ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Efficient Dialogue Policy Agent with Model-Based Causal Reinforcement Learning (2025)

Dialogue policy trains an agent to select dialogue actions frequently implemented via deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The model-based reinforcement methods built a world model to generate simulated data to alleviate the sample inefficiency. However, traditional world model methods merely consider one-step dialogues, leading to an inaccurate environmental simulation. Furthermore, different users may have different intention preferences, while most existing studies lack consideration of the intention-preferences causal relationship. This paper proposes a novel framework for dialogue policy learning named MCA, implemented through model-based reinforcement learning with automatically constructed causal chains. The MCA model utilizes an autoregressive Transformer to model dialogue trajectories, enabling a more accurate simulation of the environment. Additionally, it constructs a causal chains module that outputs latent preference distributions for intention-action pairs, thereby elucidating the relationship between user intentions and agent actions. The experimental results show that MCA can achieve state-of-the-art performances on three dialogue datasets over the compared dialogue agents, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness.
Re-Cent: A Relation-Centric Framework for Joint Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (2025)

Zero-shot Relation Triplet Extraction (ZSRTE) aims to extract triplets from the context where the relation patterns are unseen during training. Due to the inherent challenges of the ZSRTE task, existing extractive ZSRTE methods often decompose it into named entity recognition and relation classification, which overlooks the interdependence of two tasks and may introduce error propagation. Motivated by the intuition that crucial entity attributes might be implicit in the relation labels, we propose a Relation-Centric joint ZSRTE method named Re-Cent. This approach uses minimal information, specifically unseen relation labels, to extract triplets in one go through a unified model. We develop two span-based extractors to identify the subjects and objects corresponding to relation labels, forming span-pairs. Additionally, we introduce a relation-based correction mechanism that further refines the triplets by calculating the relevance between span-pairs and relation labels. Experiments demonstrate that Re-Cent achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters and does not rely on synthetic data or manual labor.
CoMIF: Modeling of Complex Multiple Interaction Factors for Conversation Generation (2025)

Highly realistic human-machine interaction is challenging for open-domain dialogue systems. Although existing methods have achieved notable progress by leveraging various interaction factors (e.g., emotion, personality, topic) for delivering human-like (e.g., empathetic, personalized and semantically-consistent) responses, they typically model such factor alone and thus easily suffer from low-quality response generation issue. We attribute this limitation to the neglect of implicit-correlations among factors. Furthermore, different factors may alternately dominate token-level response generation during decoding, making it harder to generate high-quality responses by applying various factors at the sentence level. To address the issue, we present a unified response generation framework, which is capable of simultaneously modeling Complex Multiple Interaction Factors (named CoMIF) to generate human-like conversations. To model the implicit correlations among factors, CoMIF first employ a \textit{dynamic perception} module to construct a directed \textit{collaborative}-graph to jointly learn the dynamics over time of each factor, as well as the cross-dependencies among them. Additionally, we also design a scalable post-adaptation module to introduce token-level factor signals to generate more human-like responses with appropriately multiple factors. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the superior performance in generating more human-like responses with appropriate multiple-factors, as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Courtroom-LLM: A Legal-Inspired Multi-LLM Framework for Resolving Ambiguous Text Classifications (2025)

In this research, we introduce the Courtroom-LLM framework, a novel multi-LLM structure inspired by legal courtroom processes, aiming to enhance decision-making in ambiguous text classification scenarios. Our approach simulates a courtroom setting within LLMs, assigning roles similar to those of prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, to facilitate comprehensive analysis of complex textual cases. We demonstrate that this structured multi-LLM setup can significantly improve decision-making accuracy, particularly in ambiguous situations, by harnessing the synergistic effects of diverse LLM arguments. Our evaluations across various text classification tasks show that the Courtroom-LLM framework outperforms both traditional single-LLM classifiers and simpler multi-LLM setups. These results highlight the advantages of our legal-inspired model in improving decision-making for text classification.
RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systems (2025)

