pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Revisiting Test-Time Scaling: A Survey and a Diversity-Aware Method for Efficient Reasoning
Authors: Ho-Lam Chung, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Hsiao-Ying Huang, Chunerh Cho, Jian-Ren Lin, Zhang Ziwei, Yun-Nung Chen
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Mathematical Reasoning

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by allocating additional compute during inference. We conduct a structured survey of TTS methods and categorize them into sampling-based, search-based, and trajectory optimization strategies. We observe that reasoning-optimized models often produce less diverse outputs, which limits TTS effectiveness. To address this, we propose ADAPT (A Diversity Aware Prefix fine-Tuning), a lightweight method that applies prefix tuning with a diversity-focused data strategy. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks show that ADAPT reaches 80% accuracy using eight times less compute than strong baselines. Our findings highlight the essential role of generative diversity in maximizing TTS effectiveness.
Static Word Embeddings for Sentence Semantic Representation
Authors: Takashi Wada, Yuki Hirakawa, Ryotaro Shimizu, Takahiro Kawashima, Yuki Saito
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Sentence, Word Embeddings

We propose new static word embeddings optimised for sentence semantic representation. We first extract word embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer, and improve them with sentence-level principal component analysis, followed by either knowledge distillation or contrastive learning. During inference, we represent sentences by simply averaging word embeddings, which requires little computational cost. We evaluate models on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks and show that our model substantially outperforms existing static models on sentence semantic tasks, and even rivals a basic Sentence Transformer model (SimCSE) on some data sets. Lastly, we perform a variety of analyses and show that our method successfully removes word embedding components that are irrelevant to sentence semantics, and adjusts the vector norms based on the influence of words on sentence semantics.
Advancing Tool-Augmented Large Language Models via Meta-Verification and Reflection Learning
Authors: Zhiyuan Ma, Jiayu Liu, Xianzhen Luo, Zhenya Huang, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Empowering large language models (LLMs) with effective tool utilization capabilities is crucial for enabling AI agents to solve complex problems. However, current models face two major limitations: (1) unreliable tool planning and invocation due to low-quality instruction datasets (e.g., widespread hallucinated API calls), and (2) weak tool reflection abilities (over 90% of errors cannot be corrected) resulting from static imitation learning. To address these critical limitations, we propose Tool-MVR, a novel Tool-Augmented LLM that achieves comprehensive System 2 reasoning through two key innovations. Specifically, we first introduce Multi-Agent Meta-Verification (MAMV), a systematic pipeline that rigorously validates APIs, queries, and reasoning trajectories to construct ToolBench-V, a new high-quality instruction dataset that addresses the limitation of unreliable tool planning and invocation. Second, we propose Exploration-based Reflection Learning (EXPLORE), which enhances tool reflection capabilities by leveraging tool feedback through a dynamic "Error -> Reflection -> Correction" learning paradigm, resulting in our reflection dataset ToolBench-R and addressing the critical weakness in tool reflection. Finally, we obtain Tool-MVR by finetuning open-source LLMs (e.g., Qwen-7B) on both ToolBench-V and ToolBench-R. Our experiments demonstrate that Tool-MVR achieves state-of-the-art performance on StableToolBench, surpassing both ToolLLM (by 23.9%) and GPT-4 (by 15.3%) while reducing API calls by 31.4%, with strong generalization capabilities across unseen tools and scenarios. Additionally, on our proposed RefineToolBench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate tool reflection capabilities, Tool-MVR achieves a 58.9% error correction rate, significantly outperforming ToolLLM's 9.1%.
TaDA: Training-free recipe for Decoding with Adaptive KV Cache Compression and Mean-centering
Authors: Vinay Joshi, Pratik Prabhanjan Brahma, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

