pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Whispering in Amharic: Fine-tuning Whisper for Low-resource Language
Authors: Dawit Ketema Gete, Bedru Yimam Ahmed, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Yohannes Ayana Ejigu, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, Alemu Belay Tessema, Mohammed Oumer Adem, Tadesse Amare Belay, Robert Geislinger, Umma Aliyu Musa, Martin Semmann, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Henning Schreiber, Seid Muhie Yimam
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This work explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Amharic, a low-resource language, to improve transcription accuracy. While the foundational Whisper model struggles with Amharic due to limited representation in its training data, we fine-tune it using datasets like Mozilla Common Voice, FLEURS, and the BDU-speech dataset. The best-performing model, Whispersmall-am, significantly improves when finetuned on a mix of existing FLEURS data and new, unseen Amharic datasets. Training solely on new data leads to poor performance, but combining it with FLEURS data reinforces the model, enabling better specialization in Amharic. We also demonstrate that normalizing Amharic homophones significantly enhances Word Error Rate (WER) and Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) scores. This study underscores the importance of fine-tuning strategies and dataset composition for improving ASR in low-resource languages, providing insights for future Amharic speech recognition research.
xKV: Cross-Layer SVD for KV-Cache Compression
Authors: Chi-Chih Chang, Chien-Yu Lin, Yash Akhauri, Wei-Cheng Lin, Kai-Chiang Wu, Luis Ceze, Mohamed S. Abdelfattah
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) with long context windows enable powerful applications but come at the cost of high memory consumption to store the Key and Value states (KV-Cache). Recent studies attempted to merge KV-cache from multiple layers into shared representations, yet these approaches either require expensive pretraining or rely on assumptions of high per-token cosine similarity across layers which generally does not hold in practice. We find that the dominant singular vectors are remarkably well-aligned across multiple layers of the KV-Cache. Exploiting this insight, we propose xKV, a simple post-training method that applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the KV-Cache of grouped layers. xKV consolidates the KV-Cache of multiple layers into a shared low-rank subspace, significantly reducing KV-Cache sizes. Through extensive evaluations on the RULER long-context benchmark with widely-used LLMs (e.g., Llama-3.1 and Qwen2.5), xKV achieves up to 6.8x higher compression rates than state-of-the-art inter-layer technique while improving accuracy by 2.7%. Moreover, xKV is compatible with the emerging Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) (e.g., DeepSeek-Coder-V2), yielding a notable 3x compression rates on coding tasks without performance degradation. These results highlight xKV's strong capability and versatility in addressing memory bottlenecks for long-context LLM inference. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/xKV.
On Zero-Initialized Attention: Optimal Prompt and Gating Factor Estimation
Authors: Nghiem T. Diep, Huy Nguyen, Chau Nguyen, Minh Le, Duy M. H. Nguyen, Daniel Sonntag, Mathias Niepert, Nhat Ho
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00

The LLaMA-Adapter has recently emerged as an efficient fine-tuning technique for LLaMA models, leveraging zero-initialized attention to stabilize training and enhance performance. However, despite its empirical success, the theoretical foundations of zero-initialized attention remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis, establishing a connection between zero-initialized attention and mixture-of-expert models. We prove that both linear and non-linear prompts, along with gating functions, can be optimally estimated, with non-linear prompts offering greater flexibility for future applications. Empirically, we validate our findings on the open LLM benchmarks, demonstrating that non-linear prompts outperform linear ones. Notably, even with limited training data, both prompt types consistently surpass vanilla attention, highlighting the robustness and adaptability of zero-initialized attention.
Enhancing Job Salary Prediction with Disentangled Composition Effect Modeling: A Neural Prototyping Approach
Authors: Yang Ji, Ying Sun, HengShu Zhu
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00

In the era of the knowledge economy, understanding how job skills influence salary is crucial for promoting recruitment with competitive salary systems and aligned salary expectations. Despite efforts on salary prediction based on job positions and talent demographics, there still lacks methods to effectively discern the set-structured skills' intricate composition effect on job salary. While recent advances in neural networks have significantly improved accurate set-based quantitative modeling, their lack of explainability hinders obtaining insights into the skills' composition effects. Indeed, model explanation for set data is challenging due to the combinatorial nature, rich semantics, and unique format. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel intrinsically explainable set-based neural prototyping approach, namely \textbf{LGDESetNet}, for explainable salary prediction that can reveal disentangled skill sets that impact salary from both local and global perspectives. Specifically, we propose a skill graph-enhanced disentangled discrete subset selection layer to identify multi-faceted influential input subsets with varied semantics. Furthermore, we propose a set-oriented prototype learning method to extract globally influential prototypical sets. The resulting output is transparently derived from the semantic interplay between these input subsets and global prototypes. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art baselines in salary prediction while providing explainable insights into salary-influencing patterns.
ConvoGen: Enhancing Conversational AI with Synthetic Data: A Multi-Agent Approach
Authors: Reem Gody, Mahmoud Goudy, Ahmed Y. Tawfik
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversation Summarization, Few-Shot Learning, intent-classification, Intent Classification