Role-playing systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly influential in emotional communication applications. However, these systems are susceptible to character hallucinations, where the model deviates from predefined character roles and generates responses that are inconsistent with the intended persona. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of character hallucination from an attack perspective, introducing the RoleBreak framework. Our framework identifies two core mechanisms{---}query sparsity and role-query conflict{---}as key factors driving character hallucination. Leveraging these insights, we construct a novel dataset, RoleBreakEval, to evaluate existing hallucination mitigation techniques. Our experiments reveal that even enhanced models trained to minimize hallucination remain vulnerable to attacks. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose a novel defence strategy, the Narrator Mode, which generates supplemental context through narration to mitigate role-query conflicts and improve query generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that Narrator Mode significantly outperforms traditional refusal-based strategies by reducing hallucinations, enhancing fidelity to character roles and queries, and improving overall narrative coherence.
Enhancing Event Causality Identification with LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations (2025)

Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to identify fine-grained causal relationships between events in an unstructured text. Existing ECI methods primarily rely on knowledge enhanced and graph-based reasoning approaches, but they often overlook the dependencies between similar events. Additionally, the connection between unstructured text and structured knowledge is relatively weak. Therefore, this paper proposes an ECI method enhanced by LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations (LKCER). Specifically, LKCER constructs a conceptual-level heterogeneous event graph by leveraging the local contextual information of related event mentions, generating a more comprehensive global semantic representation of event concepts. At the same time, the knowledge generated by COMET is filtered and enriched using LLM, strengthening the associations between event pairs and knowledge. Finally, the joint event conceptual representation and knowledge-enhanced event representation are used to uncover potential causal relationships between events. The experimental results show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both benchmarks, EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank.
Cognate Detection for Historical Language Reconstruction of Proto-Sabean Languages: the Case of Ge`ez, Tigrinya, and Amharic (2025)

As languages evolve, we risk losing ancestral languages. In this paper, we explore Historical Language Reconstruction (HLR) for Proto-Sabean languages, starting with the identification of cognates{--}sets of words in different related languages that are derived from the same ancestral language. We (1) collect semantically related words in three Afro-Semitic languages from a three-way dictionary (2) work with linguists to identify cognates and reconstruct the proto-form of the cognates, (3) experiment with three automatic cognate detection methods and extract cognates from the semantically related words. We then experiment with in-context learning with GPT-4o to generate the proto-language from the cognates and use Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) models for HLR.
Revisiting Cosine Similarity via Normalized ICA-transformed Embeddings (2025)

Cosine similarity is widely used to measure the similarity between two embeddings, while interpretations based on angle and correlation coefficient are common. In this study, we focus on the interpretable axes of embeddings transformed by Independent Component Analysis (ICA), and propose a novel interpretation of cosine similarity as the sum of semantic similarities over axes. The normalized ICA-transformed embeddings exhibit sparsity, enhancing the interpretability of each axis, and the semantic similarity defined by the product of the components represents the shared meaning between the two embeddings along each axis. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through intuitive numerical examples and thorough numerical experiments. By deriving the probability distributions that govern each component and the product of components, we propose a method for selecting statistically significant axes.
Piecing It All Together: Verifying Multi-Hop Multimodal Claims (2025)

Existing claim verification datasets often do not require systems to perform complex reasoning or effectively interpret multimodal evidence. To address this, we introduce a new task: multi-hop multimodal claim verification. This task challenges models to reason over multiple pieces of evidence from diverse sources, including text, images, and tables, and determine whether the combined multimodal evidence supports or refutes a given claim. To study this task, we construct MMCV, a large-scale dataset comprising 15k multi-hop claims paired with multimodal evidence, generated and refined using large language models, with additional input from human feedback. We show that MMCV is challenging even for the latest state-of-the-art multimodal large language models, especially as the number of reasoning hops increases. Additionally, we establish a human performance benchmark on a subset of MMCV. We hope this dataset and its evaluation task will encourage future research in multimodal multi-hop claim verification.
Boosting the Capabilities of Compact Models in Low-Data Contexts with Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025)

The data and compute requirements of current language modeling technology pose challenges for the processing and analysis of low-resource languages. Declarative linguistic knowledge has the potential to partially bridge this data scarcity gap by providing models with useful inductive bias in the form of language-specific rules. In this paper, we propose a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) framework backed by a large language model (LLM) to correct the output of a smaller model for the linguistic task of morphological glossing. We leverage linguistic information to make up for the lack of data and trainable parameters, while allowing for inputs from written descriptive grammars interpreted and distilled through an LLM. The results demonstrate that significant leaps in performance and efficiency are possible with the right combination of: a) linguistic inputs in the form of grammars, b) the interpretive power of LLMs, and c) the trainability of smaller token classification networks. We show that a compact, RAG-supported model is highly effective in data-scarce settings, achieving a new state-of-the-art for this task and our target languages. Our work also offers documentary linguists a more reliable and more usable tool for morphological glossing by providing well-reasoned explanations and confidence scores for each output.
Large Language Model-Based Event Relation Extraction with Rationales (2025)

