ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
S$^2$-MAD: Breaking the Token Barrier to Enhance Multi-Agent Debate Efficiency (2025)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) scenarios, but they still face challenges when handling complex arithmetic and logical reasoning tasks. While Chain-Of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, self-consistency (SC) and self-correction strategies have attempted to guide models in sequential, multi-step reasoning, Multi-agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a viable approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By increasing both the number of agents and the frequency of debates, the performance of LLMs improves significantly. However, this strategy results in a significant increase in token costs, presenting a barrier to scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel sparsification strategy designed to reduce token costs within MAD. This approach minimizes ineffective exchanges of information and unproductive discussions among agents, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of the debate process. We conduct comparative experiments on multiple datasets across various models, demonstrating that our approach significantly reduces the token costs in MAD to a considerable extent. Specifically, compared to MAD, our approach achieves an impressive reduction of up to 94.5{\%} in token costs while maintaining performance degradation below 2.0{\%}.
MASTER: A Multi-Agent System with LLM Specialized MCTS (2025)

Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly being explored for problem-solving tasks. However, their strategic planning capability is often viewed with skepticism. Recent studies have incorporated the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to augment the planning capacity of LLM. Despite its potential, MCTS relies on extensive sampling simulations to approximate the true reward distribution, which leads to two primary issues. Firstly, MCTS is effective for tasks like the Game of Go, where simulation results can yield objective rewards (e.g., 1 for a win and 0 for a loss). However, for tasks such as question answering, the result of a simulation is the answer to the question, which cannot yield an objective reward without the ground truth. Secondly, obtaining statistically significant reward estimations typically requires a sample size exceeding 30 simulations, resulting in excessive token usage and time consumption. To address these challenges, we present Multi-Agent System with Tactical Execution and Reasoning using LLM Specialized MCTS (MASTER), a novel framework that coordinates agent recruitment and communication through LLM specialized MCTS. This system autonomously adjusts the number of agents based on task complexity and ensures focused communication among them. Comprehensive experiments across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. It achieves 76{\%} accuracy on HotpotQA and 80{\%} on WebShop, setting new state of-the-art performance on these datasets.
ScreenQA: Large-Scale Question-Answer Pairs Over Mobile App Screenshots (2025)

We introduce ScreenQA, a novel benchmarking dataset designed to advance screen content understanding through question answering. The existing screen datasets are focused either on low-level structural and component understanding, or on a much higher-level composite task such as navigation and task completion for autonomous agents. ScreenQA attempts to bridge this gap. By annotating 86k question-answer pairs over the RICO dataset, we aim to benchmark the screen reading comprehension capacity, thereby laying the foundation for vision-based automation over screenshots. Our annotations encompass full answers, short answer phrases, and corresponding UI contents with bounding boxes, enabling four subtasks to address various application scenarios. We evaluate the dataset`s efficacy using both open-weight and proprietary models in zero-shot, fine-tuned, and transfer learning settings. We further demonstrate positive transfer to web applications, highlighting its potential beyond mobile applications.
Cross-Lingual and Cross-Cultural Variation in Image Descriptions (2025)

Do speakers of different languages talk differently about what they see? Behavioural and cognitive studies report cultural effects on perception; however, these are mostly limited in scope and hard to replicate. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of cross-lingual variation in image descriptions. Using a multimodal dataset with 31 languages and images from diverse locations, we develop a method to accurately identify entities mentioned in captions and present in the images, then measure how they vary across languages. Our analysis reveals that pairs of languages that are geographically or genetically closer tend to mention the same entities more frequently. We also identify entity categories whose saliency is universally high (such as animate beings), low (clothing accessories) or displaying high variance across languages (landscape). In a case study, we measure the differences in a specific language pair (e.g., Japanese mentions clothing far more frequently than English). Furthermore, our method corroborates previous small-scale studies, including 1) Rosch et al. (1976)`s theory of basic-level categories, demonstrating a preference for entities that are neither too generic nor too specific, and 2) Miyamoto et al. (2006)`s hypothesis that environments afford patterns of perception, such as entity counts. Overall, our work reveals the presence of both universal and culture-specific patterns in entity mentions.
Soft Syntactic Reinforcement for Neural Event Extraction (2025)