The key-value (KV) cache in transformer models is a critical component for efficient decoding or inference, yet its memory demands scale poorly with sequence length, posing a major challenge for scalable deployment of large language models. Among several approaches to KV cache compression, quantization of key and value activations has been widely explored. Most KV cache quantization methods still need to manage sparse and noncontiguous outliers separately. To address this, we introduce TaDA, a training-free recipe for KV cache compression with quantization precision that adapts to error sensitivity across layers and a mean centering to eliminate separate outlier handling. Our approach yields substantial accuracy improvements for multiple models supporting various context lengths. Moreover, our approach does not need to separately manage outlier elements -- a persistent hurdle in most traditional quantization methods. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our technique reduces KV cache memory footprint to 27% of the original 16-bit baseline while achieving comparable accuracy. Our method paves the way for scalable and high-performance reasoning in language models by potentially enabling inference for longer context length models, reasoning models, and longer chain of thoughts.
Flex-TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Flexible Planning with Language Agents
Authors: Juhyun Oh, Eunsu Kim, Alice Oh
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Real-world planning problems require constant adaptation to changing requirements and balancing of competing constraints. However, current benchmarks for evaluating LLMs' planning capabilities primarily focus on static, single-turn scenarios. We introduce Flex-TravelPlanner, a benchmark that evaluates language models' ability to reason flexibly in dynamic planning scenarios. Building on the TravelPlanner dataset~\citep{xie2024travelplanner}, we introduce two novel evaluation settings: (1) sequential constraint introduction across multiple turns, and (2) scenarios with explicitly prioritized competing constraints. Our analysis of GPT-4o and Llama 3.1 70B reveals several key findings: models' performance on single-turn tasks poorly predicts their ability to adapt plans across multiple turns; constraint introduction order significantly affects performance; and models struggle with constraint prioritization, often incorrectly favoring newly introduced lower priority preferences over existing higher-priority constraints. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating LLMs in more realistic, dynamic planning scenarios and suggest specific directions for improving model performance on complex planning tasks. The code and dataset for our framework are publicly available at https://github.com/juhyunohh/FlexTravelBench.
Normative Conflicts and Shallow AI Alignment
Authors: Raphaël Millière
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

The progress of AI systems such as large language models (LLMs) raises increasingly pressing concerns about their safe deployment. This paper examines the value alignment problem for LLMs, arguing that current alignment strategies are fundamentally inadequate to prevent misuse. Despite ongoing efforts to instill norms such as helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness in LLMs through fine-tuning based on human preferences, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that exploit conflicts between these norms. I argue that this vulnerability reflects a fundamental limitation of existing alignment methods: they reinforce shallow behavioral dispositions rather than endowing LLMs with a genuine capacity for normative deliberation. Drawing from on research in moral psychology, I show how humans' ability to engage in deliberative reasoning enhances their resilience against similar adversarial tactics. LLMs, by contrast, lack a robust capacity to detect and rationally resolve normative conflicts, leaving them susceptible to manipulation; even recent advances in reasoning-focused LLMs have not addressed this vulnerability. This ``shallow alignment'' problem carries significant implications for AI safety and regulation, suggesting that current approaches are insufficient for mitigating potential harms posed by increasingly capable AI systems.
Recycling the Web: A Method to Enhance Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for Language Models
Authors: Thao Nguyen, Yang Li, Olga Golovneva, Luke Zettlemoyer, Sewoong Oh, Ludwig Schmidt, Xian Li
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Scaling laws predict that the performance of large language models improves with increasing model size and data size. In practice, pre-training has been relying on massive web crawls, using almost all data sources publicly available on the internet so far. However, this pool of natural data does not grow at the same rate as the compute supply. Furthermore, the availability of high-quality texts is even more limited: data filtering pipelines often remove up to 99% of the initial web scrapes to achieve state-of-the-art. To address the "data wall" of pre-training scaling, our work explores ways to transform and recycle data discarded in existing filtering processes. We propose REWIRE, REcycling the Web with guIded REwrite, a method to enrich low-quality documents so that they could become useful for training. This in turn allows us to increase the representation of synthetic data in the final pre-training set. Experiments at 1B, 3B and 7B scales of the DCLM benchmark show that mixing high-quality raw texts and our rewritten texts lead to 1.0, 1.3 and 2.5 percentage points improvement respectively across 22 diverse tasks, compared to training on only filtered web data. Training on the raw-synthetic data mix is also more effective than having access to 2x web data. Through further analysis, we demonstrate that about 82% of the mixed in texts come from transforming lower-quality documents that would otherwise be discarded. REWIRE also outperforms related approaches of generating synthetic data, including Wikipedia-style paraphrasing, question-answer synthesizing and knowledge extraction. These results suggest that recycling web texts holds the potential for being a simple and effective approach for scaling pre-training data.
Cracking the Code: Enhancing Implicit Hate Speech Detection through Coding Classification
Authors: Lu Wei, Liangzhi Li, Tong Xiang, Xiao Liu, Noa Garcia
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

