pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pragmatics in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey on Datasets, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challenges
Authors: Bolei Ma, Yuting Li, Wei Zhou, Ziwei Gong, Yang Janet Liu, Katja Jasinskaja, Annemarie Friedrich, Julia Hirschberg, Frauke Kreuter, Barbara Plank
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Implicatures, Survey

Understanding pragmatics-the use of language in context-is crucial for developing NLP systems capable of interpreting nuanced language use. Despite recent advances in language technologies, including large language models, evaluating their ability to handle pragmatic phenomena such as implicatures and references remains challenging. To advance pragmatic abilities in models, it is essential to understand current evaluation trends and identify existing limitations. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of resources designed for evaluating pragmatic capabilities in NLP, categorizing datasets by the pragmatic phenomena they address. We analyze task designs, data collection methods, evaluation approaches, and their relevance to real-world applications. By examining these resources in the context of modern language models, we highlight emerging trends, challenges, and gaps in existing benchmarks. Our survey aims to clarify the landscape of pragmatic evaluation and guide the development of more comprehensive and targeted benchmarks, ultimately contributing to more nuanced and context-aware NLP models.
Computation Mechanism Behind LLM Position Generalization
Authors: Chi Han, Heng Ji
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Position

Most written natural languages are composed of sequences of words and sentences. Similar to humans, large language models (LLMs) exhibit flexibility in handling textual positions - a phenomenon we term position generalization. They can understand texts with position perturbations and generalize to longer texts than those encountered during training with the latest techniques. These phenomena suggest that LLMs handle positions tolerantly, but how LLMs computationally process positional relevance remains largely unexplored. This work connects the linguistic phenomenon with LLMs' computational mechanisms. We show how LLMs enforce certain computational mechanisms for the aforementioned tolerance in position perturbations. Despite the complex design of the self-attention mechanism, this work reveals that LLMs learn a counterintuitive disentanglement of attention logits. Their values show a 0.959 linear correlation with an approximation of the arithmetic sum of positional relevance and semantic importance. Furthermore, we identify a prevalent pattern in intermediate features, which we prove theoretically enables this effect. The pattern, which is different from how randomly initialized parameters would behave, suggests that it is a learned behavior rather than a natural result of the model architecture. Based on these findings, we provide computational explanations and criteria for LLMs' position flexibilities. This work takes a pioneering step in linking position generalization with modern LLMs' internal mechanisms.
Building UD Cairo for Old English in the Classroom
Authors: Lauren Levine, Junghyun Min, Amir Zeldes
Date: 2025-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

In this paper we present a sample treebank for Old English based on the UD Cairo sentences, collected and annotated as part of a classroom curriculum in Historical Linguistics. To collect the data, a sample of 20 sentences illustrating a range of syntactic constructions in the world's languages, we employ a combination of LLM prompting and searches in authentic Old English data. For annotation we assigned sentences to multiple students with limited prior exposure to UD, whose annotations we compare and adjudicate. Our results suggest that while current LLM outputs in Old English do not reflect authentic syntax, this can be mitigated by post-editing, and that although beginner annotators do not possess enough background to complete the task perfectly, taken together they can produce good results and learn from the experience. We also conduct preliminary parsing experiments using Modern English training data, and find that although performance on Old English is poor, parsing on annotated features (lemma, hyperlemma, gloss) leads to improved performance.
Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures
Authors: Shaily Bhatt, Tal August, Maria Antoniak
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00

Improving cultural competence of language technologies is important. However most recent works rarely engage with the communities they study, and instead rely on synthetic setups and imperfect proxies of culture. In this work, we take a human-centered approach to discover and measure language-based cultural norms, and cultural competence of LLMs. We focus on a single kind of culture, research cultures, and a single task, adapting writing across research cultures. Through a set of interviews with interdisciplinary researchers, who are experts at moving between cultures, we create a framework of structural, stylistic, rhetorical, and citational norms that vary across research cultures. We operationalise these features with a suite of computational metrics and use them for (a) surfacing latent cultural norms in human-written research papers at scale; and (b) highlighting the lack of cultural competence of LLMs, and their tendency to homogenise writing. Overall, our work illustrates the efficacy of a human-centered approach to measuring cultural norms in human-written and LLM-generated texts.
SealQA: Raising the Bar for Reasoning in Search-Augmented Language Models
Authors: Thinh Pham, Nguyen Nguyen, Pratibha Zunjare, Weiyuan Chen, Yu-Min Tseng, Tu Vu
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00

