ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pointwise Mutual Information as a Performance Gauge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025)

Recent work suggests that large language models enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation are easily influenced by the order in which the retrieved documents are presented to the model when solving tasks such as question answering (QA).However, there is no method to date that exploits this phenomenon to improve generation.To fill this gap, in this study, we show that the pointwise mutual information between a context and a question is an effective gauge for language model performance.Importantly, this gauge does not depend on knowing the answer to the question \textit{a priori}.Through experiments on two question-answering datasets using a variety of large language models, we find evidence for an empirical correlation between answer accuracy and pointwise mutual information.Additionally, we propose two methods that use the pointwise mutual information between a document and a question as a gauge for selecting and constructing prompts that lead to better performance, whose effectiveness we demonstrate through experimentation.
MATO: A Model-Agnostic Training Optimization for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2025)

As an important fine-grained sentiment analysis task, aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) aims to identify three elements, i.e., aspect, opinion and sentiment polarity as a triplet. Advanced ASTE researches have mostly explored triplet-wise ability to achieve superior improvement. However, existing models with strong in-house performances may struggle to generalize to the challenging cases with the diverse expression of inter-triplet and intra-triplet elements. To this end, we propose a **M**odel-**A**gnostic **T**raining **O**ptimization (**MATO**) to improve ASTE model inference consistent with expected results facing triplet element diversity. Specifically, we design inter-triplet and intra-triplet metamorphic relations (MRs), and calculate the violation rate (VR) on each element of one triplet through metamorphic testing (MT), indicating the capacity to accommodate the diverse elements. Moreover, we propose an element-wise diversity-aware loss based on the VRs of aspect, opinion and sentiment, which can be jointly trained with existed ASTE models via uncertainty weighing. Conducted on four benchmark datasets and seven ASTE models, experimental results show that our MATO can enhance their diversity capacity, decreasing the average element-wise VRs by 3.28{\%} to 15.36{\%}. Meanwhile, our MATO is comparable to or better than those in terms of F1-score.
Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts (2025)

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have shown remarkable capability in instruction tuning, especially when the number of tasks scales. However, previous methods simply merge all training tasks (e.g. creative writing, coding, and mathematics) and apply fixed sampling weights, without considering the importance of different tasks as the model training state changes. In this way, the most helpful data cannot be effectively distinguished, leading to suboptimal model performance. To reduce the potential redundancies of datasets, we make the first attempt and propose a novel dynamic data mixture for MoE instruction tuning. Specifically, inspired by MoE`s token routing preference, we build dataset-level representations and then capture the subtle differences among datasets. Finally, we propose to dynamically adjust the sampling weight of datasets by their inter-redundancies, thus maximizing global performance under a limited training budget. The experimental results on two MoE models demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both downstream knowledge {\&} reasoning tasks and open-ended queries.
EmoDynamiX: Emotional Support Dialogue Strategy Prediction by Modelling MiXed Emotions and Discourse Dynamics (2025)

Designing emotionally intelligent conversational systems to provide comfort and advice to people experiencing distress is a compelling area of research. Recently, with advancements in large language models (LLMs), end-to-end dialogue agents without explicit strategy prediction steps have become prevalent. However, implicit strategy planning lacks transparency, and recent studies show that LLMs' inherent preference bias towards certain socio-emotional strategies hinders the delivery of high-quality emotional support. To address this challenge, we propose decoupling strategy prediction from language generation, and introduce a novel dialogue strategy prediction framework, EmoDynamiX, which models the discourse dynamics between user fine-grained emotions and system strategies using a heterogeneous graph for better performance and transparency. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show EmoDynamiX outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with a significant margin (better proficiency and lower preference bias). Our approach also exhibits better transparency by allowing backtracing of decision making.
Divergent Thoughts toward One Goal: LLM-based Multi-Agent Collaboration System for Electronic Design Automation (2025)

