pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Just a Scratch: Enhancing LLM Capabilities for Self-harm Detection through Intent Differentiation and Emoji Interpretation
Authors: Soumitra Ghosh, Gopendra Vikram Singh, Shambhavi, Sabarna Choudhury, Asif Ekbal
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Sensitivity

Self-harm detection on social media is critical for early intervention and mental health support, yet remains challenging due to the subtle, context-dependent nature of such expressions. Identifying self-harm intent aids suicide prevention by enabling timely responses, but current large language models (LLMs) struggle to interpret implicit cues in casual language and emojis. This work enhances LLMs' comprehension of self-harm by distinguishing intent through nuanced language-emoji interplay. We present the Centennial Emoji Sensitivity Matrix (CESM-100), a curated set of 100 emojis with contextual self-harm interpretations and the Self-Harm Identification aNd intent Extraction with Supportive emoji sensitivity (SHINES) dataset, offering detailed annotations for self-harm labels, casual mentions (CMs), and serious intents (SIs). Our unified framework: a) enriches inputs using CESM-100; b) fine-tunes LLMs for multi-task learning: self-harm detection (primary) and CM/SI span detection (auxiliary); c) generates explainable rationales for self-harm predictions. We evaluate the framework on three state-of-the-art LLMs-Llama 3, Mental-Alpaca, and MentalLlama, across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned scenarios. By coupling intent differentiation with contextual cues, our approach commendably enhances LLM performance in both detection and explanation tasks, effectively addressing the inherent ambiguity in self-harm signals. The SHINES dataset, CESM-100 and codebase are publicly available at: https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/resources.html#SHINES .
CL-ISR: A Contrastive Learning and Implicit Stance Reasoning Framework for Misleading Text Detection on Social Media
Authors: Tianyi Huang, Zikun Cui, Cuiqianhe Du, Chia-En Chiang
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Text Detection

Misleading text detection on social media platforms is a critical research area, as these texts can lead to public misunderstanding, social panic and even economic losses. This paper proposes a novel framework - CL-ISR (Contrastive Learning and Implicit Stance Reasoning), which combines contrastive learning and implicit stance reasoning, to improve the detection accuracy of misleading texts on social media. First, we use the contrastive learning algorithm to improve the model's learning ability of semantic differences between truthful and misleading texts. Contrastive learning could help the model to better capture the distinguishing features between different categories by constructing positive and negative sample pairs. This approach enables the model to capture distinguishing features more effectively, particularly in linguistically complicated situations. Second, we introduce the implicit stance reasoning module, to explore the potential stance tendencies in the text and their relationships with related topics. This method is effective for identifying content that misleads through stance shifting or emotional manipulation, because it can capture the implicit information behind the text. Finally, we integrate these two algorithms together to form a new framework, CL-ISR, which leverages the discriminative power of contrastive learning and the interpretive depth of stance reasoning to significantly improve detection effect.
DiCoRe: Enhancing Zero-shot Event Detection via Divergent-Convergent LLM Reasoning
Authors: Tanmay Parekh, Kartik Mehta, Ninareh Mehrabi, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, Event Detection, Transfer Learning