In this paper, we present ConvoGen: an innovative framework for generating synthetic conversational data using multi-agent systems. Our method leverages few-shot learning and introduces iterative sampling from a dynamically updated few-shot hub to create diverse and realistic conversational scenarios. The generated data has numerous applications, including training and evaluating conversational AI models, and augmenting existing datasets for tasks like conversational intent classification or conversation summarization. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in producing high-quality diverse synthetic conversational data, highlighting its potential to enhance the development and evaluation of conversational AI systems.
Leveraging Human Production-Interpretation Asymmetries to Test LLM Cognitive Plausibility
Authors: Suet-Ying Lam, Qingcheng Zeng, Jingyi Wu, Rob Voigt
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Whether large language models (LLMs) process language similarly to humans has been the subject of much theoretical and practical debate. We examine this question through the lens of the production-interpretation distinction found in human sentence processing and evaluate the extent to which instruction-tuned LLMs replicate this distinction. Using an empirically documented asymmetry between production and interpretation in humans for implicit causality verbs as a testbed, we find that some LLMs do quantitatively and qualitatively reflect human-like asymmetries between production and interpretation. We demonstrate that whether this behavior holds depends upon both model size - with larger models more likely to reflect human-like patterns and the choice of meta-linguistic prompts used to elicit the behavior.
Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs' Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning
Authors: Ke Ji, Yixin Lian, Linxu Li, Jingsheng Gao, Weiyuan Li, Bin Dai
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Dialogue Generation

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved breakthrough progress in many dialogue generation tasks. However, their lack of emotion and fine-grained role awareness limits the model's ability to provide personalized and diverse interactions further. Current methods face high costs in collecting high-quality annotated data for scenarios such as role-playing, and traditional human alignment methods are difficult to deploy due to the inherent diversity of model behavior in role-playing scenarios. Inspired by the alignment of models for safety behaviors through RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), in this paper, we revisit model role-playing behavior from the perspective of persona alignment and propose a novel annotation-free framework named \textbf{\underline{P}}ersona-Aware \textbf{\underline{C}}ontrastive \textbf{\underline{L}}earning (PCL) to align LLMs' behavior during role-playing, enhancing the model's role consistency. Specifically, we first design a role chain method to encourage the model to self-question based on the role characteristics and dialogue context to adjust personality consistency. Then, we further enhance the model's role-playing strategy through iterative contrastive learning between the use of role characteristics and not. Experiments on both black-box and white-box LLMs show that LLMs equipped with PCL significantly outperform vanilla LLMs under automatic evaluation methods (CharEval \& GPT-4) and human expert evaluation.
Enhancing Arabic Automated Essay Scoring with Synthetic Data and Error Injection
Authors: Chatrine Qwaider, Bashar Alhafni, Kirill Chirkunov, Nizar Habash, Ted Briscoe
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Essay Scoring, Type prediction

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) plays a crucial role in assessing language learners' writing quality, reducing grading workload, and providing real-time feedback. Arabic AES systems are particularly challenged by the lack of annotated essay datasets. This paper presents a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Transformers to generate synthetic Arabic essay datasets for AES. We prompt an LLM to generate essays across CEFR proficiency levels and introduce controlled error injection using a fine-tuned Standard Arabic BERT model for error type prediction. Our approach produces realistic human-like essays, contributing a dataset of 3,040 annotated essays. Additionally, we develop a BERT-based auto-marking system for accurate and scalable Arabic essay evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in improving Arabic AES performance.
Relation Extraction with Instance-Adapted Predicate Descriptions
Authors: Yuhang Jiang, Ramakanth Kavuluru
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Question Answering, Relation, Relation Extraction

