United States

We present a novel study analyzing the effects of various prompt loss token weights (PLW) for supervised instruction fine-tuning (SIFT). While prompt-masking (PLW = 0) is common for SIFT, some fine-tuning APIs support fractional PLWs and suggest that using a small non-zero PLW can help stabilize learning when fine-tuning on short-completion data. However, there has never been a study confirming this claim, and OpenAI, a major cloud-based SIFT provider, recently removed this parameter from their fine-tuning API. We found that performance of models fine-tuned on short-completion data had a statistically-significant negative quadratic relationship with PLW. Using small values (0.01 − 0.5) of PLW produced better results on multiple-choice and short-generation benchmarks (outperforming models fine-tuned on long-completion data) while large values (≈ 1.0) of PLW produced better results on long-generation benchmarks. We explained this effect and verified its importance through additional experiments. This research serves as a warning to API providers about the importance of providing a PLW parameter for SIFT.

EMNLP 2024

Instruction Fine-Tuning: Does Prompt Loss Matter?

explanation

faithfulness

interpretability

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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Human listeners effortlessly compensate for phonological changes during speech perception, often unconsciously inferring the intended sounds. For example, listeners infer the underlying /n/ when hearing an utterance such as “clea[m] pan”, where [m] arises from place assimilation to the following labial [p]. This article explores how the neural speech recognition model Wav2Vec2 perceives assimilated sounds, and identifies the linguistic knowledge that is implemented by the model to compensate for assimilation during Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Using psycholinguistic stimuli, we systematically analyze how various linguistic context cues influence compensation patterns in the model’s output. Complementing these behavioral experiments, our probing experiments indicate that the model shifts its interpretation of assimilated sounds from their acoustic form to their underlying form in its final layers. Finally, our causal intervention experiments suggest that the model relies on minimal phonological context cues to accomplish this shift. These findings represent a step towards better understanding the similarities and differences in phonological processing between neural ASR models and humans.

Perception of Phonological Assimilation by Neural Speech Recognition Models

Recent models in cross-lingual semantic role labeling (SRL) barely analyze the applicability of their network selection.
We believe that network selection is important since it affects the transferability of cross-lingual models, i.e., how the model can extract universal features from source languages to label target languages.
Therefore, we comprehensively compare the transferability of different graph neural network (GNN)-based models enriched with universal dependency trees.
GNN-based models include transformer-based, graph convolutional network-based, and graph attention network (GAT)-based models.
We focus our study on a zero-shot setting by training the models in English and evaluating the models in 23 target languages provided by the Universal Proposition Bank.
Based on our experiments, we consistently show that syntax from universal dependency trees is essential for cross-lingual SRL models to achieve better transferability.
Dependency-aware self-attention with relative position representations (SAN-RPRs) transfer best across languages, especially in the long-range dependency distance.
We also show that dependency-aware two-attention relational GATs transfer better than SAN-RPRs in languages where most arguments lie in a 1-2 dependency distance.

Transferability of Syntax-Aware Graph Neural Networks in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling

LLMs can now perform a variety of complex writing tasks. They also excel in answering questions pertaining to natural language inference and commonsense reasoning. Composing these questions is itself a skilled writing task, so in this paper we consider LLMs as authors of commonsense assessment items. We prompt LLMs to generate items in the style of a prominent benchmark for commonsense reasoning, the Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA). We examine the outcome according to analyses facilitated by the LLMs and human annotation. We find that LLMs that succeed in answering the original COPA benchmark are also more successful in authoring their own items.

From Test-Taking to Test-Making: Examining LLM Authoring of Commonsense Assessment Items

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to execute complex instructions is essential for their real-world applications. However, several recent studies indicate that LLMs struggle with challenging instructions. In this paper, we propose Evolutionary Contrastive Distillation (ECD), a novel method for generating high-quality synthetic preference data designed to enhance the complex instruction-following capability of language models. ECD generates data that specifically illustrates the difference between a response that successfully follows a set of complex instructions and a response that is high-quality, but nevertheless makes some subtle mistakes. This is done by prompting LLMs to progressively evolve simple instructions to more complex instructions. When the complexity of an instruction is increased, the original successful response to the original instruction becomes a "hard negative" response for the new instruction, mostly meeting requirements of the new instruction, but barely missing one or two. By pairing a good response with such a hard negative response, and employing contrastive learning algorithms such as DPO, we improve language models' ability to follow complex instructions. Empirically, we observe that our method yields a 7B model that exceeds the complex instruction-following performance of current SOTA 7B models and is competitive even with open-source 70B models.

Evolutionary Contrastive Distillation for Language Model Alignment

Despite recent advancements in AI and NLP, negotiation remains a difficult domain for AI agents. Traditional game theoretic approaches that have worked well for two-player zero-sum games struggle in the context of negotiation due to their inability to learn human-compatible strategies. On the other hand, approaches that only use human data tend to be domain-specific and lack the theoretical guarantees provided by strategies grounded in game theory. Motivated by the notion of fairness as a criterion for optimality in general sum games, we propose a negotiation framework called FDHC which incorporates fairness into both the reward design and search to learn human-compatible negotiation strategies. Our method includes a novel, RL+search technique called LGM-Zero which leverages a pre-trained language model to retrieve human-compatible offers from large action spaces. Our results show that our method is able to achieve more egalitarian negotiation outcomes and improve negotiation quality.

