ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mutual Reinforcement of LLM Dialogue Synthesis and Summarization Capabilities for Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization (2025)

In this work, we propose Mutual Reinforcing Data Synthesis (MRDS) within LLMs to improve few-shot dialogue summarization task. Unlike prior methods that require external knowledge, we mutually reinforce the LLM`s dialogue synthesis and summarization capabilities, allowing them to complement each other during training and enhance overall performances. The dialogue synthesis capability is enhanced by directed preference optimization with preference scoring from summarization capability. The summarization capability is enhanced by the additional high quality dialogue-summary paired data produced by the dialogue synthesis capability. By leveraging the proposed MRDS mechanism, we elicit the internal knowledge of LLM in the format of synthetic data, and use it to augment the few-shot real training dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that our method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5{\%} increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3{\%} improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings. Furthermore, our method attains the highest average scores in human evaluations, surpassing both the pre-trained models and the baselines fine-tuned solely for summarization tasks.
UNLEARN Efficient Removal of Knowledge in Large Language Models (2025)

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in many Natural Language Processing tasks but are outperformed by specialized tools for certain tasks. This raises the question: Can we reduce redundant LLM parameters when using these tools? Given the size and high training costs of LLMs, it is essential to efficiently forget specific knowledge without retraining. This paper introduces UNLEARN, a novel method that uses subspace techniques to selectively remove knowledge without access to the original training data, without retraining, and with minimal impact to other tasks. Our results show that UNLEARN significantly outperforms previous methods for forgetting targeted (unwanted) knowledge while also preserving related (wanted) knowledge. We also propose LEARN, a complementary approach for targeted knowledge addition, which achieves fine-tuning accuracy comparable to Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) without degrading related task performance.
Personalize Your LLM: Fake it then Align it (2025)

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for delivering tailored interactions that improve user experience. Many existing personalization methods require fine-tuning LLMs for each user, rendering them prohibitively expensive for widespread adoption. Although retrieval-based approaches offer a more compute-efficient alternative, they still depend on large, high-quality datasets that are not consistently available for all users. To address this challenge, we propose Chameleon, a scalable and efficient personalization approach that uses (1) self-generated personal preference data and (2) representation editing to enable quick and cost-effective personalization. Our experiments on various tasks, including those from the LaMP personalization benchmark, show that Chameleon efficiently adapts models to personal preferences, improving instruction-tuned models and outperforms two personalization baselines by an average of 40{\%} across two model architectures.
A Survey to Recent Progress Towards Understanding In-Context Learning (2025)

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly empirical success, the underlying mechanism of ICL remains unclear. Existing research remains ambiguous with various viewpoints, utilizing intuition-driven and ad-hoc technical solutions to interpret ICL. In this paper, we leverage a data generation perspective to reinterpret recent efforts from a systematic angle, demonstrating the potential broader usage of these popular technical solutions. For a conceptual definition, we rigorously adopt the terms of skill recognition and skill learning. Skill recognition selects one learned data generation function previously seen during pre-training while skill learning can learn new data generation functions from in-context data. Furthermore, we provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of both abilities, emphasizing their commonalities through the perspective of data generation. This analysis suggests potential directions for future research. The corresponding paper list can be found here.
Inference Scaling for Bridging Retrieval and Augmented Generation (2025)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular approach to steering the output of a large language model (LLM) by incorporating retrieved contexts as inputs. However, existing work observed the generator bias, such that improving the retrieval results may negatively affect the outcome. In this work, we show such bias can be mitigated, from inference scaling, aggregating inference calls from the permuted order of retrieved contexts. The proposed Mixture-of-Intervention (MoI) explicitly models the debiased utility of each passage with multiple forward passes to construct a new ranking. We also show that MoI can leverage the retriever`s prior knowledge to reduce the computational cost by minimizing the number of permutations considered and lowering the cost per LLM call. We showcase the effectiveness of MoI on diverse RAG tasks, improving ROUGE-L on MS MARCO and EM on HotpotQA benchmarks by {\textasciitilde}7 points.
GeoCoder: Solving Geometry Problems by Generating Modular Code through Vision-Language Models (2025)