Recent event extraction (EE) methods rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs) but still suffer from errors due to a lack of syntactic knowledge. While syntactic information is crucial for EE, there is a need for effective methods to incorporate syntactic knowledge into PLMs. To address this gap, we present a novel method to incorporate syntactic information into PLM-based models for EE, which do not require external syntactic parsers to produce syntactic features of task data. Instead, our proposed soft syntactic reinforcement (SSR) mechanism learns to select syntax-related dimensions of PLM representation during pretraining on a standard dependency corpus. The adapted PLM weights and the syntax-aware representation then facilitate the model`s prediction over the task data. On both sentence-level and document-level EE benchmark datasets, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming baseline models and existing syntactic reinforcement methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in this direction. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Anran971/sre-naacl25}.
Not All Adapters Matter: Selective Adapter Freezing for Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Language Models (2025)

Transformer-based large-scale pre-trained models achieve great success. Fine-tuning is the standard practice for leveraging these models in downstream tasks. Among the fine-tuning methods, adapter-tuning provides a parameter-efficient fine-tuning by introducing lightweight trainable modules while keeping most pre-trained parameters frozen. However, existing adapter-tuning methods still impose substantial resource usage. Through our investigation, we show that each adapter unequally contributes to both task performance and resource usage. Motivated by this insight, we propose Selective Adapter FrEezing (SAFE), which gradually freezes less important adapters early to reduce unnecessary resource usage while maintaining performance. In our experiments, SAFE reduces memory usage, computation amount, and training time by 42.85{\%}, 34.59{\%}, and 11.82{\%}, respectively, while achieving comparable or better task performance compared to the baseline. We also demonstrate that SAFE induces regularization effect, thereby smoothing the loss landscape, which enables the model to generalize better by avoiding sharp minima.
Bridging the Gap between Expert and Language Models: Concept-guided Chess Commentary Generation and Evaluation (2025)

Deep learning-based expert models have reached superhuman performance in decision-making domains such as chess and Go. However, it is under-explored to explain or comment on given decisions although it is important for model explainability and human education. The outputs of expert models are accurate, but yet difficult to interpret for humans. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) can produce fluent commentary but are prone to hallucinations due to their limited decision-making capabilities. To bridge this gap between expert models and LLMs, we focus on chess commentary as a representative task of explaining complex decision-making processes through language and address both the generation and evaluation of commentary. We introduce Concept-guided Chess Commentary generation (CCC) for producing commentary and GPT-based Chess Commentary Evaluation (GCC-Eval) for assessing it. CCC integrates the decision-making strengths of expert models with the linguistic fluency of LLMs through prioritized, concept-based explanations. GCC-Eval leverages expert knowledge to evaluate chess commentary based on informativeness and linguistic quality. Experimental results, validated by both human judges and GCC-Eval, demonstrate that CCC generates commentary which is accurate, informative, and fluent.
Behavior-SD: Behaviorally Aware Spoken Dialogue Generation with Large Language Models (2025)

Spoken dialogue involves behaviors like turn-taking, interruptions, filler words, and backchannels, which make interactions more natural and engaging but are often overlooked in language models. These models struggle to explicitly model these behavioral traits, resulting in a less natural and personalized communication style that aligns with user needs. To address this challenge, we make two key contributions. First, we introduce Behavior-SD, a large-scale dataset containing over 100K spoken dialogues (2,164 hours) annotated with various conversational behaviors, synthesized via LLMs to model diverse full-duplex interactions. Second, we propose BeDLM, the first dialogue model capable of generating natural conversations conditioned on specific behavioral and narrative contexts, supporting simultaneous contributions from both speakers. Through human evaluations and behavior-adherence metrics, we demonstrate that BeDLM outperforms baseline models in generating natural, coherent, and behaviorally rich dialogues. Our work opens new possibilities for developing behaviorally-aware dialogue systems that more closely mimic human conversational dynamics, enhancing user engagement and communication effectiveness.
Is Translation All You Need? A Study on Solving Multilingual Tasks with Large Language Models (2025)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated multilingual capabilities, yet they are mostly English-centric due to the imbalanced training corpora. While prior works have leveraged this bias to enhance multilingual performance through translation, they have been largely limited to natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this work, we extend the evaluation to real-world user queries and non-English-centric LLMs, offering a broader examination of multilingual performance. Our key contribution lies in demonstrating that while translation into English can boost the performance of English-centric LLMs on NLP tasks, it is not universally optimal. For culture-related tasks that need deep language understanding, prompting in the native language proves more effective as it better captures the nuances of culture and language. Our experiments expose varied behaviors across LLMs and tasks in the multilingual context, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive approach to multilingual evaluation. Therefore, we call for greater efforts in developing and evaluating LLMs that go beyond English-centric paradigms.
AlgoPuzzleVQA: Diagnosing Multimodal Reasoning Challenges of Language Models with Algorithmic Multimodal Puzzles (2025)