The internet has become a hotspot for hate speech (HS), threatening societal harmony and individual well-being. While automatic detection methods perform well in identifying explicit hate speech (ex-HS), they struggle with more subtle forms, such as implicit hate speech (im-HS). We tackle this problem by introducing a new taxonomy for im-HS detection, defining six encoding strategies named codetypes. We present two methods for integrating codetypes into im-HS detection: 1) prompting large language models (LLMs) directly to classify sentences based on generated responses, and 2) using LLMs as encoders with codetypes embedded during the encoding process. Experiments show that the use of codetypes improves im-HS detection in both Chinese and English datasets, validating the effectiveness of our approach across different languages.
Accelerated Test-Time Scaling with Model-Free Speculative Sampling
Authors: Woomin Song, Saket Dingliwal, Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Bhavana Ganesh, Jinwoo Shin, Aram Galstyan, Sravan Babu Bodapati
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning tasks through test-time scaling techniques like best-of-N sampling and tree search. However, these approaches often demand substantial computational resources, creating a critical trade-off between performance and efficiency. We introduce STAND (STochastic Adaptive N-gram Drafting), a novel model-free speculative decoding approach that leverages the inherent redundancy in reasoning trajectories to achieve significant acceleration without compromising accuracy. Our analysis reveals that reasoning paths frequently reuse similar reasoning patterns, enabling efficient model-free token prediction without requiring separate draft models. By introducing stochastic drafting and preserving probabilistic information through a memory-efficient logit-based N-gram module, combined with optimized Gumbel-Top-K sampling and data-driven tree construction, STAND significantly improves token acceptance rates. Extensive evaluations across multiple models and reasoning tasks (AIME-2024, GPQA-Diamond, and LiveCodeBench) demonstrate that STAND reduces inference latency by 60-65% compared to standard autoregressive decoding while maintaining accuracy. Furthermore, STAND outperforms state-of-the-art speculative decoding methods by 14-28% in throughput and shows strong performance even in single-trajectory scenarios, reducing inference latency by 48-58%. As a model-free approach, STAND can be applied to any existing language model without additional training, being a powerful plug-and-play solution for accelerating language model reasoning.
IIITH-BUT system for IWSLT 2025 low-resource Bhojpuri to Hindi speech translation
Authors: Bhavana Akkiraju, Aishwarya Pothula, Santosh Kesiraju, Anil Kumar Vuppala
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Translation

This paper presents the submission of IIITH-BUT to the IWSLT 2025 shared task on speech translation for the low-resource Bhojpuri-Hindi language pair. We explored the impact of hyperparameter optimisation and data augmentation techniques on the performance of the SeamlessM4T model fine-tuned for this specific task. We systematically investigated a range of hyperparameters including learning rate schedules, number of update steps, warm-up steps, label smoothing, and batch sizes; and report their effect on translation quality. To address data scarcity, we applied speed perturbation and SpecAugment and studied their effect on translation quality. We also examined the use of cross-lingual signal through joint training with Marathi and Bhojpuri speech data. Our experiments reveal that careful selection of hyperparameters and the application of simple yet effective augmentation techniques significantly improve performance in low-resource settings. We also analysed the translation hypotheses to understand various kinds of errors that impacted the translation quality in terms of BLEU.
SPARTA ALIGNMENT: Collectively Aligning Multiple Language Models through Combat
Authors: Yuru Jiang, Wenxuan Ding, Shangbin Feng, Greg Durrett, Yulia Tsvetkov
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

We propose SPARTA ALIGNMENT, an algorithm to collectively align multiple LLMs through competition and combat. To complement a single model's lack of diversity in generation and biases in evaluation, multiple LLMs form a "sparta tribe" to compete against each other in fulfilling instructions while serving as judges for the competition of others. For each iteration, one instruction and two models are selected for a duel, the other models evaluate the two responses, and their evaluation scores are aggregated through a adapted elo-ranking based reputation system, where winners/losers of combat gain/lose weight in evaluating others. The peer-evaluated combat results then become preference pairs where the winning response is preferred over the losing one, and all models learn from these preferences at the end of each iteration. SPARTA ALIGNMENT enables the self-evolution of multiple LLMs in an iterative and collective competition process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPARTA ALIGNMENT outperforms initial models and 4 self-alignment baselines across 10 out of 12 tasks and datasets with 7.0% average improvement. Further analysis reveals that SPARTA ALIGNMENT generalizes more effectively to unseen tasks and leverages the expertise diversity of participating models to produce more logical, direct and informative outputs.
Lifelong Evolution: Collaborative Learning between Large and Small Language Models for Continuous Emergent Fake News Detection
Authors: Ziyi Zhou, XiaoMing Zhang, Litian Zhang, Yibo Zhang, Zhenyu Guan, Chaozhuo Li, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, knowledge editing, Mixture-of-Experts

