ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Palette of Language Models: A Solver for Controlled Text Generation (2025)

Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. These models can produce controlled texts that closely adhere to specific requirements when prompted appropriately. However, designing an optimal prompt to control multiple attributes simultaneously can be challenging. A common approach is to linearly combine single-attribute models, but this strategy often overlooks attribute overlaps and can lead to conflicts. Therefore, we propose a novel combination strategy inspired by the Law of Total Probability and Conditional Mutual Information Minimization on generative language models. This method has been adapted for single-attribute control scenario and is termed the Palette of Language Models due to its theoretical linkage between attribute strength and generation style, akin to blending colors on an artist`s palette. Moreover, positive correlation and attribute enhancement are advanced as theoretical properties to guide a rational combination strategy design. We conduct experiments on both single control and multiple control settings, and achieve surpassing results.
MAMM-Refine: A Recipe for Improving Faithfulness in Generation with Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025)

Multi-agent collaboration among models has shown promise in reasoning tasks but is underexplored in long-form generation tasks like summarization and question-answering. We extend multi-agent multi-model reasoning to generation, specifically to improving faithfulness through refinement, i.e., revising model-generated outputs to remove factual inconsistencies. We investigate how iterative collaboration among multiple instances and types of large language models (LLMs) enhances subtasks in the refinement process, such as error detection, critiquing unfaithful sentences, and making corrections based on critiques. We design intrinsic evaluations for each subtask, with our findings indicating that both multi-agent (multiple instances) and multi-model (diverse LLM types) approaches benefit error detection and critiquing. Additionally, reframing critiquing and refinement as reranking rather than generation tasks improves multi-agent performance. We consolidate these insights into a final {\textquotedblleft}recipe{\textquotedblright} called **M**ulti-**A**gent **M**ulti-**M**odel **Refine**ment (MAMM-Refine), where multi-agent and multi-model collaboration significantly boosts performance on three summarization datasets as well as on long-form question answering, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our recipe. Our code is publicly available.
MADial-Bench: Towards Real-world Evaluation of Memory-Augmented Dialogue Generation (2025)

Long-term memory is important for chatbots and dialogue systems (DS) to create consistent and human-like conversations, evidenced by numerous developed memory-augmented DS (MADS). To evaluate the effectiveness of such MADS, existing commonly used evaluation metrics, like retrieval accuracy and perplexity (PPL), mainly focus on query-oriented factualness and language quality assessment. However, these metrics often lack practical value. Moreover, the evaluation dimensions are insufficient for human-like assessment in DS. Regarding memory-recalling paradigms, current evaluation schemes only consider passive memory retrieval while ignoring diverse memory recall with rich triggering factors, e.g., emotions and surroundings, which can be essential in emotional support scenarios. To bridge the gap, we construct a novel Memory-Augmented Dialogue Benchmark (MADail-Bench) covering various memory-recalling paradigms based on cognitive science and psychology theories. The benchmark assesses two tasks separately: memory retrieval and memory recognition with the incorporation of both passive and proactive memory recall data. We introduce new scoring criteria to the evaluation, including memory injection, emotion support (ES) proficiency, and intimacy, to comprehensively assess generated responses. Results from cutting-edge embedding models and large language models on this benchmark indicate the potential for further advancement. Extensive testing further reveals correlations between memory injection, ES proficiency, and intimacy.
Assessing the State of the Art in Scene Segmentation (2025)

The detection of scenes in literary texts is a recently introduced segmentation task in computational literary studies. Its goal is to partition a fictional text into segments that are coherent across the dimensions time, space, action and character constellation. This task is very challenging for automatic methods, since it requires a high-level understanding of the text. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of the State of the Art and challenges in this task, identifying and solving a problem in the training procedure for previous approaches, analysing the generalisation capabilities of the models and comparing the BERT-based SotA to current Llama models, as well as providing an analysis of what causes errors in the models. Our change in training procedure provides a significant increase in performance. We find that Llama-based models are more robust to different types of texts, while their overall performance is slightly worse than that of BERT-based models.
DCE-LLM: Dead Code Elimination with Large Language Models (2025)