Recently, with the development of tool-calling capabilities in large language models (LLMs), these models have demonstrated significant potential for automating electronic design automation (EDA) flows by interacting with EDA tool APIs via EDA scripts.However, considering the limited understanding of EDA tools, LLMs face challenges in practical scenarios where diverse interfaces of EDA tools exist across different platforms.Additionally, EDA flow automation often involves intricate, long-chain tool-calling processes, increasing the likelihood of errors in intermediate steps.Any errors will lead to the instability and failure of EDA flow automation.To address these challenges, we introduce EDAid, a multi-agent collaboration system where multiple agents harboring divergent thoughts converge towards a common goal, ensuring reliable and successful EDA flow automation. Specifically, each agent is controlled by ChipLlama models, which are expert LLMs fine-tuned for EDA flow automation.Our experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of our ChipLlama models and validate the effectiveness of our EDAid in the automation of complex EDA flows, showcasing superior performance compared to single-agent systems.
A Survey of QUD Models for Discourse Processing (2025)

Question Under Discussion (QUD), which is originally a linguistic analytic framework, gains increasing attention in the community of natural language processing over the years. Various models have been proposed for implementing QUD for discourse processing. This survey summarizes these models, with a focus on application to written texts, and examines studies that explore the relationship between QUD and mainstream discourse frameworks, including RST, PDTB and SDRT. Some questions that may require further study are suggested.
SafetyQuizzer: Timely and Dynamic Evaluation on the Safety of LLMs (2025)

With the expansion of the application of Large Language Models (LLMs), concerns about their safety have grown among researchers. Numerous studies have demonstrated the potential risks of LLMs generating harmful content and have proposed various safety assessment benchmarks to evaluate these risks. However, the evaluation questions in current benchmarks, especially for Chinese, are too straightforward, making them easily rejected by target LLMs, and difficult to update with practical relevance due to their lack of correlation with real-world events. This hinders the effective application of these benchmarks in continuous evaluation tasks. To address these limitations, we propose SafetyQuizzer, a question-generation framework designed to evaluate the safety of LLMs more sustainably in the Chinese context. SafetyQuizzer leverages a finetuned LLM and jailbreaking attack templates to generate subtly offensive questions, which reduces the decline rate. Additionally, by utilizing retrieval-augmented generation, SafetyQuizzer incorporates the latest real-world events into evaluation questions, improving the adaptability of the benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate that evaluation questions generated by SafetyQuizzer significantly reduce the decline rate compared to other benchmarks while maintaining a comparable attack success rate. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhichao-stone/SafetyQuizzer. Warning: this paper contains examples that may be offensive or upsetting.
Privacy Checklist: Privacy Violation Detection Grounding on Contextual Integrity Theory (2025)

Privacy research has attracted wide attention as individuals worry that their private data can be easily leaked during interactions with smart devices, social platforms, and AI applications. Existing works mostly consider privacy attacks and defenses on various sub-fields. Within each field, various privacy attacks and defenses are studied to address patterns of personally identifiable information (PII). In this paper, we argue that privacy is not solely about PII patterns. We ground on the Contextual Integrity (CI) theory which posits that people`s perceptions of privacy are highly correlated with the corresponding social context. Based on such an assumption, we formulate privacy as a reasoning problem rather than naive PII matching. We develop the first comprehensive checklist that covers social identities, private attributes, and existing privacy regulations. Unlike prior works on CI that either cover limited expert annotated norms or model incomplete social context, our proposed privacy checklist uses the whole Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) as an example, to show that we can resort to large language models (LLMs) to completely cover the HIPAA`s regulations. Additionally, our checklist also gathers expert annotations across multiple ontologies to determine private information including but not limited to PII. We use our preliminary results on the HIPAA to shed light on future context-centric privacy research to cover more privacy regulations, social norms and standards. We will release the reproducible code and data.
Investigating the (De)Composition Capabilities of Large Language Models in Natural-to-Formal Language Conversion (2025)

Humans have strong capabilities of decomposition and composition in natural-to-formal language conversion (N2F) when faced with an unfamiliar formal language, and can easily cope with compositional gaps and counter-intuitive symbolic names. To investigate whether large language models (LLMs) have this set of basic capabilities in N2F, we propose the STD framework. This framework semi-automatically performs sample and task construction, allowing decoupled evaluation of the set of decomposition and composition capabilities of LLMs in N2F. Based on this framework, we evaluate and analyze the most advanced LLMs, and the main findings include that: (1) the LLMs are deficient in both decomposition and composition; (2) the LLMs show a wide coverage of error types that can be attributed to deficiencies in natural language understanding and the learning and use of symbolic systems; (3) compositional gaps and counter-intuitive symbolic names both affect the decomposition and composition of the LLMs. Our work provides a new perspective for investigating the basic capabilities of decomposition and composition of LLMs in N2F. The detailed analysis of deficiencies and attributions can help subsequent improvements of LLMs.
Stealthy Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Benign Data Mirroring (2025)

