ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Uncovering Bias in Large Vision-Language Models at Scale with Counterfactuals (2025)

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) possessing increasingly impressive capabilities, a number of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have been proposed to augment LLMs with visual inputs. Such models condition generated text on both an input image and a text prompt, enabling a variety of use cases such as visual question answering and multimodal chat. While prior studies have examined the social biases contained in text generated by LLMs, this topic has been relatively unexplored in LVLMs. Examining social biases in LVLMs is particularly challenging due to the confounding contributions of bias induced by information contained across the text and visual modalities. To address this challenging problem, we conduct a large-scale study of text generated by different LVLMs under counterfactual changes to input images, producing over 57 million responses from popular models. Our multi-dimensional bias evaluation framework reveals that social attributes such as perceived race, gender, and physical characteristics depicted in images can significantly influence the generation of toxic content, competency-associated words, harmful stereotypes, and numerical ratings of individuals.
AEGIS2.0: A Diverse AI Safety Dataset and Risks Taxonomy for Alignment of LLM Guardrails (2025)

As Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI become increasingly widespread, concerns about content safety have grown in parallel. Currently, there is a clear lack of high-quality, human-annotated datasets that address the full spectrum of LLM-related safety risks and are usable for commercial applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a comprehensive and adaptable taxonomy for categorizing safety risks, structured into 12 top-level hazard categories with an extension to 9 fine-grained subcategories. This taxonomy is designed to meet the diverse requirements of downstream users, offering more granular and flexible tools for managing various risk types. Using a hybrid data generation pipeline that combines human annotations with a multi-LLM {\textquotedblleft}jury{\textquotedblright} system to assess the safety of responses we obtain Aegis2.0, a carefully curated collection of 34,248 samples of human-LLM interactions, annotated according to our proposed taxonomy. To validate its effectiveness, we demonstrate that several lightweight models, trained using parameter-efficient techniques on Aegis2.0, achieve performance competitive with leading safety models fully fine-tuned on much larger, non-commercial datasets generated leveraging GPT-4. Additionally, we introduce a novel training blend that combines topic following data with safety data. This approach enhances the adaptability of guard models, enabling them to generalize to new risk categories defined during inference. We plan to open-source Aegis2.0 data and models to the research community to aid in safety guardrailing of LLMs.
UOREX: Towards Uncertainty-Aware Open Relation Extraction (2025)

Open relation extraction (OpenRE) aims to identify relational facts within open-domain corpora without relying on predefined relation types. A significant limitation of current state-of-the-art OpenRE approaches is their inability to accurately self-assess their performance. Which is caused by the reliance on pseudo-labels, that treats all points within a cluster equally, regardless of their actual relative position according to the cluster center. This leads to models that are often overconfident in their incorrect predictions , significantly undermining their reliability. In this paper, we introduce an approach that addresses this challenge by effectively modeling a part of the epistemic uncertainty within OpenRE. Instead of using pseudo labels that mask uncertainty, our approach is built to train a classifier directly with the clustering distribution. Our experimental results across various datasets demonstrate that the suggested approach improves reliability of OpenRE by preventing overconfident errors. Furthermore we show that by improving the reliability of the predictions, UOREX operates more efficiently in a generative active learning context where an LLM is the oracle, doubling the performance gain compared to the state-of-the-art.
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025)

Due to the scarcity of agent-oriented pre-training data, LLM-based autonomous agents typically rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning, which often fails to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. We introduce Hephaestus-Forge, the first large-scale pre-training corpus designed to enhance the fundamental capabilities of LLM agents in API function calling, intrinsic reasoning and planning, and adapting to environmental feedback. Hephaestus-Forge comprises 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs, including both tool documentation to introduce knowledge of API functions and function calling trajectories to strengthen intrinsic reasoning. To explore effective training protocols, we investigate scaling laws to identify the optimal recipe in data mixing ratios. By continual pre-training on Hephaestus-Forge, Hephaestus outperforms small- to medium-scale open-source LLMs and rivals commercial LLMs on three agent benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pre-training corpus in enhancing fundamental agentic capabilities and generalization of LLMs to new tasks or environments.
TinyThinker: Distilling Reasoning through Coarse-to-Fine Knowledge Internalization with Self-Reflection (2025)