Dead code introduces several challenges in software development, such as increased binary size and maintenance difficulties. It can also obscure logical errors and be exploited for obfuscation in malware. For LLM-based code-related tasks, dead code introduces vulnerabilities that can mislead these models, raising security concerns. Although modern compilers and IDEs offer dead code elimination, sophisticated patterns can bypass these tools. A universal approach that includes classification, location, explanation, and correction is needed, yet current tools often require significant manual effort. We present DCE-LLM, a framework for automated dead code elimination using a small CodeBERT model with an attribution-based line selector to efficiently locate suspect code. LLMs then generate judgments and explanations, fine-tuned on a large-scale, annotated dead code dataset to provide detailed explanations and patches. DCE-LLM outperforms existing tools, with advanced unreachability detection, automated correction, and support for multiple programming languages. Experimental results show DCE-LLM achieves over 94{\%} F1 scores for unused and unreachable code, significantly surpassing GPT-4o by 30{\%}.
Instruct-of-Reflection: Enhancing Large Language Models Iterative Reflection Capabilities via Dynamic-Meta Instruction (2025)

Self-reflection for Large LanguageModels (LLMs) has gained significant attention. Existing approaches involve models iterating and improving their previous responses based on LLMs' internal reflection ability or external feedback. However, recent research has raised doubts about whether intrinsic self-correction without external feedback may even degrade performance. Based on our empirical evidence, we find that current static reflection methods may lead to redundant, drift, and stubborn issues. To mitigate this, we introduce **I**nstruct-**o**f-**R**eflec**t**ion (**IoRT**), a novel and general reflection framework that leverages dynamic-meta instruction to enhance the iterative reflection capability of LLMs. Specifically, we propose the instructor driven by the meta-thoughts and self-consistency classifier, generates various instructions, including refresh, stop, and select, to guide the next reflection iteration. Our experiments demonstrate that IoRT achieves an average improvement of 10.1{\%} over established baselines in mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks, highlighting its efficacy and applicability. Our code is available at https://github.com/llp635/IoRT.
Correcting Negative Bias in Large Language Models through Negative Attention Score Alignment (2025)

A binary decision task, like yes-no questions or answer verification, reflects a significant real-world scenario such as where users look for confirmation about the correctness of their decisions on specific issues. In this work, we observe that language models exhibit a negative bias in the binary decisions of complex reasoning tasks. Based on our observations and the rationale about attention-based model dynamics, we propose a negative attention score (NAS) to systematically and quantitatively formulate negative bias. Based on NAS, we identify attention heads that attend to negative tokens provided in the instructions as answer candidate of binary decisions, regardless of the question in the prompt, and validate their association with the negative bias. Additionally, we propose the negative attention score alignment (NASA) method, which is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique to address the extracted negatively biased attention heads. Experimental results from various domains of reasoning tasks and large model search space demonstrate that NASA significantly reduces the gap between precision and recall caused by negative bias while preserving their generalization abilities.
MiCEval: Unveiling Multimodal Chain of Thought`s Quality via Image Description and Reasoning Steps (2025)

**Multimodal Chain of Thought (MCoT)** is a popular prompting strategy for improving the performance of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) across a range of complex reasoning tasks. Despite its popularity, there is a notable absence of automated methods for evaluating the quality of reasoning steps in MCoT. To address this gap, we propose **Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Evaluation (MiCEval)**, a framework designed to assess the correctness of reasoning chains by evaluating the quality of both the description and each reasoning step. The evaluation of the description component focuses on the accuracy of the image descriptions, while the reasoning step evaluates the quality of each step as it is conditionally generated based on the preceding steps. MiCEval is built upon a fine-grained dataset with annotations that rate each step according to correctness, relevance, and informativeness. Extensive experiments on four state-of-the-art MLLMs show that step-wise evaluations using MiCEval align more closely with human judgments compared to existing methods based on cosine similarity or fine-tuning approaches. MiCEval datasets and code can be found at: [https://anonymous{\_}github/MicEval](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MiCEval-847F/README.md).
CartesianMoE: Boosting Knowledge Sharing among Experts via Cartesian Product Routing in Mixture-of-Experts (2025)

Large language models (LLM) have been attracting much attention from the community recently, due to their remarkable performance in all kinds of downstream tasks. According to the well-known scaling law, scaling up a dense LLM enhances its capabilities, but also significantly increases the computational complexity. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models address that by allowing the model size to grow without substantially raising training or inference costs. Yet MoE models face challenges regarding knowledge sharing among experts, making their performance somehow sensitive to routing accuracy. To tackle that, previous works introduced shared experts and combined their outputs with those of the top $K$ routed experts in an addition manner. In this paper, inspired by collective matrix factorization to learn shared knowledge among data, we propose CartesianMoE, which implements more effective knowledge sharing among experts in more like a multiplication manner. Extensive experimental results indicate that CartesianMoE outperforms previous MoE models for building LLMs, in terms of both perplexity and downstream task performance. And we also find that CartesianMoE achieves better expert routing robustness.
Measuring and Benchmarking Large Language Models' Capabilities to Generate Persuasive Language (2025)

