces while preserving the model’s general reasoning ability. Our experiments demonstrate that R2MU significantly reduces reasoning trace leakage and achieves strong performance across both reasoning and safety benchmarks, including WMDP, StrongReject, JBB-Behaviors and WildJailbreak, under state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLaMA-8B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B. To the best of our knowledge, MU is the first principled approach to both expose and mitigate reasoning trace leakage in LRM unlearning, while preserving reasoning ability.
Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk): Fast Human Annotation of Dense Image Captions
Authors: Yijun Shen; Delong Chen; Fan Liu; Xingyu Wang; Chuanyi Zhang; Liang Yao; Yuhui Zheng
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While densely annotated image captions significantly facilitate the learning of robust vision-language alignment, methodologies for systematically optimizing human annotation efforts remain underexplored. We introduce Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk), an AI-in-the-loop methodology designed to maximize the number of annotated samples and improve their comprehensiveness under fixed budget constraints (e.g., total human annotation time). The framework is built upon two key insights. First, sequential annotation reduces redundant workload compared to conventional parallel annotation, as subsequent annotators only need to annotate the “residual”—the missing visual information that previous annotations have not covered. Second, humans process textual input faster by reading while outputting annotations with much higher throughput via talking; thus a multimodal interface enables optimized efficiency. We evaluate our framework from two aspects: intrinsic evaluations that assess the comprehensiveness of semantic units, obtained by parsing detailed captions into object-attribute trees and analyzing their effective connections; extrinsic evaluation measures the practical usage of the annotated captions in facilitating vision-language alignment. Experiments with eight participants show our Chain-of-Talkers (CoTalk) improves annotation speed (0.42 vs. 0.30 units/sec) and retrieval performance (41.13% vs. 40.52%) over the parallel method.
DecoupleSearch: Decouple Planning and Search via Hierarchical Reward Modeling
Authors: Hao Sun; Zile Qiao; Bo Wang; Guoxin Chen; Yingyan Hou; Yong Jiang; Pengjun Xie; Fei Huang; Yan Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a pivotal methodology for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) through the dynamic integration of external knowledge. To further improve RAG’s flexibility, Agentic RAG introduces autonomous agents into the workflow. However, Agentic RAG faces several challenges:(1) the success of each step depends on both high-quality planning and accurate search,(2) the lack of supervision for intermediate reasoning steps, and(3) the exponentially large candidate space for planning and searching.To address these challenges, we propose DecoupleSearch, a novel framework that decouples planning and search processes using dual value models, enabling independent optimization of plan reasoning and search grounding. Our approach constructs a reasoning tree, where each node represents planning and search steps. We leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to assess the quality of each step. During inference, Hierarchical Beam Search iteratively refines planning and search candidates with dual value models. Extensive experiments across policy models of varying parameter sizes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.