Large Language Models exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks, motivating efforts to distill these capabilities into smaller models through generated reasoning data. However, direct training on such synthesized reasoning data may lead to superficial imitation of reasoning process, rather than fostering a genuine integration of reasoning capabilities with underlying knowledge. To address this, we propose TinyThinker, a framework introducing two novel approaches. First, we introduce a three-stage process that incrementally guides the student model through the reasoning process, progressively refining knowledge from coarse to fine granularity. Second, we develop a two-phase training framework comprising an initial reasoning acquisition phase followed by a self-reflection phase utilizing self-generated data. Experiments on commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that TinyThinker achieves superior performance compared to baselines. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component in our framework. We expect that TinyThinker can be extended to other knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks, offering an alternative strategy for developing effective reasoning capabilities in smaller language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/shengminp/TinyThinker.
VisDoM: Multi-Document QA with Visually Rich Elements Using Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025)

Understanding information from a collection of multiple documents, particularly those with visually rich elements, is important for document-grounded question answering. This paper introduces VisDoMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate QA systems in multi-document settings with rich multimodal content, including tables, charts, and presentation slides. We propose VisDoMRAG, a novel multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that simultaneously utilizes visual and textual RAG, combining robust visual retrieval capabilities with sophisticated linguistic reasoning. VisDoMRAG employs a multi-step reasoning process encompassing evidence curation and chain-of-thought reasoning for concurrent textual and visual RAG pipelines. A key novelty of VisDoMRAG is its consistency-constrained modality fusion mechanism, which aligns the reasoning processes across modalities at inference time to produce a coherent final answer. This leads to enhanced accuracy in scenarios where critical information is distributed across modalities and improved answer verifiability through implicit context attribution. Through extensive experiments involving open-source and proprietary large language models, we benchmark state-of-the-art document QA methods on VisDoMBench. Extensive results show that VisDoMRAG outperforms unimodal and long-context LLM baselines for end-to-end multimodal document QA by 12-20{\%}.
VTechAGP: An Academic-to-General-Audience Text Paraphrase Dataset and Benchmark Models (2025)

Existing text simplification or paraphrase datasets mainly focus on sentence-level text generation in a general domain. These datasets are typically developed without using domain knowledge. In this paper, we release a novel dataset, VTechAGP, which is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset consisting of document-level these and dissertation academic and general-audience abstract pairs from 8 colleges authored over 25 years. We also propose a novel dynamic soft prompt generative language model, DSPT5. For training, we leverage a contrastive-generative loss function to learn the keyword vectors in the dynamic prompt. For inference, we adopt a crowd-sampling decoding strategy at both semantic and structural levels to further select the best output candidate. We evaluate DSPT5 and various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) from multiple perspectives. Results demonstrate that the SOTA LLMs do not provide satisfactory outcomes, while the lightweight DSPT5 can achieve competitive results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build a benchmark dataset and solutions for academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset. Models will be public after acceptance.
Large Language Models Share Representations of Latent Grammatical Concepts Across Typologically Diverse Languages (2025)

Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In this work, we explore the extent to which LLMs share representations of morphsyntactic concepts such as grammatical number, gender, and tense across languages. We train sparse autoencoders on Llama-3-8B and Aya-23-8B, and demonstrate that abstract grammatical concepts are often encoded in feature directions shared across many languages. We use causal interventions to verify the multilingual nature of these representations; specifically, we show that ablating only multilingual features decreases classifier performance to near-chance across languages. We then use these features to precisely modify model behavior in a machine translation task; this demonstrates both the generality and selectivity of these feature`s roles in the network. Our findings suggest that even models trained predominantly on English data can develop robust, cross-lingual abstractions of morphosyntactic concepts.
Examining and Adapting Time for Multilingual Classification via Mixture of Temporal Experts (2025)

Time is implicitly embedded in classification process: classifiers are usually built on existing data while to be applied on future data whose distributions (e.g., label and token) may change. However, existing state-of-the-art classification models merely consider the temporal variations and primarily focus on English corpora, which leaves temporal studies less explored, let alone under multilingual settings. In this study, we fill the gap by treating time as domains (e.g., 2024 vs. 2025), examining temporal effects, and developing a domain adaptation framework to generalize classifiers over time on four languages, English, Danish, French, and German. Our framework proposes Mixture of Temporal Experts (MoTE) to leverage both semantic and data distributional shifts to learn and adapt temporal trends into classification models. Our analysis shows classification performance varies over time across different languages, and we experimentally demonstrate that MoTE can enhance classifier generalizability over temporal data shifts. Our study provides analytic insights and addresses the need for time-aware models that perform robustly in multilingual scenarios.
FLEURS-ASL: Including American Sign Language in Massively Multilingual Multitask Evaluation (2025)