Zero-shot Event Detection (ED), the task of identifying event mentions in natural language text without any training data, is critical for document understanding in specialized domains. Understanding the complex event ontology, extracting domain-specific triggers from the passage, and structuring them appropriately overloads and limits the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot ED. To this end, we propose DiCoRe, a divergent-convergent reasoning framework that decouples the task of ED using Dreamer and Grounder. Dreamer encourages divergent reasoning through open-ended event discovery, which helps to boost event coverage. Conversely, Grounder introduces convergent reasoning to align the free-form predictions with the task-specific instructions using finite-state machine guided constrained decoding. Additionally, an LLM-Judge verifies the final outputs to ensure high precision. Through extensive experiments on six datasets across five domains and nine LLMs, we demonstrate how DiCoRe consistently outperforms prior zero-shot, transfer-learning, and reasoning baselines, achieving 4-7% average F1 gains over the best baseline -- establishing DiCoRe as a strong zero-shot ED framework.
Information Locality as an Inductive Bias for Neural Language Models
Authors: Taiga Someya, Anej Svete, Brian DuSell, Timothy J. O'Donnell, Mario Giulianelli, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Inductive biases are inherent in every machine learning system, shaping how models generalize from finite data. In the case of neural language models (LMs), debates persist as to whether these biases align with or diverge from human processing constraints. To address this issue, we propose a quantitative framework that allows for controlled investigations into the nature of these biases. Within our framework, we introduce $m$-local entropy$\unicode{x2013}$an information-theoretic measure derived from average lossy-context surprisal$\unicode{x2013}$that captures the local uncertainty of a language by quantifying how effectively the $m-1$ preceding symbols disambiguate the next symbol. In experiments on both perturbed natural language corpora and languages defined by probabilistic finite-state automata (PFSAs), we show that languages with higher $m$-local entropy are more difficult for Transformer and LSTM LMs to learn. These results suggest that neural LMs, much like humans, are highly sensitive to the local statistical structure of a language.
Do Large Language Models Judge Error Severity Like Humans?
Authors: Diege Sun, Guanyi Chen, Zhao Fan, Xiaorong Cheng, Tingting He
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators in natural language generation, yet it remains unclear whether they can accurately replicate human judgments of error severity. In this study, we systematically compare human and LLM assessments of image descriptions containing controlled semantic errors. We extend the experimental framework of van Miltenburg et al. (2020) to both unimodal (text-only) and multimodal (text + image) settings, evaluating four error types: age, gender, clothing type, and clothing colour. Our findings reveal that humans assign varying levels of severity to different error types, with visual context significantly amplifying perceived severity for colour and type errors. Notably, most LLMs assign low scores to gender errors but disproportionately high scores to colour errors, unlike humans, who judge both as highly severe but for different reasons. This suggests that these models may have internalised social norms influencing gender judgments but lack the perceptual grounding to emulate human sensitivity to colour, which is shaped by distinct neural mechanisms. Only one of the evaluated LLMs, Doubao, replicates the human-like ranking of error severity, but it fails to distinguish between error types as clearly as humans. Surprisingly, DeepSeek-V3, a unimodal LLM, achieves the highest alignment with human judgments across both unimodal and multimodal conditions, outperforming even state-of-the-art multimodal models.
Dissecting Bias in LLMs: A Mechanistic Interpretability Perspective
Authors: Bhavik Chandna, Zubair Bashir, Procheta Sen
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Linguistic Acceptability, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to exhibit social, demographic, and gender biases, often as a consequence of the data on which they are trained. In this work, we adopt a mechanistic interpretability approach to analyze how such biases are structurally represented within models such as GPT-2 and Llama2. Focusing on demographic and gender biases, we explore different metrics to identify the internal edges responsible for biased behavior. We then assess the stability, localization, and generalizability of these components across dataset and linguistic variations. Through systematic ablations, we demonstrate that bias-related computations are highly localized, often concentrated in a small subset of layers. Moreover, the identified components change across fine-tuning settings, including those unrelated to bias. Finally, we show that removing these components not only reduces biased outputs but also affects other NLP tasks, such as named entity recognition and linguistic acceptability judgment because of the sharing of important components with these tasks.
Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models
Authors: Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Xin Zhang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, An Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Reranking, Retrieval, Unsupervised Pre-training

In this work, we introduce the Qwen3 Embedding series, a significant advancement over its predecessor, the GTE-Qwen series, in text embedding and reranking capabilities, built upon the Qwen3 foundation models. Leveraging the Qwen3 LLMs' robust capabilities in multilingual text understanding and generation, our innovative multi-stage training pipeline combines large-scale unsupervised pre-training with supervised fine-tuning on high-quality datasets. Effective model merging strategies further ensure the robustness and adaptability of the Qwen3 Embedding series. During the training process, the Qwen3 LLMs serve not only as backbone models but also play a crucial role in synthesizing high-quality, rich, and diverse training data across multiple domains and languages, thus enhancing the training pipeline. The Qwen3 Embedding series offers a spectrum of model sizes (0.6B, 4B, 8B) for both embedding and reranking tasks, addressing diverse deployment scenarios where users can optimize for either efficiency or effectiveness. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the Qwen3 Embedding series achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse benchmarks. Notably, it excels on the multilingual evaluation benchmark MTEB for text embedding, as well as in various retrieval tasks, including code retrieval, cross-lingual retrieval and multilingual retrieval. To facilitate reproducibility and promote community-driven research and development, the Qwen3 Embedding models are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license.
Counterfactual reasoning: an analysis of in-context emergence
Authors: Moritz Miller, Bernhard Schölkopf, Siyuan Guo
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning, Diversity, In-Context Learning, regression, Story Generation