Relation extraction (RE) is a standard information extraction task playing a major role in downstream applications such as knowledge discovery and question answering. Although decoder-only large language models are excelling in generative tasks, smaller encoder models are still the go to architecture for RE. In this paper, we revisit fine-tuning such smaller models using a novel dual-encoder architecture with a joint contrastive and cross-entropy loss. Unlike previous methods that employ a fixed linear layer for predicate representations, our approach uses a second encoder to compute instance-specific predicate representations by infusing them with real entity spans from corresponding input instances. We conducted experiments on two biomedical RE datasets and two general domain datasets. Our approach achieved F1 score improvements ranging from 1% to 2% over state-of-the-art methods with a simple but elegant formulation. Ablation studies justify the importance of various components built into the proposed architecture.
ParsiPy: NLP Toolkit for Historical Persian Texts in Python
Authors: Farhan Farsi, Parnian Fazel, Sepand Haghighi, Sadra Sabouri, Farzaneh Goshtasb, Nadia Hajipour, Ehsaneddin Asgari, Hossein Sameti
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Lemmatization, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Transliteration

The study of historical languages presents unique challenges due to their complex orthographic systems, fragmentary textual evidence, and the absence of standardized digital representations of text in those languages. Tackling these challenges needs special NLP digital tools to handle phonetic transcriptions and analyze ancient texts. This work introduces ParsiPy, an NLP toolkit designed to facilitate the analysis of historical Persian languages by offering modules for tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, phoneme-to-transliteration conversion, and word embedding. We demonstrate the utility of our toolkit through the processing of Parsig (Middle Persian) texts, highlighting its potential for expanding computational methods in the study of historical languages. Through this work, we contribute to computational philology, offering tools that can be adapted for the broader study of ancient texts and their digital preservation.
Enhancing Retrieval Systems with Inference-Time Logical Reasoning
Authors: Felix Faltings, Wei Wei, Yujia Bao
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Logical Reasoning, Natural Language Queries, Retrieval

Traditional retrieval methods rely on transforming user queries into vector representations and retrieving documents based on cosine similarity within an embedding space. While efficient and scalable, this approach often fails to handle complex queries involving logical constructs such as negations, conjunctions, and disjunctions. In this paper, we propose a novel inference-time logical reasoning framework that explicitly incorporates logical reasoning into the retrieval process. Our method extracts logical reasoning structures from natural language queries and then composes the individual cosine similarity scores to formulate the final document scores. This approach enables the retrieval process to handle complex logical reasoning without compromising computational efficiency. Our results on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms traditional retrieval methods across different models and datasets, significantly improving retrieval performance for complex queries.
MedPlan:A Two-Stage RAG-Based System for Personalized Medical Plan Generation
Authors: Hsin-Ling Hsu, Cong-Tinh Dao, Luning Wang, Zitao Shuai, Thao Nguyen Minh Phan, Jun-En Ding, Chun-Chieh Liao, Pengfei Hu, Xiaoxue Han, Chih-Ho Hsu, Dongsheng Luo, Wen-Chih Peng, Feng Liu, Fang-Ming Hung, Chenwei Wu
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Despite recent success in applying large language models (LLMs) to electronic health records (EHR), most systems focus primarily on assessment rather than treatment planning. We identify three critical limitations in current approaches: they generate treatment plans in a single pass rather than following the sequential reasoning process used by clinicians; they rarely incorporate patient-specific historical context; and they fail to effectively distinguish between subjective and objective clinical information. Motivated by the SOAP methodology (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan), we introduce MedPlan, a novel framework that structures LLM reasoning to align with real-life clinician workflows. Our approach employs a two-stage architecture that first generates a clinical assessment based on patient symptoms and objective data, then formulates a structured treatment plan informed by this assessment and enriched with patient-specific information through retrieval-augmented generation. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches in both assessment accuracy and treatment plan quality.
WindowKV: Task-Adaptive Group-Wise KV Cache Window Selection for Efficient LLM Inference
Authors: Youhui Zuo, Sibo Wei, Chen Zhang, Zhuorui Liu, Wenpeng Lu, Dawei Song
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

With the advancements in long-context inference capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the KV cache has become one of the foundational components. However, its substantial GPU memory consumption makes KV cache compression a key technique for enabling efficient LLM inference in industrial scenarios. While recent studies have focused on optimizing the memory occupied by the KV cache, they overlook two critical factors: preserving semantic coherence and considering task-specific characteristic during compression. To address these limitations, we propose a novel task-adaptive KV cache window selection method, WindowKV. WindowKV dynamically selects local semantic windows consisting of consecutive tokens, according to task-specific characteristics, ensuring the retained KV cache captures continuous, essential context. Additionally, we introduce an intra-group layer KV cache indices sharing strategy to reduce computational overhead, achieving a balance between performance and efficiency. We rigorously evaluate WindowKV on the LongBench benchmark, and the results demonstrate that it maintains a performance comparable to full KV cache retention while using only 12% of the original KV cache, significantly reducing memory requirements. Furthermore, our method also achieves state-of-the-art results in the Needle-in-a-Haystack evaluation, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness.
SLIDE: Sliding Localized Information for Document Extraction
Authors: Divyansh Singh, Manuel Nunez Martinez, Bonnie J. Dorr, Sonja Schmer Galunder
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, graph construction, Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering, Retrieval