Large language model (LLM) safety is a critical issue, with numerous studies employing red team testing to enhance model security. Among these, jailbreak methods explore potential vulnerabilities by crafting malicious prompts that induce model outputs contrary to safety alignments. Existing black-box jailbreak methods often rely on model feedback, repeatedly submitting queries with detectable malicious instructions during the attack search process. Although these approaches are effective, the attacks may be intercepted by content moderators during the search process. We propose an improved transfer attack method that guides malicious prompt construction by locally training a mirror model of the target black-box model through benign data distillation. This method offers enhanced stealth, as it does not involve submitting identifiable malicious instructions to the target model during the search phase. Our approach achieved a maximum attack success rate of 92{\%}, or a balanced value of 80{\%} with an average of 1.5 detectable jailbreak queries per sample against GPT-3.5 Turbo on a subset of AdvBench. These results underscore the need for more robust defense mechanisms.
VividMed: Vision Language Model with Versatile Visual Grounding for Medicine (2025)

Recent advancements in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable promise in generating visually grounded responses. However, their application in the medical domain is hindered by unique challenges. For instance, most VLMs rely on a single method of visual grounding, whereas complex medical tasks demand more versatile approaches. Additionally, while most VLMs process only 2D images, a large portion of medical images are 3D. The lack of medical data further compounds these obstacles. To address these challenges, we present VividMed, a vision language model with versatile visual grounding for medicine. Our model supports generating both semantic segmentation masks and instance-level bounding boxes, and accommodates various imaging modalities, including both 2D and 3D data. We design a three-stage training procedure and an automatic data synthesis pipeline based on open datasets and models. Besides visual grounding tasks, VividMed also excels in other common downstream tasks, including Visual Question Answering (VQA) and report generation. Ablation studies empirically show that the integration of visual grounding ability leads to improved performance on these tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/function2-llx/MMMM.
Mixture of Multimodal Adapters for Sentiment Analysis (2025)

Pre-trained language model (PLM) have achieved great success in text sentiment analysis. However, in practical applications, sentiment is not only conveyed through language but also hidden in other modalities. Therefore, multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) has attracted increasing research interest. Compared to text sentiment analysis, MSA is challenging since (1) emotions hidden in body movements or vocal timbres eclipse traditional analytical methods, and (2) transferring PLM to MSA task requires huge training parameters. Thus, to solve these issues, we introduce the Mixture of Multimodal Adapters (MMA) into the PLM. Specifically, we first design a mixture-of-multimodal-experts module to capture and fuse emotional movements from different data. Meanwhile, we use a compression parameter for each expert to reduce the training burden. We apply our method to two benchmark datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance with a tiny trainable parameter count. For example, compared to the current state-of-the-art method, AcFormer, we only need 1/22 of its training parameters amount (130M$\rightarrow$6M) to achieve better results.
The Impact of Inference Acceleration on Bias of LLMs (2025)

Last few years have seen unprecedented advances in capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). These advancements promise to benefit a vast array of application domains. However, due to their immense size, performing inference with LLMs is both costly and slow. Consequently, a plethora of recent work has proposed strategies to enhance inference efficiency, e.g., quantization, pruning, and caching. These acceleration strategies reduce the inference cost and latency, often by several factors, while maintaining much of the predictive performance measured via common benchmarks. In this work, we explore another critical aspect of LLM performance: demographic bias in model generations due to inference acceleration optimizations. Using a wide range of metrics, we probe bias in model outputs from a number of angles. Analysis of outputs before and after inference acceleration shows significant change in bias. Worryingly, these bias effects are complex and unpredictable. A combination of an acceleration strategy and bias type may show little bias change in one model but may lead to a large effect in another. Our results highlight a need for in-depth and case-by-case evaluation of model bias after it has been modified to accelerate inference.This paper contains prompts and outputs which may be deemed offensive.
AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages (2025)

Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of (1) absence of moderation and (2) censorship due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been overlooked.These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in \textbf{AfriHate} is a tweet annotated by native speakers familiar with the regional culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. We find that model performance highly depends on the language and that multilingual models can help boost performance in low-resource settings.
Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning (2025)

Autonomous planning has been an ongoing pursuit since the inception of artificial intelligence. Based on curated problem solvers, early planning agents could deliver precise solutions for specific tasks but lacked generalization. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) and their powerful reasoning capabilities has reignited interest in autonomous planning by automatically generating reasonable solutions for given tasks. However, prior research and our experiments show that current language agents still lack human-level planning abilities. Even the state-of-the-art reasoning model, OpenAI o1, achieves only 15.6{\%} on one of the complex real-world planning benchmarks. This highlights a critical question: What hinders language agents from achieving human-level planning? Although existing studies have highlighted weak performance in agent planning, the deeper underlying issues and the mechanisms and limitations of the strategies proposed to address them remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we apply the feature attribution study and identify two key factors that hinder agent planning: the limited role of constraints and the diminishing influence of questions. We also find that although current strategies help mitigate these challenges, they do not fully resolve them, indicating that agents still have a long way to go before reaching human-level intelligence.
You Only Read Once (YORO): Learning to Internalize Database Knowledge for Text-to-SQL (2025)

While significant progress has been made on the text-to-SQL task, recent solutions repeatedly encode the same database schema for every question, resulting in unnecessary high inference cost and often overlooking crucial database knowledge. To address these issues, we propose You Only Read Once (YORO), a novel paradigm that directly internalizes database knowledge into the parametric knowledge of a text-to-SQL model during training and eliminates the need for schema encoding during inference. YORO significantly reduces the input token length by 66{\%}-98{\%}. Despite its shorter inputs, our empirical results demonstrate YORO`s competitive performances with traditional systems on three benchmarks as well as its significant outperformance on large databases. Furthermore, YORO excels in handling questions with challenging value retrievals such as abbreviation.
Option Symbol Matters: Investigating and Mitigating Multiple-Choice Option Symbol Bias of Large Language Models (2025)

Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a widely used task in the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we reveal that current LLMs' performance in MCQA could be heavily influenced by the choice of option symbol sets, due to the option symbol bias. That is, when altering only the option symbols (e.g., A/B/C/D$\rightarrow$i/ii/iii/iv), the results could vary sharply, leading to a margin of approximately 10{\%} in accuracy. To uncover the mechanisms behind this, we investigate the internal components of LLMs from a causal perspective. By measuring the causal effects, we identify a small subset of attention heads responsible for the symbol bias. Subsequently, we interpret these key components in a human-understandable way, showing that attention heads with higher causal effects are more likely to focus on only option symbols, while those with lower causal effects tend to distribute their attention across the content of questions and options. It also motivates us to pursue debiasing based on the causal effects. Specifically, to mitigate such bias, we propose a tuning-free, causal effect driven debiasing method which intervenes the activations of identified components according to their causal effects, with stronger interventions corresponding to higher causal effects. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method not only alleviates aforementioned bias, but also improves the MCQA performance of LLMs.
DAWN-ICL: Strategic Planning of Problem-solving Trajectories for Zero-Shot In-Context Learning (2025)

Zero-shot in-context learning (ZS-ICL) aims to conduct in-context learning (ICL) without using human-annotated demonstrations.Existing ZS-ICL methods either use large language models (LLMs) to generate (input, label) pairs as pseudo-demonstrations or leverage historical pseudo-demonstrations to help solve the current problem.They assume that all problems are from the same task and traverse them in a random order.However, in real-world scenarios, problems usually come from diverse tasks, and only a few belong to the same task.The random traversing order may generate unreliable pseudo-demonstrations and lead to error accumulation.To address this problem, we reformulate ZS-**ICL** as a planning problem and propose a **D**emonstration-**AW**are Mo**N**te Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) approach (DAWN-ICL), which leverages MCTS to strategically plan the problem-solving trajectories for ZS-ICL.In addition, to achieve effective and efficient $Q$ value estimation, we propose a demonstration-aware $Q$-value function and use it to enhance the selection phase and accelerate the expansion and simulation phases in MCTS.Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DAWN-ICL on in-domain and cross-domain scenarios, and it even outperforms ICL using human-annotated demonstrations.The code is available at https://github.com/txy77/MCTS4ZSICL.