Sign language translation has historically been peripheral to mainstream machine translation research. In order to help converge the fields, we introduce FLEURS-ASL, an extension of the multiway parallel benchmarks FLORES (for text) and FLEURS (for speech) to support their first sign language (as video), American Sign Language, translated by 5 Certified Deaf Interpreters. FLEURS-ASL can be used to evaluate a variety of tasks{---}primarily sentence- and discourse-level translation{---}between ASL and 200 other languages as text, or 102 languages as speech. We provide baselines for tasks from ASL to English text using a unified modeling approach that incorporates timestamp tokens and previous text tokens in a 34-second context window, trained on random video clips from YouTube-ASL. This model meets or exceeds the performance of phrase-level baselines while supporting a multitude of new tasks. We also use FLEURS-ASL to show that multimodal frontier models have virtually no understanding of ASL, underscoring the importance of including sign languages in standard evaluation suites.
EvoAgent: Towards Automatic Multi-Agent Generation via Evolutionary Algorithms (2025)

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) has spurred a new trend in building LLM-based autonomous agents for solving complex tasks, especially multi-agent systems. Despite the remarkable progress, we notice that existing works are heavily dependent on human-designed frameworks, which greatly limits the functional scope and scalability of agent systems. How to automatically extend the specialized agent to multi-agent systems to improve task-solving capability still remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce EVOAGENT, a generic method to automatically extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems via the evolutionary algorithm, thereby improving the effectiveness of LLM-based agents in solving tasks. Specifically, we consider the existing agent frameworks as the initial individual and then apply a series of evolutionary operators (e.g., mutation, crossover, selection, etc.) to generate multiple agents with diverse settings. Experimental results across various tasks show that EVOAGENT can significantly enhance the tasksolving capability of LLM-based agents, and can be generalized to any LLM-based agent framework to extend them into multi-agent systems. Resources are available at https://evo-agent.github.io/.
EmoCharacter: Evaluating the Emotional Fidelity of Role-Playing Agents in Dialogues (2025)

Role-playing agents (RPAs) powered by large language models (LLMs) have been widely utilized in dialogue systems for their capability to deliver personalized interactions. Current evaluations of RPAs mainly focus on personality fidelity, tone imitation, and knowledge consistency, while overlooking emotional fidelity, a key factor that affects user experience. To this end, we propose a benchmark called EmoCharacter to assess emotional fidelity of RPAs in dialogues. EmoCharacter includes two benchmark datasets (single-turn and multi-turn dialogues), three evaluation settings, and six metrics to measure the emotional fidelity between RPAs and the characters they portray. Based on EmoCharacter, we conduct extensive evaluations on RPAs powered by seven widely used LLMs with representative role-playing methods. Our empirical findings reveal that: (1) Contrary to intuition, current role-playing methods often reduce the emotional fidelity of LLMs in dialogues; (2) Enhancing the general capabilities of LLMs does not necessarily improve the emotional fidelity of RPAs; (3) Fine-tuning or In-Context Learning based on real dialogue data can enhance emotional fidelity.
Language Models can Categorize System Inputs for Performance Analysis (2025)

Language model systems are used to process diverse categories of input requests, ranging from improving creative writing to solving programming challenges. It would be useful to know which categories they are good at. However, existing evaluations compare model performance on pre-defined categories, failing to reflect a system`s performance on finer-grained or novel ones. We propose to automatically search for finer-grained categories based on inputs where a system performs well or poorly, and describe them in natural language. To search for these categories, we propose a large number of candidate category descriptions, e.g. {\textquotedblleft}Communication Improvement{\textquotedblright}, find the subset of inputs that match the category descriptions, and calculate the performance on these categories; then we sort these categories based on their performance, thereby highlighting those that score high or low. As one application, we apply our method to compare LLaMA 3-70B and Claude 3 Opus, which have similar Elo-ratings on Chatbot Arena; our method finds the former is weaker at making text more professional and humorous while better at providing psychological insights, depicting a more nuanced picture of model performance.
FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025)

Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored, and their performance on complex tasks like financial agent remains unknown. This paper presents FinEval, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. The dataset contains 8,351 questions categorized into four different key areas: Financial Academic Knowledge, Financial Industry Knowledge, Financial Security Knowledge, and Financial Agent. Financial Academic Knowledge comprises 4,661 multiple-choice questions spanning 34 subjects such as finance and economics. Financial Industry Knowledge contains 1,434 questions covering practical scenarios like investment research. Financial Security Knowledge assesses models through 1,640 questions on topics like application security and cryptography. Financial Agent evaluates tool usage and complex reasoning with 616 questions. FinEval has multiple evaluation settings, including zero-shot, five-shot with chain-of-thought, and assesses model performance using objective and subjective criteria. Our results show that Claude 3.5-Sonnet achieves the highest weighted average score of 72.9 across all financial domain categories under zero-shot setting. Our work provides a comprehensive benchmark closely aligned with Chinese financial domain. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/SUFE-AIFLMLab/FinEval.
Rethinking the Role of LLMs for Document-level Relation Extraction: a Refiner with Task Distribution and Probability Fusion (2025)

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) provides a broad context for extracting one or more relations for each entity pair. Large language models (LLMs) have made great progress in relation extraction tasks. However, one of the main challenges we face is that LLMs have difficulty in multi-label relation prediction tasks. Additionally, another noteworthy challenge and discovery we reveal: the small language models (SLMs) for DocRE tend to classify existing relations as {\textquotedblright}no relation{\textquotedblright} (NA), while LLMs tend to predict existing relations for all entity pairs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that utilizes LLMs as a refiner, employing task distribution and probability fusion. The task distribution we carefully designed aims to distinguish hard and easy tasks, and feed hard tasks to our LLMs-based framework to reevaluate and refine. Further, in order to effectively solve the multi-label relation prediction problem in the refinement process, we propose a probability fusion method, ensuring and enhancing fusion predictions by maintaining a balance between SLMs and LLMs. Extensive experiments on widely-used datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing LLMbased methods without fine-tuning by an average of 25.2{\%} F1. Refining SLMs using our method consistently boosts the performance of the SLMs, achieving new state-of-the-art results compared to existing SLMs and LLMs. Our code: https://github.com/Drasick/Drell.
Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance? (2025)

Fact-checking pipelines increasingly adopt the Decompose-Then-Verify paradigm, where texts are broken down into smaller claims for individual verification and subsequently combined for a veracity decision. While decomposition is widely-adopted in such pipelines, its effects on final fact-checking performance remain underexplored. Some studies have reported improvements from decompostition, while others have observed performance declines, indicating its inconsistent impact. To date, no comprehensive analysis has been conducted to understand this variability. To address this gap, we present an in-depth analysis that explicitly examines the impact of decomposition on downstream verification performance. Through error case inspection and experiments, we introduce a categorization of decomposition errors and reveal a trade-off between accuracy gains and the noise introduced through decomposition. Our analysis provides new insights into understanding current system`s instability and offers guidance for future studies toward improving claim decomposition in fact-checking pipelines.
Model Surgery: Modulating LLM`s Behavior Via Simple Parameter Editing (2025)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential as generalist assistants, showcasing powerful task understanding and problem-solving capabilities. To deploy LLMs as AI assistants, it is crucial that these models exhibit desirable behavioral traits, such as non-toxicity and resilience against jailbreak attempts. Current approaches for detoxification or preventing jailbreaking usually involve Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which requires finetuning billions of parameters through gradient descent with substantial computational cost. Furthermore, models modified through SFT and RLHF may deviate from the pretrained models, potentially leading to a degradation in foundational LLM capabilities. In this paper, we observe that surprisingly, directly editing a small subset of parameters can effectively modulate specific behaviors of LLMs, such as detoxification and resistance to jailbreaking, with only inference-level computational resources. Experiments demonstrate that in the detoxification task, our approach achieves reductions of up to 90.0{\%} in toxicity on the RealToxicityPrompts dataset and 49.2{\%} on ToxiGen, while maintaining the LLM`s general capabilities in areas such as common sense, question answering, and mathematics.