Large-scale neural language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable performance in in-context learning: the ability to learn and reason the input context on the fly without parameter update. This work studies in-context counterfactual reasoning in language models, that is, to predict the consequences of changes under hypothetical scenarios. We focus on studying a well-defined synthetic setup: a linear regression task that requires noise abduction, where accurate prediction is based on inferring and copying the contextual noise from factual observations. We show that language models are capable of counterfactual reasoning in this controlled setup and provide insights that counterfactual reasoning for a broad class of functions can be reduced to a transformation on in-context observations; we find self-attention, model depth, and data diversity in pre-training drive performance in Transformers. More interestingly, our findings extend beyond regression tasks and show that Transformers can perform noise abduction on sequential data, providing preliminary evidence on the potential for counterfactual story generation. Our code is available under https://github.com/moXmiller/counterfactual-reasoning.git .
RELIC: Evaluating Compositional Instruction Following via Language Recognition
Authors: Jackson Petty, Michael Y. Hu, Wentao Wang, Shauli Ravfogel, William Merrill, Tal Linzen
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to perform tasks based only on a specification of the task provided in context, without examples of inputs and outputs; this ability is referred to as instruction following. We introduce the Recognition of Languages In-Context (RELIC) framework to evaluate instruction following using language recognition: the task of determining if a string is generated by formal grammar. Unlike many standard evaluations of LLMs' ability to use their context, this task requires composing together a large number of instructions (grammar productions) retrieved from the context. Because the languages are synthetic, the task can be increased in complexity as LLMs' skills improve, and new instances can be automatically generated, mitigating data contamination. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on RELIC and find that their accuracy can be reliably predicted from the complexity of the grammar and the individual example strings, and that even the most advanced LLMs currently available show near-chance performance on more complex grammars and samples, in line with theoretical expectations. We also use RELIC to diagnose how LLMs attempt to solve increasingly difficult reasoning tasks, finding that as the complexity of the language recognition task increases, models switch to relying on shallow heuristics instead of following complex instructions.
The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text
Authors: Nikhil Kandpal, Brian Lester, Colin Raffel, Sebastian Majstorovic, Stella Biderman, Baber Abbasi, Luca Soldaini, Enrico Shippole, A. Feder Cooper, Aviya Skowron, John Kirchenbauer, Shayne Longpre, Lintang Sutawika, Alon Albalak, Zhenlin Xu, Guilherme Penedo, Loubna Ben allal, Elie Bakouch, John David Pressman, Honglu Fan, Dashiell Stander, Guangyu Song, Aaron Gokaslan, Tom Goldstein, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Tyler Murray
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on enormous quantities of unlicensed text, a practice that has led to scrutiny due to possible intellectual property infringement and ethical concerns. Training LLMs on openly licensed text presents a first step towards addressing these issues, but prior data collection efforts have yielded datasets too small or low-quality to produce performant LLMs. To address this gap, we collect, curate, and release the Common Pile v0.1, an eight terabyte collection of openly licensed text designed for LLM pretraining. The Common Pile comprises content from 30 sources that span diverse domains including research papers, code, books, encyclopedias, educational materials, audio transcripts, and more. Crucially, we validate our efforts by training two 7 billion parameter LLMs on text from the Common Pile: Comma v0.1-1T and Comma v0.1-2T, trained on 1 and 2 trillion tokens respectively. Both models attain competitive performance to LLMs trained on unlicensed text with similar computational budgets, such as Llama 1 and 2 7B. In addition to releasing the Common Pile v0.1 itself, we also release the code used in its creation as well as the training mixture and checkpoints for the Comma v0.1 models.
Improving Low-Resource Morphological Inflection via Self-Supervised Objectives
Authors: Adam Wiemerslage, Katharina von der Wense
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Morphological Inflection

Self-supervised objectives have driven major advances in NLP by leveraging large-scale unlabeled data, but such resources are scarce for many of the world's languages. Surprisingly, they have not been explored much for character-level tasks, where smaller amounts of data have the potential to be beneficial. We investigate the effectiveness of self-supervised auxiliary tasks for morphological inflection -- a character-level task highly relevant for language documentation -- in extremely low-resource settings, training encoder-decoder transformers for 19 languages and 13 auxiliary objectives. Autoencoding yields the best performance when unlabeled data is very limited, while character masked language modeling (CMLM) becomes more effective as data availability increases. Though objectives with stronger inductive biases influence model predictions intuitively, they rarely outperform standard CMLM. However, sampling masks based on known morpheme boundaries consistently improves performance, highlighting a promising direction for low-resource morphological modeling.
Towards a Unified System of Representation for Continuity and Discontinuity in Natural Language
Authors: Ratna Kandala, Prakash Mondal
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00