Event Relation Extraction (ERE) aims to extract various types of relations between different events within texts. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many natural language processing tasks, existing ERE methods based on LLMs still face three key challenges: (1) \textbf{Time Inefficiency}: The existing pairwise method of combining events and determining their relations is time-consuming for LLMs. (2) \textbf{Low Coverage}: When dealing with numerous events in a document, the limited generation length of fine-tuned LLMs restricts the coverage of their extraction results. (3) \textbf{Lack of Rationale}: Essential rationales concerning the results that could enhance the reasoning ability of the model are overlooked. To address these challenges, we propose LLMERE, an LLM-based approach with rationales for the ERE task. LLMERE transforms ERE into a question-and-answer task that may have multiple answers. By extracting all events related to a specified event at once, LLMERE reduces time complexity from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$, compared to the pairwise method. Subsequently, LLMERE enhances the coverage of extraction results by employing a partitioning strategy that highlights only a portion of the events in the document at a time. In addition to the extracted results, LLMERE is also required to generate corresponding rationales/reasons behind them, in terms of event coreference information or transitive chains of event relations. Experimental results on three widely used datasets show that LLMERE achieves significant improvements over baseline methods.
Charting the Future: Using Chart Question-Answering for Scalable Evaluation of LLM-Driven Data Visualizations (2025)

We propose a novel framework that leverages Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to automate the evaluation of LLM-generated data visualizations. Traditional evaluation methods often rely on human judgment, which is costly and unscalable, or focus solely on data accuracy, neglecting the effectiveness of visual communication. By employing VQA models, we assess data representation quality and the general communicative clarity of charts. Experiments were conducted using two leading VQA benchmark datasets, ChartQA and PlotQA, with visualizations generated by OpenAI`s GPT-3.5 Turbo and Meta`s Llama 3.1 70B-Instruct models. Our results indicate that LLM-generated charts do not match the accuracy of the original non-LLM-generated charts based on VQA performance measures. Moreover, while our results demonstrate that few-shot prompting significantly boosts the accuracy of chart generation, considerable progress remains to be made before LLMs can fully match the precision of human-generated graphs. This underscores the importance of our work, which expedites the research process by enabling rapid iteration without the need for human annotation, thus accelerating advancements in this field.
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their coding capabilities. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, such as single-file code generation or repository issue debugging, falling short of measuring the full spectrum of challenges raised by real-world programming activities. In this case study, we explore the performance of LLMs across the entire software development lifecycle with DevEval, encompassing stages including software design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. DevEval features four programming languages, multiple domains, high-quality data collection, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. Empirical studies show that current LLMs, including GPT-4, fail to solve the challenges presented within DevEval. Our findings offer actionable insights for the future development of LLMs toward real-world programming applications.
Making Large Language Models into World Models with Precondition and Effect Knowledge (2025)

World models, which encapsulate the dynamics of how actions affect environments, are foundational to the functioning of intelligent agents. In this work, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to operate as world models. Although LLMs are not inherently designed to model real-world dynamics, we show that they can be induced to perform two critical world model functions: determining the applicability of an action based on a given world state, and predicting the resulting world state upon action execution. This is achieved by fine-tuning two separate LLMs{---}one for precondition prediction and another for effect prediction{---}while leveraging synthetic data generation techniques. Through human-participant studies, we validate that the precondition and effect knowledge generated by our models aligns with human understanding of world dynamics. We also analyze the extent to which the world model trained on our synthetic data results in an inferred state space that supports the creation of action chains, a necessary property for planning.
DORA: Dynamic Optimization Prompt for Continuous Reflection of LLM-based Agent (2025)