We introduce SealQA, a new challenge benchmark for evaluating SEarch-Augmented Language models on fact-seeking questions where web search yields conflicting, noisy, or unhelpful results. SealQA comes in three flavors: (1) Seal-0 (main) and (2) Seal-Hard, which assess factual accuracy and reasoning capabilities, with Seal-0 focusing on the most challenging questions where chat models (e.g., GPT-4.1) typically achieve near-zero accuracy; and (3) LongSeal, which extends SealQA to test long-context, multi-document reasoning in "needle-in-a-haystack" settings. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in current models: Even frontier LLMs perform poorly across all SealQA flavors. On Seal-0, frontier agentic models equipped with tools like o3 and o4-mini achieve only 17.1% and 6.3% accuracy, respectively, at their best reasoning efforts. We find that advanced reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1-671B and o3-mini are highly vulnerable to noisy search results. Notably, increasing test-time compute does not yield reliable gains across o3-mini, o4-mini, and o3, with performance often plateauing or even declining early. Additionally, while recent models are less affected by the "lost-in-the-middle" issue, they still fail to reliably identify relevant documents in LongSeal when faced with numerous distractors. To facilitate future work, we release SealQA at huggingface.co/datasets/vtllms/sealqa.
iQUEST: An Iterative Question-Guided Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering
Authors: Shuai Wang, Yinan Yu
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Knowledge Base Question Answering, Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many natural language processing tasks, they often suffer from factual inaccuracies in knowledge-intensive scenarios. Integrating external knowledge resources, particularly knowledge graphs (KGs), provides a transparent and updatable foundation for more reliable reasoning. Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA), which queries and reasons over KGs, is central to this effort, especially for complex, multi-hop queries. However, multi-hop reasoning poses two key challenges: (1)~maintaining coherent reasoning paths, and (2)~avoiding prematurely discarding critical multi-hop connections. To address these issues, we introduce iQUEST, a question-guided KBQA framework that iteratively decomposes complex queries into simpler sub-questions, ensuring a structured and focused reasoning trajectory. Additionally, we integrate a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to look ahead and incorporate 2-hop neighbor information at each reasoning step. This dual approach strengthens the reasoning process, enabling the model to explore viable paths more effectively. Detailed experiments demonstrate the consistent improvement delivered by iQUEST across four benchmark datasets and four LLMs.
Chain-of-Code Collapse: Reasoning Failures in LLMs via Adversarial Prompting in Code Generation
Authors: Jaechul Roh, Varun Gandhi, Shivani Anilkumar, Arin Garg
Date: 2025-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Mathematical Problem-Solving

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks requiring complex reasoning, such as code generation, mathematical problem solving, and algorithmic synthesis -- especially when aided by reasoning tokens and Chain-of-Thought prompting. Yet, a core question remains: do these models truly reason, or do they merely exploit shallow statistical patterns? In this paper, we introduce Chain-of-Code Collapse, where we systematically investigate the robustness of reasoning LLMs by introducing a suite of semantically faithful yet adversarially structured prompt perturbations. Our evaluation -- spanning 700 perturbed code generations derived from LeetCode-style problems -- applies transformations such as storytelling reframing, irrelevant constraint injection, example reordering, and numeric perturbation. We observe that while certain modifications severely degrade performance (with accuracy drops up to -42.1%), others surprisingly improve model accuracy by up to 35.3%, suggesting sensitivity not only to semantics but also to surface-level prompt dynamics. These findings expose the fragility and unpredictability of current reasoning systems, underscoring the need for more principles approaches to reasoning alignments and prompting robustness. We release our perturbation datasets and evaluation framework to promote further research in trustworthy and resilient LLM reasoning.
Improving Fairness of Large Language Models in Multi-document Summarization
Authors: Haoyuan Li, Rui Zhang, Snigdha Chaturvedi
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decision Making, Document Summarization, Fairness, Multi-Document Summarization

Fairness in multi-document summarization (MDS) is crucial for providing comprehensive views across documents with diverse social attribute values, which can significantly impact decision-making. For example, a summarization system that tends to overrepresent negative reviews of products can mislead customers into disregarding good products. Previous works measure fairness in MDS at two levels: summary-level and corpus-level. While summary-level fairness focuses on individual summaries, corpus-level fairness focuses on a corpus of summaries. Recent methods primarily focus on summary-level fairness. We propose FairPO, a preference tuning method that focuses on both summary-level and corpus-level fairness in MDS. To improve summary-level fairness, we propose to generate preference pairs by perturbing document sets. To improve corpus-level fairness, we propose fairness-aware preference tuning by dynamically adjusting the weights of preference pairs. Our experiments show that FairPO outperforms strong baselines while maintaining the critical qualities of summaries. The code is available at https://github.com/leehaoyuan/coverage_fairnes.
Towards Large Language Models with Self-Consistent Natural Language Explanations
Authors: Sahar Admoni, Ofra Amir, Assaf Hallak, Yftah Ziser
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

