GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Cross-Lingual Optimization for Language Transfer in Large Language Models
Authors: Jungseob Lee; Seongtae Hong; Hyeonseok Moon; Heuiseok Lim
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Adapting large language models to other languages typically employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a standard approach. However, it often suffers from an overemphasis on English performance, a phenomenon that is especially pronounced in data-constrained environments. To overcome these challenges, we propose Cross-Lingual Optimization (CLO) that efficiently transfers an English-centric LLM to a target language while preserving its English capabilities. CLO utilizes publicly available English SFT data and a translation model to enable cross-lingual transfer. We conduct experiments using five models on six languages, each possessing varying levels of resource. Our results show that CLO consistently outperforms SFT in both acquiring target language proficiency and maintaining English performance. Remarkably, in low-resource languages, CLO with only 3,200 samples surpasses SFT with 6,400 samples, demonstrating that CLO can achieve better performance with less data. Furthermore, we find that SFT is particularly sensitive to data quantity in medium and low-resource languages, whereas CLO remains robust. Our comprehensive analysis emphasizes the limitations of SFT and incorporates additional training strategies in CLO to enhance efficiency.
CART: A Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval Framework With Coarse-To-Fine Semantic Modeling
Authors: Minghui Fang; Shengpeng Ji; Jialong Zuo; Hai Huang; Yan Xia; Jieming Zhu; Xize Cheng; Xiaoda Yang; Wenrui Liu; Gang Wang; Zhenhua Dong; Zhou Zhao
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Cross-modal retrieval aims to search for instances, which are semantically related to the query through the interaction of different modal data. Traditional solutions utilize a single-tower or dual-tower framework to explicitly compute the score between queries and candidates, which is challenged by training cost and inference latency with large-scale data. Inspired by the remarkable performance and efficiency of generative models, we propose a generative cross-modal retrieval framework (CART) based on coarse-to-fine semantic modeling, which assigns identifiers to each candidate and treats the generating identifier as the retrieval target. Specifically, we explore an effective coarse-to-fine scheme, combining K-Means and RQ-VAE to discretize multimodal data into token sequences that support autoregressive generation. Further, considering the lack of explicit interaction between queries and candidates, we propose a feature fusion strategy to align their semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategies in the CART, achieving excellent results in both retrieval performance and efficiency.
MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark
Authors: Xiang Yue; Tianyu Zheng; Yuansheng Ni; Yubo Wang; Kai Zhang; Shengbang Tong; Yuxuan Sun; Botao Yu; Ge Zhang; Huan Sun; Yu Su; Wenhu Chen; Graham Neubig
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: This paper introduces MMMU-Pro, a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. MMMU-Pro rigorously assesses multimodal models’ true understanding and reasoning capabilities through a three-step process based on MMMU: (1) filtering out questions answerable by text-only models, (2) augmenting candidate options, and (3) introducing a vision-only input setting where questions are embedded within images. This setting challenges AI to truly “see” and “read” simultaneously, testing a core human cognitive skill of seamlessly integrating visual and textual information. Results show that model performance is substantially lower on MMMU-Pro than on MMMU, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9% across models. We explore the impact of OCR prompts and Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, finding that OCR prompts have minimal effect while CoT generally improves performance. MMMU-Pro provides a more rigorous evaluation tool, closely mimicking real-world scenarios and offering valuable directions for future multimodal research.
Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch
Authors: Xueru Wen; Jie Lou; Zichao Li; Yaojie Lu; Xing Yu; Yuqiu Ji; Guohai Xu; Hongyu Lin; Ben He; Xianpei Han; Le Sun; Debing Zhang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Reward models (RMs) are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, most RM research is centered on English and relies heavily on synthetic resources, which leads to limited and less reliable datasets and benchmarks for Chinese. To address this gap, we introduce CheemsBench, a fully human-annotated RM evaluation benchmark within Chinese contexts, and CheemsPreference, a large-scale and diverse preference dataset annotated through human-machine collaboration to support Chinese RM training. We systematically evaluate open-source discriminative and generative RMs on CheemsBench and observe significant limitations in their ability to capture human preferences in Chinese scenarios. Additionally, based on CheemsPreference, we construct an RM that achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench, demonstrating the necessity of human supervision in RM training. Our findings reveal that scaled AI-generated data struggles to fully capture human preferences, emphasizing the importance of high-quality human supervision in RM development.