Geometry problem-solving demands advanced reasoning abilities to process multimodal inputs and employ mathematical knowledge effectively. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in various multimodal tasks. Yet, they still struggle with geometry problems and are significantly limited by their inability to perform mathematical operations not seen during pre-training, such as calculating the cosine of an arbitrary angle, and by difficulties in correctly applying relevant geometry formulas. To overcome these challenges, we present GeoCoder, which leverages modular code-finetuning to generate and execute code using a predefined geometry function library. By executing the code, we achieve accurate and deterministic calculations, contrasting the stochastic nature of autoregressive token prediction, while the function library minimizes errors in formula usage. We also propose a multimodal retrieval-augmented variant of GeoCoder, named RAG-GeoCoder, which incorporates a non-parametric memory module for retrieving functions from the geometry library, thereby reducing reliance on parametric memory. Our modular code-finetuning approach enhances the geometric reasoning capabilities of VLMs, yielding an average improvement of over 16{\%} across various question complexities on the GeomVerse dataset compared to other fine-tuning methods.
SEEval: Advancing LLM Text Evaluation Efficiency and Accuracy through Self-Explanation Prompting (2025)

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various natural language generation (NLG) tasks, but their performance in automatic text evaluation is not yet ready as human replacements. In this paper, we propose SEEval (Self-Explanation in Evaluation), a novel prompt-based text evaluator. Inspired by educational psychology, SEEval incorporates self-explanation, a metacognitive strategy, to enhance automatic text evaluation. Our experimental results show that SEEval, without probability normalization, is able to achieve competitive and often superior performance compared to the two state-of-the-art baselines {--} G-Eval and Analyze-Rate {--} across all evaluation dimensions and is 20 times more efficient in terms of run-time. The SEEval method is also generalizable as its results are consistent across three other selected LLMs {--} Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Command R+, and Mistral-Large 2.
When natural language is not enough: The limits of in-context learning demonstrations in multilingual reasoning (2025)

Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of reasoning methods in eliciting multi-step reasoned answers from Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging in-context demonstrations. These methods, exemplified by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Program-Aided Language Models (PAL), have been shown to perform well in monolingual contexts, primarily in English. There has, however, been limited exploration of their abilities in other languages.To gain a deeper understanding of the role of reasoning methods for in-context demonstrations, we investigate how well CoT and PAL perform across languages for arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks. Our findings indicate that the effectiveness of reasoning methods varies significantly across different languages and models. Specifically, CoT, which relies on natural language demonstrations, tends to be more accurate in high-resource than in low-resource languages. Conversely, the structured nature of PAL demonstrations facilitates multilingual comprehension, enabling LLMs to generate programmatic answers in both high- and low-resource languages and leading to significant performance improvements over CoT concerning the accuracy of the generated responses.
Uncovering Latent Arguments in Social Media Messaging by Employing LLMs-in-the-Loop Strategy (2025)

The widespread use of social media has led to a surge in popularity for automated methods of analyzing public opinion. Supervised methods are adept at text categorization, yet the dynamic nature of social media discussions poses a continual challenge for these techniques due to the constant shifting of the focus. On the other hand, traditional unsupervised methods for extracting themes from public discourse, such as topic modeling, often reveal overarching patterns that might not capture specific nuances. Consequently, a significant portion of research into social media discourse still depends on labor-intensive manual coding techniques and a human-in-the-loop approach, which are both time-consuming and costly. In this work, we study the problem of discovering arguments associated with a specific theme. We propose a generic **LLMs-in-the-Loop** strategy that leverages the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract latent arguments from social media messaging. To demonstrate our approach, we apply our framework to contentious topics. We use two publicly available datasets: (1) the climate campaigns dataset of 14k Facebook ads with 25 themes and (2) the COVID-19 vaccine campaigns dataset of 9k Facebook ads with 14 themes. Additionally, we design a downstream task as stance prediction by leveraging talking points in climate debates. Furthermore, we analyze demographic targeting and the adaptation of messaging based on real-world events.
AcrosticSleuth: Probabilistic Identification and Ranking of Acrostics in Multilingual Corpora (2025)

For centuries, writers have hidden messages as acrostics, in which initial letters of consecutive lines or paragraphs form meaningful words or phrases. Scholars searching for acrostics manually can only focus on a few authors at a time and often favor qualitative arguments about whether a given acrostic is accidental or intentional. Here we describe AcrosticSleuth, a first-of-its-kind approach to identify acrostics automatically and rank them by the probability that the corresponding sequence of characters does not occur by chance. Since acrostics are rare, we formalize the problem as a binary classification task in the presence of extreme class imbalance. To evaluate AcrosticSleuth, we present the Acrostic Identification Dataset (AcrostID), a collection of acrostics from the WikiSource online database. Despite the class imbalance, AcrosticSleuth achieves F1 scores of 0.39, 0.59, and 0.66 on the French, English, and Russian subdomains of WikiSource, respectively. We further demonstrate that AcrosticSleuth can identify previously unknown instances of wordplay in high-profile literary contexts, including the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes' signature in the opening paragraphs of The Elements of Law.
MedThink: A Rationale-Guided Framework for Explaining Medical Visual Question Answering (2025)

Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA), which offers language responses to image-based medical inquiries, represents a challenging task and significant advancement in healthcare. It assists medical experts to swiftly interpret medical images, thereby enabling faster and more accurate diagnoses. However, the model interpretability and transparency of existing Med-VQA solutions are often limited, posing challenges in understanding their decision-making processes. To address this issue, we devise a semi-automated annotation process to streamline data preparation and build new benchmark Med-VQA datasets R-RAD, R-SLAKE and R-Path. These datasets provide intermediate medical decision-making rationales generated by multimodal large language models and human annotations for question-answering pairs in existing Med-VQA datasets, i.e., VQA-RAD, SLAKE and PathVQA. Moreover, we design a novel framework, MedThink, which finetunes lightweight pretrained generative models by incorporating medical decision-making rationales. MedThink includes three distinct strategies to generate decision outcomes and corresponding rationales, clearly showcasing the medical decision-making process during reasoning. Our comprehensive experiments show that our method achieves an accuracy of 83.5{\%} on R-RAD, 86.3{\%} on R-SLAKE and 87.2{\%} on R-Path. These results significantly exceed those of existing state-of-the-art models with comparable parameters. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Tang-xiaoxiao/Medthink.
How to Learn in a Noisy World? Self-Correcting the Real-World Data Noise in Machine Translation (2025)

The massive amounts of web-mined parallel data often contain large amounts of noise. Semantic misalignment, as the primary source of the noise, poses a challenge for training machine translation systems. In this paper, we first introduce a process for simulating misalignment controlled by semantic similarity, which closely resembles misaligned sentences in real-world web-crawled corpora. Under our simulated misalignment noise settings, we quantitatively analyze its impact on machine translation and demonstrate the limited effectiveness of widely used pre-filters for noise detection. This underscores the necessity of more fine-grained ways to handle hard-to-detect misalignment noise. By analyzing the reliability of the model`s self-knowledge for distinguishing misaligned and clean data at the token level, we propose self-correction{---}an approach that gradually increases trust in the model`s self-knowledge to correct the supervision signal during training. Comprehensive experiments show that our method significantly improves translation performance both in the presence of simulated misalignment noise and when applied to real-world, noisy web-mined datasets, across a range of translation tasks.
Rejected Dialects: Biases Against African American Language in Reward Models (2025)

Preference alignment via reward models helps build safe, helpful, and reliable large language models (LLMs). However, subjectivity in preference judgments and the lack of representative sampling in preference data collection can introduce new biases, hindering reward models' fairness and equity. In this work, we introduce a framework for evaluating dialect biases in reward models and conduct a case study on biases against African American Language (AAL) through several experiments comparing reward model preferences and behavior on paired White Mainstream English (WME) and both machine-translated and human-written AAL corpora. We show that reward models are less aligned with human preferences when processing AAL texts vs. WME ones (-4{\%} accuracy on average), frequently disprefer AAL-aligned texts vs. WME-aligned ones, and steer conversations toward WME, even when prompted with AAL texts. Our findings provide a targeted analysis of anti-AAL biases at a relatively understudied stage in LLM development, highlighting representational harms and ethical questions about the desired behavior of LLMs concerning AAL.
Do Large Language Models Align with Core Mental Health Counseling Competencies? (2025)

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a promising solution to the global shortage of mental health professionals. However, their alignment with essential counseling competencies remains underexplored. We introduce CounselingBench, a novel NCMHCE-based benchmark evaluating 22 general-purpose and medical-finetuned LLMs across five key competencies. While frontier models surpass minimum aptitude thresholds, they fall short of expert-level performance, excelling in Intake, Assessment {\&} Diagnosis but struggling with Core Counseling Attributes and Professional Practice {\&} Ethics. Surprisingly, medical LLMs do not outperform generalist models in accuracy, though they provide slightly better justifications while making more context-related errors. These findings highlight the challenges of developing AI for mental health counseling, particularly in competencies requiring empathy and nuanced reasoning. Our results underscore the need for specialized, fine-tuned models aligned with core mental health counseling competencies and supported by human oversight before real-world deployment. Code and data associated with this manuscript can be found at: https://github.com/cuongnguyenx/CounselingBench
Uncertainty Quantification for Clinical Outcome Predictions with (Large) Language Models (2025)