Large language models (LLMs) seem to offer an easy path to interpretability: just ask them to explain their decisions. Yet, studies show that these post-hoc explanations often misrepresent the true decision process, as revealed by mismatches in feature importance. Despite growing evidence of this inconsistency, no systematic solutions have emerged, partly due to the high cost of estimating feature importance, which limits evaluations to small datasets. To address this, we introduce the Post-hoc Self-Consistency Bank (PSCB) - a large-scale benchmark of decisions spanning diverse tasks and models, each paired with LLM-generated explanations and corresponding feature importance scores. Analysis of PSCB reveals that self-consistency scores barely differ between correct and incorrect predictions. We also show that the standard metric fails to meaningfully distinguish between explanations. To overcome this limitation, we propose an alternative metric that more effectively captures variation in explanation quality. We use it to fine-tune LLMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), leading to significantly better alignment between explanations and decision-relevant features, even under domain shift. Our findings point to a scalable path toward more trustworthy, self-consistent LLMs.
Did I Faithfully Say What I Thought? Bridging the Gap Between Neural Activity and Self-Explanations in Large Language Models
Authors: Milan Bhan, Jean-Noel Vittaut, Nicolas Chesneau, Sarath Chandar, Marie-Jeanne Lesot
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Large Language Models (LLM) have demonstrated the capability of generating free text self Natural Language Explanation (self-NLE) to justify their answers. Despite their logical appearance, self-NLE do not necessarily reflect the LLM actual decision-making process, making such explanations unfaithful. While existing methods for measuring self-NLE faithfulness mostly rely on behavioral tests or computational block identification, none of them examines the neural activity underlying the model's reasoning. This work introduces a novel flexible framework for quantitatively measuring the faithfulness of LLM-generated self-NLE by directly comparing the latter with interpretations of the model's internal hidden states. The proposed framework is versatile and provides deep insights into self-NLE faithfulness by establishing a direct connection between self-NLE and model reasoning. This approach advances the understanding of self-NLE faithfulness and provides building blocks for generating more faithful self-NLE.
TransXSSM: A Hybrid Transformer State Space Model with Unified Rotary Position Embedding
Authors: Bingheng Wu, Jingze Shi, Yifan Wu, Nan Tang, Yuyu Luo
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Position, State Space Models

Transformers exhibit proficiency in capturing long-range dependencies, whereas State Space Models (SSMs) facilitate linear-time sequence modeling. Notwithstanding their synergistic potential, the integration of these architectures presents a significant challenge, primarily attributable to a fundamental incongruity in their respective positional encoding mechanisms: Transformers rely on explicit Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE), while SSMs leverage implicit positional representations via convolutions. This divergence often precipitates discontinuities and suboptimal performance. To address this impediment, we propose a unified rotary position embedding (Unified RoPE) methodology, thereby establishing a consistent positional encoding framework for both self-attention and state-space components. Using this Unified RoPE, we introduce TransXSSM, a hybrid architecture that coherently integrates the Transformer and SSM layers under this unified positional encoding scheme. At a 4K sequence length, TransXSSM exhibits training and inference speeds that are 42.3\% and 29.5\% faster, respectively, relative to standard Transformer models. It also delivers higher accuracy: under comparable settings, it surpasses a Transformer baseline by over 4\% on language modeling benchmarks.TransXSSM furthermore scales more effectively: TransXSSM-1.3B gains 7.22\% in average accuracy over its 320M version (versus about 6\% gains for equivalent Transformers or SSMs). Our results show that unified positional encoding resolves positional incompatibility in hybrid models, enabling efficient, high-performance long-context modeling.
Aspect-Based Opinion Summarization with Argumentation Schemes
Authors: Wendi Zhou, Ameer Saadat-Yazdi, Nadin Kokciyan
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Opinion Summarization

Reviews are valuable resources for customers making purchase decisions in online shopping. However, it is impractical for customers to go over the vast number of reviews and manually conclude the prominent opinions, which prompts the need for automated opinion summarization systems. Previous approaches, either extractive or abstractive, face challenges in automatically producing grounded aspect-centric summaries. In this paper, we propose a novel summarization system that not only captures predominant opinions from an aspect perspective with supporting evidence, but also adapts to varying domains without relying on a pre-defined set of aspects. Our proposed framework, ASESUM, summarizes viewpoints relevant to the critical aspects of a product by extracting aspect-centric arguments and measuring their salience and validity. We conduct experiments on a real-world dataset to demonstrate the superiority of our approach in capturing diverse perspectives of the original reviews compared to new and existing methods.
Incentivizing Reasoning for Advanced Instruction-Following of Large Language Models
Authors: Yulei Qin, Gang Li, Zongyi Li, Zihan Xu, Yuchen Shi, Zhekai Lin, Xiao Cui, Ke Li, Xing Sun
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Existing large language models (LLMs) face challenges of following complex instructions, especially when multiple constraints are present and organized in paralleling, chaining, and branching structures. One intuitive solution, namely chain-of-thought (CoT), is expected to universally improve capabilities of LLMs. However, we find that the vanilla CoT exerts a negative impact on performance due to its superficial reasoning pattern of simply paraphrasing the instructions. It fails to peel back the compositions of constraints for identifying their relationship across hierarchies of types and dimensions. To this end, we propose a systematic method to boost LLMs in dealing with complex instructions via incentivizing reasoning for test-time compute scaling. First, we stem from the decomposition of complex instructions under existing taxonomies and propose a reproducible data acquisition method. Second, we exploit reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rule-centric reward signals to cultivate reasoning specifically for instruction following. We address the shallow, non-essential nature of reasoning under complex instructions via sample-wise contrast for superior CoT enforcement. We also exploit behavior cloning of experts to facilitate steady distribution shift from fast-thinking LLMs to skillful reasoners. Extensive evaluations on seven comprehensive benchmarks confirm the validity of the proposed method, where a 1.5B LLM achieves 11.74% gains with performance comparable to a 8B LLM. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/RAIF.
Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce
Authors: Yijia Shao, Humishka Zope, Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David Nguyen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Diyi Yang
Date: 2025-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent

The rapid rise of compound AI systems (a.k.a., AI agents) is reshaping the labor market, raising concerns about job displacement, diminished human agency, and overreliance on automation. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the evolving landscape. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing a novel auditing framework to assess which occupational tasks workers want AI agents to automate or augment, and how those desires align with the current technological capabilities. Our framework features an audio-enhanced mini-interview to capture nuanced worker desires and introduces the Human Agency Scale (HAS) as a shared language to quantify the preferred level of human involvement. Using this framework, we construct the WORKBank database, building on the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET database, to capture preferences from 1,500 domain workers and capability assessments from AI experts across over 844 tasks spanning 104 occupations. Jointly considering the desire and technological capability divides tasks in WORKBank into four zones: Automation "Green Light" Zone, Automation "Red Light" Zone, R&D Opportunity Zone, Low Priority Zone. This highlights critical mismatches and opportunities for AI agent development. Moving beyond a simple automate-or-not dichotomy, our results reveal diverse HAS profiles across occupations, reflecting heterogeneous expectations for human involvement. Moreover, our study offers early signals of how AI agent integration may reshape the core human competencies, shifting from information-focused skills to interpersonal ones. These findings underscore the importance of aligning AI agent development with human desires and preparing workers for evolving workplace dynamics.
FedRAG: A Framework for Fine-Tuning Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Authors: Val Andrei Fajardo, David B. Emerson, Amandeep Singh, Veronica Chatrath, Marcelo Lotif, Ravi Theja, Alex Cheung, Izuki Matsuba
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have been shown to be effective in addressing many of the drawbacks of relying solely on the parametric memory of large language models. Recent work has demonstrated that RAG systems can be improved via fine-tuning of their retriever and generator models. In this work, we introduce FedRAG, a framework for fine-tuning RAG systems across centralized and federated architectures. FedRAG supports state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods, offering a simple and intuitive interface and a seamless conversion from centralized to federated training tasks. FedRAG is also deeply integrated with the modern RAG ecosystem, filling a critical gap in available tools.
Fundamental Limits of Learning High-dimensional Simplices in Noisy Regimes
Authors: Seyed Amir Hossein Saberi, Amir Najafi, Abolfazl Motahari, Babak H. Khalaj
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we establish sample complexity bounds for learning high-dimensional simplices in $\mathbb{R}^K$ from noisy data. Specifically, we consider $n$ i.i.d. samples uniformly drawn from an unknown simplex in $\mathbb{R}^K$, each corrupted by additive Gaussian noise of unknown variance. We prove an algorithm exists that, with high probability, outputs a simplex within $\ell_2$ or total variation (TV) distance at most $\varepsilon$ from the true simplex, provided $n \ge (K^2/\varepsilon^2) e^{\mathcal{O}(K/\mathrm{SNR}^2)}$, where $\mathrm{SNR}$ is the signal-to-noise ratio. Extending our prior work~\citep{saberi2023sample}, we derive new information-theoretic lower bounds, showing that simplex estimation within TV distance $\varepsilon$ requires at least $n \ge \Omega(K^3 \sigma^2/\varepsilon^2 + K/\varepsilon)$ samples, where $\sigma^2$ denotes the noise variance. In the noiseless scenario, our lower bound $n \ge \Omega(K/\varepsilon)$ matches known upper bounds up to constant factors. We resolve an open question by demonstrating that when $\mathrm{SNR} \ge \Omega(K^{1/2})$, noisy-case complexity aligns with the noiseless case. Our analysis leverages sample compression techniques (Ashtiani et al., 2018) and introduces a novel Fourier-based method for recovering distributions from noisy observations, potentially applicable beyond simplex learning.