Why Safeguarded Ships Run Aground? Aligned Large Language Models’ Safety Mechanisms Tend to Be Anchored in The Template Region
Authors: Chak Tou Leong; Qingyu Yin; Jian Wang; Wenjie Li
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) remains vulnerable, as their initial behavior can be easily jailbroken by even relatively simple attacks. Since infilling a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model output is a common practice for existing LLMs, we hypothesize that this template is a key factor behind their vulnerabilities: LLMs’ safety-related decision-making overly relies on the aggregated information from the template region, which largely influences these models’ safety behavior. We refer to this issue as template-anchored safety alignment. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments and verify that template-anchored safety alignment is widespread across various aligned LLMs. Our mechanistic analyses demonstrate how it leads to models’ susceptibility when encountering inference-time jailbreak attacks. Furthermore, we show that detaching safety mechanisms from the template region is promising in mitigating vulnerabilities to jailbreak attacks. We encourage future research to develop more robust safety alignment techniques that reduce reliance on the template region.
LLaVA Steering: Visual Instruction Tuning with 500x Fewer Parameters through Modality Linear Representation-Steering
Authors: Jinhe Bi; Yujun Wang; Haokun Chen; Xun Xiao; Artur Hecker; Volker Tresp; Yunpu Ma
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhance visual tasks by integrating visual representations into large language models (LLMs). The textual modality, inherited from LLMs, enables instruction following and in-context learning, while the visual modality boosts downstream task performance through rich semantic content, spatial information, and grounding capabilities. These modalities work synergistically across various visual tasks. Our research reveals a persistent imbalance between these modalities, with text often dominating output generation during visual instruction tuning, regardless of using full or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We found that re-balancing these modalities can significantly reduce trainable parameters, inspiring further optimization of visual instruction tuning. To this end, we introduce Modality Linear Representation-Steering (MoReS), which re-balances intrinsic modalities by steering visual representations through linear transformations in the visual subspace across each model layer. We validated our approach by developing LLaVA Steering, a suite of models using MoReS. Results show that LLaVA Steering requires, on average, 500 times fewer trainable parameters than LoRA while maintaining comparable performance across three visual benchmarks and eight visual question-answering tasks. Finally, we introduce the LLaVA Steering Factory, a platform that enables rapid customization of MLLMs with a component-based architecture, seamlessly integrating state-of-the-art models and evaluating intrinsic modality imbalance. This open-source project facilitates a deeper understanding of MLLMs within the research community.
Efficient Long Context Language Model Retrieval with Compression
Authors: Minju Seo; Jinheon Baek; Seongyun Lee; Sung Ju Hwang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm to perform Information Retrieval (IR), which enables the direct ingestion and retrieval of information by processing an entire corpus in their single context, showcasing the potential to surpass traditional sparse and dense retrieval methods. However, processing a large number of passages within in-context for retrieval is computationally expensive, and handling their representations during inference further exacerbates the processing time; thus, we aim to make LCLM retrieval more efficient and potentially more effective with passage compression. Specifically, we propose a new compression approach tailored for LCLM retrieval, which is trained to maximize the retrieval performance while minimizing the length of the compressed passages. To accomplish this, we generate the synthetic data, where compressed passages are automatically created and labeled as chosen or rejected according to their retrieval success for a given query, and we train the proposed Compression model for Long context Retrieval (CoLoR) with this data via preference optimization while adding the length regularization loss on top of it to enforce brevity. Through extensive experiments on 9 datasets, we show that CoLoR improves the retrieval performance by 6% while compressing the in-context size by a factor of 1.91. Our code is available at: https://github.com/going-doer/CoLoR.