The widespread dissemination of fake news on social media has significantly impacted society, resulting in serious consequences. Conventional deep learning methodologies employing small language models (SLMs) suffer from extensive supervised training requirements and difficulties adapting to evolving news environments due to data scarcity and distribution shifts. Large language models (LLMs), despite robust zero-shot capabilities, fall short in accurately detecting fake news owing to outdated knowledge and the absence of suitable demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel Continuous Collaborative Emergent Fake News Detection (C$^2$EFND) framework to address these challenges. The C$^2$EFND framework strategically leverages both LLMs' generalization power and SLMs' classification expertise via a multi-round collaborative learning framework. We further introduce a lifelong knowledge editing module based on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to incrementally update LLMs and a replay-based continue learning method to ensure SLMs retain prior knowledge without retraining entirely. Extensive experiments on Pheme and Twitter16 datasets demonstrate that C$^2$EFND significantly outperforms existed methods, effectively improving detection accuracy and adaptability in continuous emergent fake news scenarios.
Identifying Reliable Evaluation Metrics for Scientific Text Revision
Authors: Léane Jourdan, Florian Boudin, Richard Dufour, Nicolas Hernandez
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Evaluating text revision in scientific writing remains a challenge, as traditional metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore primarily focus on similarity rather than capturing meaningful improvements. In this work, we analyse and identify the limitations of these metrics and explore alternative evaluation methods that better align with human judgments. We first conduct a manual annotation study to assess the quality of different revisions. Then, we investigate reference-free evaluation metrics from related NLP domains. Additionally, we examine LLM-as-a-judge approaches, analysing their ability to assess revisions with and without a gold reference. Our results show that LLMs effectively assess instruction-following but struggle with correctness, while domain-specific metrics provide complementary insights. We find that a hybrid approach combining LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and task-specific metrics offers the most reliable assessment of revision quality.
Fine-Grained Interpretation of Political Opinions in Large Language Models
Authors: Jingyu Hu, Mengyue Yang, Mengnan Du, Weiru Liu
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Studies of LLMs' political opinions mainly rely on evaluations of their open-ended responses. Recent work indicates that there is a misalignment between LLMs' responses and their internal intentions. This motivates us to probe LLMs' internal mechanisms and help uncover their internal political states. Additionally, we found that the analysis of LLMs' political opinions often relies on single-axis concepts, which can lead to concept confounds. In this work, we extend the single-axis to multi-dimensions and apply interpretable representation engineering techniques for more transparent LLM political concept learning. Specifically, we designed a four-dimensional political learning framework and constructed a corresponding dataset for fine-grained political concept vector learning. These vectors can be used to detect and intervene in LLM internals. Experiments are conducted on eight open-source LLMs with three representation engineering techniques. Results show these vectors can disentangle political concept confounds. Detection tasks validate the semantic meaning of the vectors and show good generalization and robustness in OOD settings. Intervention Experiments show these vectors can intervene in LLMs to generate responses with different political leanings.
Design of intelligent proofreading system for English translation based on CNN and BERT
Authors: Feijun Liu, Huifeng Wang, Kun Wang, Yizhen Wang
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Machine Translation, Translation

Since automatic translations can contain errors that require substantial human post-editing, machine translation proofreading is essential for improving quality. This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach for robust proofreading that combines convolutional neural networks (CNN) with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). In order to extract semantic information from phrases and expressions, CNN uses a variety of convolution kernel filters to capture local n-gram patterns. In the meanwhile, BERT creates context-rich representations of whole sequences by utilizing stacked bidirectional transformer encoders. Using BERT's attention processes, the integrated error detection component relates tokens to spot translation irregularities including word order problems and omissions. The correction module then uses parallel English-German alignment and GRU decoder models in conjunction with translation memory to propose logical modifications that maintain original meaning. A unified end-to-end training process optimized for post-editing performance is applied to the whole pipeline. The multi-domain collection of WMT and the conversational dialogues of Open-Subtitles are two of the English-German parallel corpora used to train the model. Multiple loss functions supervise detection and correction capabilities. Experiments attain a 90% accuracy, 89.37% F1, and 16.24% MSE, exceeding recent proofreading techniques by over 10% overall. Comparative benchmarking demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in identifying and coherently rectifying mistranslations and omissions.
Evaluating Vision-Language and Large Language Models for Automated Student Assessment in Indonesian Classrooms
Authors: Nurul Aisyah, Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Arif Hidayat, Raqib Chowdhury, Fajri Koto
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice

Although vision-language and large language models (VLM and LLM) offer promising opportunities for AI-driven educational assessment, their effectiveness in real-world classroom settings, particularly in underrepresented educational contexts, remains underexplored. In this study, we evaluated the performance of a state-of-the-art VLM and several LLMs on 646 handwritten exam responses from grade 4 students in six Indonesian schools, covering two subjects: Mathematics and English. These sheets contain more than 14K student answers that span multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions. Assessment tasks include grading these responses and generating personalized feedback. Our findings show that the VLM often struggles to accurately recognize student handwriting, leading to error propagation in downstream LLM grading. Nevertheless, LLM-generated feedback retains some utility, even when derived from imperfect input, although limitations in personalization and contextual relevance persist.