This paper introduces the novel task of multimodal puzzle solving, framed within the context of visual question-answering. We present a new dataset, AlgoPuzzleVQA designed to challenge and evaluate the capabilities of multimodal language models in solving algorithmic puzzles that necessitate both visual understanding, language understanding, and complex algorithmic reasoning. We create the puzzles to encompass a diverse array of mathematical and algorithmic topics such as boolean logic, combinatorics, graph theory, optimization, search, etc., aiming to evaluate the gap between visual data interpretation and algorithmic problem-solving skills. The dataset is generated automatically from code authored by humans. All our puzzles have exact solutions that can be found from the algorithm without tedious human calculations. It ensures that our dataset can be scaled up arbitrarily in terms of reasoning complexity and dataset size. Our investigation reveals that multimodal language models such as GPT4V and Gemini exhibit limited performance in puzzle-solving tasks. We find that their performance is near random in a multi-choice question-answering setup for a significant number of puzzles. The findings emphasize the challenges of integrating visual, language, and algorithmic knowledge for solving complex reasoning problems.
Beyond Logit Lens: Contextual Embeddings for Robust Hallucination Detection \& Grounding in VLMs (2025)

The rapid development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has significantly advanced multimodal understanding by harnessing the language abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and integrating modality-specific encoders. However, LMMs are plagued by hallucinations that limit their reliability and adoption. While traditional methods to detect and mitigate these hallucinations often involve costly training or rely heavily on external models, recent approaches utilizing internal model features present a promising alternative. In this paper, we critically assess the limitations of the state-of-the-art training-free technique, the logit lens, in handling generalized visual hallucinations. We introduce *ContextualLens*, a refined method that leverages contextual token embeddings from middle layers of LMMs. This approach significantly improves hallucination detection and grounding across diverse categories, including actions and OCR, while also excelling in tasks requiring contextual understanding, such as spatial relations and attribute comparison. Our novel grounding technique yields highly precise bounding boxes, facilitating a transition from Zero-Shot Object Segmentation to Grounded Visual Question Answering. Our contributions pave the way for more reliable and interpretable multimodal models.
M2Lingual: Enhancing Multilingual, Multi-Turn Instruction Alignment in Large Language Models (2025)

Collecting instruction fine-tuning (IFT) data is a resource and time intensive task especially in multilingual setting where finding proficient native speakers is challenging. Moreover, traditional data collection is prone to privacy risks, toxicity and lacks scalability. While, fully synthetic datasets are a promising alternative, research on their use in multilingual domain is limited as existing approaches still rely on machine translation to improve multilingual performance. To bridge this gap we introduce M2Lingual, the first fully synthetic, multi-turn multilingual dataset having 175K conversations across 70 languages with a balanced mix of high, low and mid-resourced languages. M2Lingual is constructed using a cost-efficient and scalable method that uses our novel two-step Evol prompt taxonomy to transform a small set of human written instructions to complex and challenging conversations. Results across three model families, six baseline datasets and evaluation spanning 31 languages demonstrates the effectiveness of M2Lingual over other datasets.
Multi$^3$Hate: Multimodal, Multilingual, and Multicultural Hate Speech Detection with Vision--Language Models (2025)

Hate speech moderation on global platforms poses unique challenges due to the multimodal and multilingual nature of content, along with the varying cultural perceptions. How well do current vision-language models (VLMs) navigate these nuances? To investigate this, we create the first multimodal and multilingual parallel hate speech dataset, annotated by a multiculturally diverse set of annotators, called Multi$^3$Hate. It contains 300 parallel meme samples across 5 languages: English, German, Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin. We demonstrate that cultural background significantly affects multimodal hate speech annotation in our dataset. The average pairwise agreement among countries is just 74{\%}, significantly lower than that of randomly selected annotator groups. Our qualitative analysis indicates that the lowest pairwise label agreement{---}only 67{\%} between the USA and India{---}can be attributed to cultural factors. We then conduct experiments with 5 large VLMs in a zero-shot setting, finding that these models align more closely with annotations from the US than with those from other cultures, even when the memes and prompts are presented in the native language of the other culture.
Grounding Fallacies Misrepresenting Scientific Publications in Evidence (2025)