Ontology-Guided Reverse Thinking Makes Large Language Models Stronger on Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Authors: Runxuan Liu; Bei Luo; Jiaqi Li; Baoxin Wang; Ming Liu; Dayong Wu; Shijin Wang; Bing Qin
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language processing. However, in knowledge graph question answering tasks (KGQA), there remains the issue of answering questions that require multi-hop reasoning. Existing methods rely on entity vector matching, but the purpose of the question is abstract and difficult to match with specific entities. As a result, it is difficult to establish reasoning paths to the purpose, which leads to information loss and redundancy. To address this issue, inspired by human reverse thinking, we propose Ontology-Guided Reverse Thinking (ORT), a novel framework that constructs reasoning paths from purposes back to conditions. ORT operates in three key phases: (1) using LLM to extract purpose labels and condition labels, (2) constructing label reasoning paths based on the KG ontology, and (3) using the label reasoning paths to guide knowledge retrieval. Experiments on the WebQSP and CWQ datasets show that ORT achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly enhances the capability of LLMs for KGQA.
Towards Omni-RAG: Comprehensive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models in Medical Applications
Authors: Zhe Chen; Yusheng Liao; Shuyang Jiang; Pingjie Wang; YiQiu Guo; Yanfeng Wang; Yu Wang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models hold promise for addressing medical challenges, such as medical diagnosis reasoning, research knowledge acquisition, clinical decision-making, and consumer health inquiry support. However, they often generate hallucinations due to limited medical knowledge. Incorporating external knowledge is therefore critical, which necessitates multi-source knowledge acquisition. We address this challenge by framing it as a source planning problem, which is to formulate context-appropriate queries tailored to the attributes of diverse sources. Existing approaches either overlook source planning or fail to achieve it effectively due to misalignment between the model’s expectation of the sources and their actual content. To bridge this gap, we present MedOmniKB, a repository comprising multigenre and multi-structured medical knowledge sources. Leveraging these sources, we propose the Source Planning Optimisation method, which enhances multi-source utilisation. Our approach involves enabling an expert model to explore and evaluate potential plans while training a smaller model to learn source alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves multi-source planning performance, enabling the optimised small model to achieve state-of-the-art results in leveraging diverse medical knowledge sources.
Predicting Turn-Taking and Backchannel in Human-Machine Conversations Using Linguistic, Acoustic, and Visual Signals
Authors: Yuxin Lin; Yinglin Zheng; Ming Zeng; Wangzheng Shi
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: This paper addresses the gap in predicting turn-taking and backchannel actions in human-machine conversations using multi-modal signals (linguistic, acoustic, and visual). To overcome the limitation of existing datasets, we propose an automatic data collection pipeline that allows us to collect and annotate over 210 hours of human conversation videos. From this, we construct a Multi-Modal Face-to-Face (MM-F2F) human conversation dataset, including over 1.5M words and corresponding turn-taking and backchannel annotations from approximately 20M frames. Additionally, we present an end-to-end framework that predicts the probability of turn-taking and backchannel actions from multi-modal signals. The proposed model emphasizes the interrelation between modalities and supports any combination of text, audio, and video inputs, making it adaptable to a variety of realistic scenarios. Our experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on turn-taking and backchannel prediction tasks, achieving a 10% increase in F1-score on turn-taking and a 33% increase on backchannel prediction. Our dataset and code are publicly available online to ease of subsequent research.
A New Formulation of Zipf’s Meaning-Frequency Law through Contextual Diversity
Authors: Ryo Nagata; Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: This paper proposes formulating Zipf’s meaning-frequency law, the power law between word frequency and the number of meanings, as a relationship between word frequency and contextual diversity. The proposed formulation quantifies meaning counts as contextual diversity, which is based on the directions of contextualized word vectors obtained from a Language Model (LM). This formulation gives a new interpretation to the law and also enables us to examine it for a wider variety of words and corpora than previous studies have explored. In addition, this paper shows that the law becomes unobservable when the size of the LM used is small and that autoregressive LMs require much more parameters than masked LMs to be able to observe the law.