We are exposed to much information trying to influence us, such as teaser messages, debates, politically framed news, and propaganda {---} all of which use persuasive language. With the recent interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study the ability of LLMs to produce persuasive text. As opposed to prior work which focuses on particular domains or types of persuasion, we conduct a general study across various domains to measure and benchmark to what degree LLMs produce persuasive language - both when explicitly instructed to rewrite text to be more or less persuasive and when only instructed to paraphrase. We construct the new dataset Persuasive-Pairs of pairs of a short text and its rewrite by an LLM to amplify or diminish persuasive language. We multi-annotate the pairs on a relative scale for persuasive language: a valuable resource in itself, and for training a regression model to score and benchmark persuasive language, including for new LLMs across domains. In our analysis, we find that different {\textquoteleft}personas' in LLaMA3`s system prompt change persuasive language substantially, even when only instructed to paraphrase.
MILU: A Multi-task Indic Language Understanding Benchmark (2025)

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource and linguistically diverse languages remains a significant challenge in NLP, particularly for languages using non-Latin scripts like those spoken in India. Existing benchmarks predominantly focus on English, leaving substantial gaps in assessing LLM capabilities in these languages. We introduce MILU, a Multi-task Indic Language Understanding Benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark designed to address this gap. MILU spans 8 domains and 41 subjects across 11 Indic languages, reflecting general and culturally specific knowledge. With an India-centric design, incorporates material from regional and state-level examinations, covering topics such as local history, arts, festivals, and laws, alongside standard subjects like science and mathematics. We evaluate over 42 LLMs, and find that current LLMs struggle with MILU, with GPT-4o achieving the highest average accuracy at 74 percent. Open multilingual models outperform language-specific fine-tuned models, which perform only slightly better than random baselines. Models also perform better in high resource languages as compared to low resource ones. Domain-wise analysis indicates that models perform poorly in culturally relevant areas like Arts and Humanities, Law and Governance compared to general fields like STEM. To the best of our knowledge, MILU is the first of its kind benchmark focused on Indic languages, serving as a crucial step towards comprehensive cultural evaluation. All code, benchmarks, and artifacts are publicly available to foster open research.
AutoEval-ToD: Automated Evaluation of Task-oriented Dialog Systems (2025)

Task-oriented Dialog systems (ToD) are essential in automating user interactions, but their complex design and dynamic nature make evaluation particularly challenging. Current evaluation methodologies heavily depend on human annotators, which can be inefficient, subjective, and expensive to scale. To advance the field, there is a pressing need for a reliable, scalable, and systematic evaluation framework that can provide comprehensive insights into ToD system performance. In this paper, we propose, AutoEval-TOD, an automated end-to-end evaluation framework using large language models (LLMs). Our framework first interacts with the ToD system and then assesses its performance across key dimensions by analyzing both the ToD`s responses and internal states. We validate our approach by applying it to multiple ToD systems, highlighting its adaptability and potential for widespread use in both research and industrial settings.
Self-calibration for Language Model Quantization and Pruning (2025)

Quantization and pruning are fundamental approaches for model compression, enabling efficient inference for language models. In a post-training setting, state-of-the-art quantization and pruning methods require calibration data, a small set of unlabeled examples. Conventionally, this is randomly sampled web text, aiming to reflect the model training data. However, this poses two key problems: (1) unrepresentative calibration examples can harm model performance, and (2) organizations increasingly avoid releasing model training data. In this paper, we propose self-calibration as a solution. Our approach requires no external data, instead leveraging the model itself to generate synthetic calibration data, with a view to better approximating the pre-training data distribution. We extensively compare the performance of self-calibration with several baselines, across a variety of models, compression methods, and tasks. Our approach proves consistently competitive in maximizing downstream task performance, frequently outperforming even using real data.
Logic-of-Thought: Injecting Logic into Contexts for Full Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks but their performance in complex logical reasoning tasks remains unsatisfactory. Although some prompting methods, such as Chain-of-Thought, can improve the reasoning ability of LLMs to some extent, they suffer from an unfaithful issue where derived conclusions may not align with the generated reasoning chain. To address this issue, some studies employ the approach of propositional logic to further enhance logical reasoning abilities of LLMs. However, the potential omissions in the extraction of logical expressions in these methods can cause information loss in the logical reasoning process, thereby generating incorrect results. To this end, we propose Logic-of-Thought (LoT) prompting which employs propositional logic to generate expanded logical information descriptions and utilizes them as an additional augmentation to original contexts, thereby ensuring information completeness and enhancing logical reasoning ability. LoT is orthogonal to existing prompting methods and can be seamlessly integrated with them. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoT boosts the performance of various prompting methods with a striking margin across five logical reasoning tasks. In particular, LoT enhances Chain-of-Thought`s performance on the ReClor dataset by +4.35{\%}, improves Chain-of-Thought with Self-Consistency`s performance on the RuleTaker dataset by +3.52{\%}, and boosts performance of Tree-of-Thoughts on the ProofWriter dataset by +8{\%}.
IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval (2025)