Health-related misinformation claims often falsely cite a credible biomedical publication as evidence. These publications only superficially seem to support the false claim, when logical fallacies are applied. In this work, we aim to detect and to highlight such fallacies, which requires assessing the exact content of the misrepresented publications. To achieve this, we introduce MissciPlus, an extension of the fallacy detection dataset Missci. MissciPlus extends Missci by grounding the applied fallacies in real-world passages from misrepresented studies. This creates a realistic test-bed for detecting and verbalizing fallacies under real-world input conditions, and enables new and realistic passage-retrieval tasks. MissciPlus is the first logical fallacy dataset which pairs the real-world misrepresented evidence with incorrect claims, identical to the input to evidence-based fact-checking models. With MissciPlus, we i) benchmark retrieval models in identifying passages that support claims only with fallacious reasoning, ii) evaluate how well LLMs verbalize fallacious reasoning based on misrepresented scientific passages, and iii) assess the effectiveness of fact-checking models in refuting claims that misrepresent biomedical research. Our findings show that current fact-checking models struggle to use misrepresented scientific passages to refute misinformation. Moreover, these passages can mislead LLMs into accepting false claims as true.
Has this Fact been Edited? Detecting Knowledge Edits in Language Models (2025)

Knowledge editing methods (KEs) can update language models' obsolete or inaccurate knowledge learned from pre-training. However, KEs can be used for malicious applications, e.g., inserting misinformation and toxic content. Knowing whether a generated output is based on edited knowledge or first-hand knowledge from pre-training can increase users' trust in generative models and provide more transparency. Driven by this, we propose a novel task: detecting knowledge edits in language models. Given an edited model and a fact retrieved by a prompt from an edited model, the objective is to classify the knowledge as either unedited (based on the pre-training), or edited (based on subsequent editing). We instantiate the task with four KEs, two large language models (LLMs), and two datasets. Additionally, we propose using hidden state representations and probability distributions as features for the detection model. Our results reveal that using these features as inputs to a simple AdaBoost classifier establishes a strong baseline. This baseline classifier requires a small amount of training data and maintains its performance even in cross-domain settings. Our work lays the groundwork for addressing potential malicious model editing, which is a critical challenge associated with the strong generative capabilities of LLMs.
Coverage-based Fairness in Multi-document Summarization (2025)

Fairness in multi-document summarization (MDS) measures whether a system can generate a summary fairly representing information from documents with different social attribute values. Fairness in MDS is crucial since a fair summary can offer readers a comprehensive view. Previous works focus on quantifying summary-level fairness using Proportional Representation, a fairness measure based on Statistical Parity. However, Proportional Representation does not consider redundancy in input documents and overlooks corpus-level unfairness. In this work, we propose a new summary-level fairness measure, Equal Coverage, which is based on coverage of documents with different social attribute values and considers the redundancy within documents. To detect the corpus-level unfairness, we propose a new corpus-level measure, Coverage Parity. Our human evaluations show that our measures align more with our definition of fairness. Using our measures, we evaluate the fairness of thirteen different LLMs. We find that Claude3-sonnet is the fairest among all evaluated LLMs. We also find that almost all LLMs overrepresent different social attribute values. The code is available at https://github.com/leehaoyuan/coverage{\_}fairness
Grammar Control in Dialogue Response Generation for Language Learning Chatbots (2025)

Chatbots based on large language models offer cheap conversation practice opportunities for language learners. However, they are hard to control for linguistic forms that correspond to learners' current needs, such as grammar. We control grammar in chatbot conversation practice by grounding a dialogue response generation model in a pedagogical repository of grammar skills. We also explore how this control helps learners to produce specific grammar. We comprehensively evaluate prompting, fine-tuning, and decoding strategies for grammar-controlled dialogue response generation. Strategically decoding Llama3 outperforms GPT-3.5 when tolerating minor response quality losses. Our simulation predicts grammar-controlled responses to support grammar acquisition adapted to learner proficiency. Existing language learning chatbots and research on second language acquisition benefit from these affordances. Code available on GitHub.
Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge (2025)

Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet often lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. Our work aims to bridge this gap by delving into the Food domain{---}a universally relevant yet culturally diverse aspect of human life. We introduce FmLAMA, a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. We analyze LLMs across various architectures and configurations, evaluating their performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings. By leveraging templates in six different languages, we investigate how LLMs interact with language-specific and cultural knowledge. Our findings reveal that (1) LLMs demonstrate a pronounced bias towards food knowledge prevalent in the United States; (2) Incorporating relevant cultural context significantly improves LLMs' ability to access cultural knowledge; (3) The efficacy of LLMs in capturing cultural nuances is highly dependent on the interplay between the probing language, the specific model architecture, and the cultural context in question. This research underscores the complexity of integrating cultural understanding into LLMs and emphasizes the importance of culturally diverse datasets to mitigate biases and enhance model performance across different cultural domains.