The Mirage of Model Editing: Revisiting Evaluation in the Wild
Authors: Wanli Yang; Fei Sun; Jiajun Tan; Xinyu Ma; Qi Cao; Dawei Yin; Huawei Shen; Xueqi Cheng
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Despite near-perfect results reported in the literature, the effectiveness of model editing in real-world applications remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we introduce QAEdit, a new benchmark aligned with widely used question answering (QA) datasets, and WILD, a task-agnostic evaluation framework designed to better reflect real-world usage of model editing. Our single editing experiments show that current editing methods perform substantially worse than previously reported (38.5% vs. 96.8%). We demonstrate that it stems from issues in the synthetic evaluation practices of prior work. Among them, the most severe is the use of teacher forcing during testing, which leaks both content and length of the ground truth, leading to overestimated performance. Furthermore, we simulate practical deployment by sequential editing, revealing that current approaches fail drastically with only 1000 edits. This work calls for a shift in model editing research toward rigorous evaluation and the development of robust, scalable methods that can reliably update knowledge in LLMs for real-world use.
LAQuer: Localized Attribution Queries in Content-grounded Generation
Authors: Eran Hirsch; Aviv Slobodkin; David Wan; Elias Stengel-Eskin; Mohit Bansal; Ido Dagan
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Grounded text generation models often produce content that deviates from their source material, requiring user verification to ensure accuracy. Existing attribution methods associate entire sentences with source documents, which can be overwhelming for users seeking to fact-check specific claims. In contrast, existing sub-sentence attribution methods may be more precise but fail to align with users’ interests. In light of these limitations, we introduce Localized Attribution Queries (LAQuer), a new task that localizes selected spans of generated output to their corresponding source spans, allowing fine-grained and user-directed attribution. We compare two approaches for the LAQuer task, including prompting large language models (LLMs) and leveraging LLM internal representations. We then explore a modeling framework that extends existing attributed text generation methods to LAQuer. We evaluate this framework across two grounded text generation tasks: Multi-document Summarization (MDS) and Long-form Question Answering (LFQA). Our findings show that LAQuer methods significantly reduce the length of the attributed text. Our contributions include: (1) proposing the LAQuer task to enhance attribution usability, (2) suggesting a modeling framework and benchmarking multiple baselines, and (3) proposing a new evaluation setting to promote future research on localized attribution in content-grounded generation.
EPO: Explicit Policy Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xiaoqian Liu; Ke Wang; Yongbin Li; Yuchuan Wu; Wentao Ma; Aobo Kong; Fei Huang; Jianbin Jiao; Junge Zhang
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities in well-defined problems with clear solutions, such as mathematics and coding. However, they still struggle with complex real-world scenarios like business negotiations, which require strategic reasoning—an ability to navigate dynamic environments and align long-term goals amidst uncertainty.Existing methods for strategic reasoning face challenges in adaptability, scalability, and transferring strategies to new contexts.To address these issues, we propose explicit policy optimization (*EPO*) for strategic reasoning, featuring an LLM that provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior.To improve adaptability and policy transferability, we train the strategic reasoning model via multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL), utilizing process rewards and iterative self-play.Experiments across social and physical domains demonstrate *EPO*’s ability of long-term goal alignment through enhanced strategic reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art performance on social dialogue and web navigation tasks. Our findings reveal various collaborative reasoning mechanisms emergent in *EPO* and its effectiveness in generating novel strategies, underscoring its potential for strategic reasoning in real-world applications. Code and data are available at [https://github.com/lxqpku/EPO](https://github.com/lxqpku/EPO).
DCG-SQL: Enhancing In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph
Authors: Jihyung Lee; Jin-Seop Lee; Jaehoon Lee; YunSeok Choi; Jee-Hyong Lee
Venue: ACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Text-to-SQL, which translates a natural language question into an SQL query, has advanced with in-context learning of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods show little improvement in performance compared to randomly chosen demonstrations, and significant performance drops when smaller LLMs (e.g., Llama 3.1-8B) are used. This indicates that these methods heavily rely on the intrinsic capabilities of hyper-scaled LLMs, rather than effectively retrieving useful demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for effectively retrieving demonstrations and generating SQL queries. We construct a Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph, which contains key information and semantic relationship between a question and its database schema items. This graph-based structure enables effective representation of Text-to-SQL samples and retrieval of useful demonstrations for in-context learning. Experimental results on the Spider benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing consistent improvements in SQL generation performance and efficiency across both hyper-scaled LLMs and small LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/jjklle/DCG-SQL.