Syntactic discontinuity is a grammatical phenomenon in which a constituent is split into more than one part because of the insertion of an element which is not part of the constituent. This is observed in many languages across the world such as Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Warlpiri, Navajo, Hopi, Dyirbal, Yidiny etc. Different formalisms/frameworks in current linguistic theory approach the problem of discontinuous structures in different ways. Each framework/formalism has widely been viewed as an independent and non-converging system of analysis. In this paper, we propose a unified system of representation for both continuity and discontinuity in structures of natural languages by taking into account three formalisms, in particular, Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) for its widely used notion of constituency, Dependency Grammar (DG) for its head-dependent relations, and Categorial Grammar (CG) for its focus on functor-argument relations. We attempt to show that discontinuous expressions as well as continuous structures can be analysed through a unified mathematical derivation incorporating the representations of linguistic structure in these three grammar formalisms.
CLATTER: Comprehensive Entailment Reasoning for Hallucination Detection
Authors: Ron Eliav, Arie Cattan, Eran Hirsch, Shahaf Bassan, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal, Ido Dagan
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Natural Language Inference

A common approach to hallucination detection casts it as a natural language inference (NLI) task, often using LLMs to classify whether the generated text is entailed by corresponding reference texts. Since entailment classification is a complex reasoning task, one would expect that LLMs could benefit from generating an explicit reasoning process, as in CoT reasoning or the explicit ``thinking'' of recent reasoning models. In this work, we propose that guiding such models to perform a systematic and comprehensive reasoning process -- one that both decomposes the text into smaller facts and also finds evidence in the source for each fact -- allows models to execute much finer-grained and accurate entailment decisions, leading to increased performance. To that end, we define a 3-step reasoning process, consisting of (i) claim decomposition, (ii) sub-claim attribution and entailment classification, and (iii) aggregated classification, showing that such guided reasoning indeed yields improved hallucination detection. Following this reasoning framework, we introduce an analysis scheme, consisting of several metrics that measure the quality of the intermediate reasoning steps, which provided additional empirical evidence for the improved quality of our guided reasoning scheme.
Micro-Act: Mitigate Knowledge Conflict in Question Answering via Actionable Self-Reasoning
Authors: Nan Huo, Jinyang Li, Bowen Qin, Ge Qu, Xiaolong Li, XiaoDong Li, Chenhao Ma, Reynold Cheng
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems commonly suffer from Knowledge Conflicts, where retrieved external knowledge contradicts the inherent, parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). It adversely affects performance on downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). Existing approaches often attempt to mitigate conflicts by directly comparing two knowledge sources in a side-by-side manner, but this can overwhelm LLMs with extraneous or lengthy contexts, ultimately hindering their ability to identify and mitigate inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose Micro-Act a framework with a hierarchical action space that automatically perceives context complexity and adaptively decomposes each knowledge source into a sequence of fine-grained comparisons. These comparisons are represented as actionable steps, enabling reasoning beyond the superficial context. Through extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, Micro-Act consistently achieves significant increase in QA accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines across all 5 datasets and 3 conflict types, especially in temporal and semantic types where all baselines fail significantly. More importantly, Micro-Act exhibits robust performance on non-conflict questions simultaneously, highlighting its practical value in real-world RAG applications.
ProRefine: Inference-time Prompt Refinement with Textual Feedback
Authors: Deepak Pandita, Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Ankit Parag Shah, Christopher M. Homan, Wei Wei
Date: 2025-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

Agentic workflows, where multiple AI agents collaborate to accomplish complex tasks like reasoning or planning, are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, these workflows often suffer from error propagation and sub-optimal performance, largely due to poorly designed prompts that fail to effectively guide individual agents. This is a critical problem because it limits the reliability and scalability of these powerful systems. We introduce ProRefine, an innovative inference-time prompt optimization method that leverages textual feedback from large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge. ProRefine dynamically refines prompts for multi-step reasoning tasks without additional training or ground truth labels. Evaluated on five benchmark mathematical reasoning datasets, ProRefine significantly surpasses zero-shot Chain-of-Thought baselines by 3 to 37 percentage points. This approach not only boosts accuracy but also allows smaller models to match the performance of larger ones, highlighting its potential for efficient and scalable AI deployment, and democratizing access to high-performing AI.