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) hold significant potential across various domains. The Reflection framework is designed to help agents learn from past mistakes in complex tasks. While previous research has shown that reflection can enhance performance, our investigation reveals a key limitation: meaningful self-reflection primarily occurs at the beginning of iterations, with subsequent attempts failing to produce further improvements. We term this phenomenon {\textquotedblleft}Early Stop Reflection,{\textquotedblright} where the reflection process halts prematurely, limiting the agent`s ability to engage in continuous learning. To address this, we propose the DORA method (Dynamic and Optimized Reflection Advice), which generates task-adaptive and diverse reflection advice. DORA introduces an external open-source small language model (SLM) that dynamically generates prompts for the reflection LLM. The SLM uses feedback from the agent and optimizes the prompt generation process through a non-gradient Bayesian Optimization (BO) algorithm, ensuring the reflection process evolves and adapts over time. Our experiments in the MiniWoB++ and Alfworld environments confirm that DORA effectively mitigates the {\textquotedblleft}Early Stop Reflection{\textquotedblright} issue, enabling agents to maintain iterative improvements and boost performance in long-term, complex tasks. Code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DORA-44FB/.
Towards Consistent Natural-Language Explanations via Explanation-Consistency Finetuning (2025)

Large language models (LLMs) often generate convincing, fluent explanations. However, different from humans, they often generate inconsistent explanations on different inputs. For example, an LLM may explain {\textquotedblleft}all birds can fly{\textquotedblright} when answering the question {\textquotedblleft}Can sparrows fly?{\textquotedblright} but meanwhile answer {\textquotedblleft}no{\textquotedblright} to the related question {\textquotedblleft}Can penguins fly?{\textquotedblright}. Explanations should be consistent across related examples so that they allow humans to simulate the LLM`s decision process on multiple examples. We propose explanation-consistency finetuning (EC-finetuning), a method that adapts LLMs to generate more consistent natural-language explanations on related examples. EC-finetuning involves finetuning LLMs on synthetic data that is carefully constructed to contain consistent explanations. Across a variety of question-answering datasets in various domains, EC-finetuning yields a 10.0{\%} relative explanation consistency improvement on 4 finetuning datasets, and generalizes to 7 out-of-distribution datasets not seen during finetuning (+4.5{\%} relative). We will make our code available for reproducibility.
Propulsion: Steering LLM with Tiny Fine-Tuning (2025)

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and adjacent fields, yet fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains computationally expensive and risks degrading pre-learned features. To address these challenges, we propose Propulsion, a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method designed to optimize task-specific performance while drastically reducing computational overhead. Inspired by the concept of controlled adjustments in physical motion, Propulsion selectively re-scales specific dimensions of a pre-trained model, guiding output predictions toward task objectives without modifying the model`s parameters. By introducing lightweight, trainable Propulsion parameters at the pre-trained layer, we minimize the number of parameters updated during fine-tuning, thus preventing the overfitting or overwriting of existing knowledge. Our theoretical analysis, supported by Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory, shows that Propulsion approximates the performance of full fine-tuning with far fewer trainable parameters. Empirically, Propulsion reduces the parameter count from 355.3 million to a mere 0.086 million{---}achieving over a 10x reduction compared to standard approaches like LoRA{---}while maintaining competitive performance across benchmarks.
DEGAP: Dual Event-Guided Adaptive Prefixes for Templated-Based Event Argument Extraction with Slot Querying (2025)

Recent advancements in event argument extraction (EAE) involve incorporating useful auxiliary information into models during training and inference, such as retrieved instances and event templates. These methods face two challenges: (1) the retrieval results may be irrelevant and (2) templates are developed independently for each event without considering their possible relationship. In this work, we propose DEGAP to address these challenges through a simple yet effective components: dual prefixes, i.e. learnable prompt vectors, where the instance-oriented prefix and template-oriented prefix are trained to learn information from different event instances and templates. Additionally, we propose an event-guided adaptive gating mechanism, which can adaptively leverage possible connections between different events and thus capture relevant information from the prefix. Finally, these event-guided prefixes provide relevant information as cues to EAE model without retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on four datasets (ACE05, RAMS, WIKIEVENTS, and MLEE). Further analysis shows the impact of different components.
Less is More: A Simple yet Effective Token Reduction Method for Efficient Multi-modal LLMs (2025)

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has led to remarkable performances across various domains. However, this progress is accompanied by a substantial surge in the resource consumption of these models. We address this pressing issue by introducing a new approach, Token Reduction using CLIP Metric (TRIM), aimed at improving the efficiency of MLLMs without sacrificing their performance. Inspired by human attention patterns in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, TRIM presents a fresh perspective on the selection and reduction of image tokens. The TRIM method has been extensively tested across 12 datasets, and the results demonstrate a significant reduction in computational overhead while maintaining a consistent level of performance. This research marks a critical stride in efficient MLLM development, promoting greater accessibility and sustainability of high-performing models.