We introduce IFIR, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate instruction-following information retrieval (IR) in expert domains. IFIR includes 2,426 high-quality examples and covers eight subsets across four specialized domains: finance, law, healthcare, and science literature. Each subset addresses one or more domain-specific retrieval tasks, replicating real-world scenarios where customized instructions are critical. IFIR enables a detailed analysis of instruction-following retrieval capabilities by incorporating instructions at different levels of complexity. We also propose a novel LLM-based evaluation method to provide a more precise and reliable assessment of model performance in following instructions. Through extensive experiments on 15 frontier retrieval models, including those based on LLMs, our results reveal that current models face significant challenges in effectively following complex, domain-specific instructions. We further provide in-depth analyses to highlight these limitations, offering valuable insights to guide future advancements in retriever development.
QAVA: Query-Agnostic Visual Attack to Large Vision-Language Models (2025)

In typical multimodal tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), adversarial attacks targeting a specific image and question can lead large vision-language models (LVLMs) to provide incorrect answers. However, it is common for a single image to be associated with multiple questions, and LVLMs may still answer other questions correctly even for an adversarial image attacked by a specific question. To address this, we introduce the query-agnostic visual attack (QAVA), which aims to create robust adversarial examples that generate incorrect responses to unspecified and unknown questions. Compared to traditional adversarial attacks focused on specific images and questions, QAVA significantly enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of attacks on images when the question is unknown, achieving performance comparable to attacks on known target questions. Our research broadens the scope of visual adversarial attacks on LVLMs in practical settings, uncovering previously overlooked vulnerabilities, particularly in the context of visual adversarial threats. The code is available at https://github.com/btzyd/qava.
Evaluating and Improving Graph to Text Generation with Large Language Models (2025)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense potential across various tasks. However, research for exploring and improving the capabilities of LLMs in interpreting graph structures remains limited. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of prompting current open-source LLMs on graph-to-text generation tasks. Although we explored the optimal prompting strategies and proposed a novel and effective diversity-difficulty-based few-shot sample selection method, we found that the improvements from tuning-free approaches were incremental, as LLMs struggle with planning on complex graphs, particularly those with a larger number of triples. To further improve LLMs in planning with graph sequences and grounding in truth, we introduce a new graph-to-text dataset, PlanGTG, annotated with two sub-tasks: reordering and attribution. Through extensive automatic and human evaluations, we demonstrate significant improvements in the quality of generated text from both few-shot learning and fine-tuning perspectives using the PlanGTG dataset. Our study paves the way for new research directions in graph-to-text generation.
Ensembling Large Language Models with Process Reward-Guided Tree Search for Better Complex Reasoning (2025)

Despite recent advances in large language models, open-source models often struggle to consistently perform well on complex reasoning tasks. Existing ensemble methods, whether applied at the token or output levels, fail to address these challenges. In response, we present Language model Ensemble with Monte Carlo Tree Search (LE-MCTS), a novel framework for process-level ensembling of language models. LE-MCTS formulates step-by-step reasoning with an ensemble of language models as a Markov decision process. In this framework, states represent intermediate reasoning paths, while actions consist of generating the next reasoning step using one of the language models selected from a predefined pool. Guided by a process-based reward model, LE-MCTS performs a tree search over the reasoning steps generated by different language models, identifying the most accurate reasoning chain. Experimental results on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms both single language model decoding algorithms and language model ensemble methods. Notably, LE-MCTS improves performance by 3.6{\%} and 4.3{\%} on the MATH and MQA datasets, respectively, highlighting its effectiveness in solving complex reasoning problems.