To facilitate healthcare delivery, language models (LMs) have significant potential for clinical prediction tasks using electronic health records (EHRs). However, in these high-stakes applications, unreliable decisions can result in significant costs due to compromised patient safety and ethical concerns, thus increasing the need for good uncertainty modelling of automated clinical predictions. To address this, we consider uncertainty quantification of LMs for EHR tasks in both white-box and black-box settings. We first quantify uncertainty in white-box models, where we have access to model parameters and output logits. We show that an effective reduction of model uncertainty can be achieved by using the proposed multi-tasking and ensemble methods in EHRs. Continuing with this idea, we extend our approach to black-box settings, including popular proprietary LMs such as GPT-4. We validate our framework using longitudinal clinical data from over 6,000 patients across ten clinical prediction tasks. Results show that ensembling methods and multi-task prediction prompts reduce uncertainty across different scenarios. These findings increase model transparency in white-box and black-box settings, thereby advancing reliable AI healthcare.
Hypothesis Generation for Materials Discovery and Design Using Goal-Driven and Constraint-Guided LLM Agents (2025)

Materials discovery and design are essential for advancing technology across various industries by enabling the development of application-specific materials. Recent research has leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to accelerate this process. We explore the potential of LLMs to generate viable hypotheses that, once validated, can expedite materials discovery. Collaborating with materials science experts, we curated a novel dataset from recent journal publications, featuring real-world goals, constraints, and methods for designing real-world applications. Using this dataset, we test LLM-based agents that generate hypotheses for achieving given goals under specific constraints. To assess the relevance and quality of these hypotheses, we propose a novel scalable evaluation metric that emulates the process a materials scientist would use to evaluate a hypothesis critically. Our curated dataset, proposed method, and evaluation framework aim to advance future research in accelerating materials discovery and design with LLMs.
Aligning to What? Limits to RLHF Based Alignment (2025)

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the effectiveness of RLHF in addressing underlying biases remains unclear. This study investigates the relationship between RLHF and both covert and overt biases in LLMs, particularly focusing on biases against African Americans. We applied various RLHF techniques (DPO, ORPO, and RLOO) to Llama 3 8B and evaluated the covert and overt biases of the resulting models using matched-guise probing and explicit bias testing. We performed additional tests with DPO on different base models and datasets; among several implications, we found that SFT before RLHF calcifies model biases. Additionally, we extend the tools for measuring biases to multi-modal models. Through our experiments we collect evidence that indicates that current alignment techniques are inadequate for nebulous tasks such as mitigating covert biases, highlighting the need for capable datasets, data curating techniques, or alignment tools.
Beyond Words: Exploring Cultural Value Sensitivity in Multimodal Models (2025)

Investigating value alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) based on cultural context has become a critical area of research. However, similar biases have not been extensively explored in large vision-language models (VLMs). As the scale of multimodal models continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to assess whether images can serve as reliable proxies for culture and how these values are embedded through the integration of both visual and textual data. In this paper, we conduct a thorough evaluation of multimodal model at different scales, focusing on their alignment with cultural values. Our findings reveal that, much like LLMs, VLMs exhibit sensitivity to cultural values, but their performance in aligning with these values is highly context-dependent. While VLMs show potential in improving value understanding through the use of images, this alignment varies significantly across contexts highlighting the complexities and underexplored challenges in the alignment of multimodal models.
Features that Make a Difference: Leveraging Gradients for Improved Dictionary Learning (2025)

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for extracting neural network representations by learning a sparse and overcomplete decomposition of the network`s internal activations. However, SAEs are traditionally trained considering only activation values and not the effect those activations have on downstream computations. This limits the information available to learn features, and biases the autoencoder towards neglecting features which are represented with small activation values but strongly influence model outputs.To address this, we introduce Gradient SAEs (g-SAEs), which modify the $k$-sparse autoencoder architecture by augmenting the TopK activation function to rely on the gradients of the input activation when selecting the $k$ elements. For a given sparsity level, g-SAEs produce reconstructions that are more faithful to original network performance when propagated through the network.Additionally, we find evidence that g-SAEs learn latents that are on average more effective at steering models in arbitrary contexts.By considering the downstream effects of activations, our approach leverages the dual nature of neural network features as both representations, retrospectively, and actions, prospectively. While previous methods have approached the problem of feature discovery primarily focused on the former aspect, g-SAEs represent a step towards accounting for the latter as well.