Constructing accurate knowledge graphs from long texts and low-resource languages is challenging, as large language models (LLMs) experience degraded performance with longer input chunks. This problem is amplified in low-resource settings where data scarcity hinders accurate entity and relationship extraction. Contextual retrieval methods, while improving retrieval accuracy, struggle with long documents. They truncate critical information in texts exceeding maximum context lengths of LLMs, significantly limiting knowledge graph construction. We introduce SLIDE (Sliding Localized Information for Document Extraction), a chunking method that processes long documents by generating local context through overlapping windows. SLIDE ensures that essential contextual information is retained, enhancing knowledge graph extraction from documents exceeding LLM context limits. It significantly improves GraphRAG performance, achieving a 24% increase in entity extraction and a 39% improvement in relationship extraction for English. For Afrikaans, a low-resource language, SLIDE achieves a 49% increase in entity extraction and an 82% improvement in relationship extraction. Furthermore, it improves upon state-of-the-art in question-answering metrics such as comprehensiveness, diversity and empowerment, demonstrating its effectiveness in multilingual and resource-constrained settings.
Won: Establishing Best Practices for Korean Financial NLP
Authors: Guijin Son, Hyunwoo Ko, Haneral Jung, Chami Hwang
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Stock Price Prediction

In this work, we present the first open leaderboard for evaluating Korean large language models focused on finance. Operated for about eight weeks, the leaderboard evaluated 1,119 submissions on a closed benchmark covering five MCQA categories: finance and accounting, stock price prediction, domestic company analysis, financial markets, and financial agent tasks and one open-ended qa task. Building on insights from these evaluations, we release an open instruction dataset of 80k instances and summarize widely used training strategies observed among top-performing models. Finally, we introduce Won, a fully open and transparent LLM built using these best practices. We hope our contributions help advance the development of better and safer financial LLMs for Korean and other languages.
Investigating Recent Large Language Models for Vietnamese Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Anh Duc Nguyen, Hieu Minh Phi, Anh Viet Ngo, Long Hai Trieu, Thai Phuong Nguyen
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, Vietnamese Machine Reading Comprehension

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks; however, their effectiveness for low-resource languages like Vietnamese remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we fine-tune and evaluate two state-of-the-art LLMs: Llama 3 (8B parameters) and Gemma (7B parameters), on ViMMRC, a Vietnamese MRC dataset. By utilizing Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA), we efficiently fine-tune these models and compare their performance against powerful LLM-based baselines. Although our fine-tuned models are smaller than GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, they outperform both traditional BERT-based approaches and these larger models. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our fine-tuning process, showcasing how modern LLMs can surpass the capabilities of older models like BERT while still being suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Through intensive analyses, we explore various aspects of model performance, providing valuable insights into adapting LLMs for low-resource languages like Vietnamese. Our study contributes to the advancement of natural language processing in low-resource languages, and we make our fine-tuned models publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/iaiuet.
Long Is More Important Than Difficult for Training Reasoning Models
Authors: Si Shen, Fei Huang, Zhixiao Zhao, Chang Liu, Tiansheng Zheng, Danhao Zhu
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Difficult problems, which often result in long reasoning traces, are widely recognized as key factors for enhancing the performance of reasoning models. However, such high-challenge problems are scarce, limiting the size of available datasets. In this paper, we propose a simple method to decouple the reliance on problem difficulty. First, we empirically demonstrate that reasoning length, rather than problem difficulty, primarily influences the performance of trained models. Second, we identify a scaling law on reasoning length, showing that model performance increases in a log-linear fashion as the reasoning data length grows. Finally, we introduce a straightforward technique to generate reasoning data of arbitrary length, and show that synthesized data is effective for training reasoning models. After fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct language model on our Long1K dataset, we present our model, Long1K-32B, which achieves remarkable performance with only 1,000 training samples, achieving 95.6\% accuracy on MATH, and 71.1\% on GPQA outperforming DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B. The model, code, and dataset are all open-sourced, available at https://huggingface.co/ZTss/LONG1.