A Fairness-Driven Method for Learning Human-Compatible Negotiation Strategies

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in the legal domain, with GPT-4 even passing the Uniform Bar Exam in the U.S. However their efficacy remains limited for non-standardized tasks and tasks in languages other than English. This underscores the need for careful evaluation of LLMs within each legal system before application.
Here, we introduce KBL, a benchmark for assessing the Korean legal language understanding of LLMs, consisting of (1) 7 legal knowledge tasks (510 examples), (2) 4 legal reasoning tasks (288 examples), and (3) the Korean bar exam (4 domains, 53 tasks, 2,510 examples). First two datasets were developed in close collaboration with lawyers to evaluate LLMs in practical scenarios in a certified manner. Furthermore, considering legal practitioners' frequent use of extensive legal documents for research, we assess LLMs in both a closed book setting, where they rely solely on internal knowledge, and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) setting, using a corpus of Korean statutes and precedents. The results indicate substantial room and opportunities for improvement.

Developing a Pragmatic Benchmark for Assessing Korean Legal Language Understanding in Large Language Models

Modern NLP tasks increasingly rely on dense retrieval methods to access up-to-date and relevant contextual information. We are motivated by the premise that retrieval benefits from segments that can vary in size such that a content’s semantic independence is better captured. We propose LumberChunker, a method leveraging an LLM to dynamically segment documents, which iteratively prompts the LLM to identify the point within a group of sequential passages where the content begins to shift. To evaluate our method, we introduce GutenQA, a benchmark with 3000 "needle in a haystack" type of question-answer pairs derived from 100 public domain narrative books available on Project Gutenberg. Our experiments show that LumberChunker not only outperforms the most competitive baseline by 7.37% in retrieval performance (DCG@20) but also that, when integrated into a RAG pipeline, LumberChunker proves to be more effective than other chunking methods and competitive baselines, such as the Gemini 1.5M Pro.

LumberChunker: Long-Form Narrative Document Segmentation

In the video-language domain, recent works in leveraging zero-shot Large Language Model-based reasoning for video understanding have become competitive challengers to previous end-to-end models. However, long video understanding presents unique challenges due to the complexity of reasoning over extended timespans, even for zero-shot LLM-based approaches. The challenge of information redundancy in long videos prompts the question of what specific information is essential for large language models (LLMs) and how to leverage them for complex spatial-temporal reasoning in long-form video analysis. We propose a framework VideoINSTA , i.e. INformative Spatial-TemporAl Reasoning for zero-shot long-form video understanding.
VideoINSTA contributes 
(1) a zero-shot framework for long video understanding using LLMs; 
(2) an event-based temporal
reasoning and content-based spatial reasoning approach for LLMs to reason over spatial-temporal information in videos; 
(3) a self-reflective information reasoning scheme based on information sufficiency and prediction confidence while balancing temporal factors.
Our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three long video question-answering benchmarks: EgoSchema, NextQA, and IntentQA, and the open question answering dataset ActivityNetQA. Code is released: https://github.com/mayhugotong/VideoINSTA.

VideoINSTA: Zero-shot Long-Form Video Understanding via Informative Spatial-Temporal Reasoning

Over the years, memes have evolved into multifaceted narratives on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, blending text, images and audio to amplify humor and engagement. The objective of the task described in this article is to bridge the gap for individuals who may struggle to understand memes due to cultural, geographical, ancillary insights, or relevant exposure constraints, aiming to enhance meme comprehension across diverse audiences. The lack of large datasets for supervised learning and alternatives to resource-intensive vision language models have historically hindered the development of such technology. In this work, we have made strides to overcome these challenges. We introduce "MMD" a $\textbf{M}$ultimodal $\textbf{M}$eme $\textbf{D}$ataset comprising $\textbf{13,494}$ instances, including 3,134 with audio, rendering it the largest of its kind, with $\textbf{2.1}$ times as many samples and $\textbf{9.5}$ times as many words in the human annotated meme summary compared to the largest available meme captioning dataset, MemeCap. Our framework, MeSum ($\textbf{Me}$me $\textbf{Sum}$mariser), employs a fusion of Vision Transformer and Large Language Model technologies, providing an efficient alternative to resource-intensive Vision Language Models pioneering the integration of all three modalities, we attain a ROUGE-L score of 0.439, outperforming existing approaches such as zero-shot Gemini, GPT4 Vision, LLaVA and QwenVL which yield scores of 0.259, 0.213, 0.177 and 0.198. We have made our codes and datasets publicly available.

Hope `The Paragraph Guy' explains the rest : Introducing MeSum, the Meme Summarizer

We present an approach for generating differentially private synthetic text using large language models (LLMs), via private prediction. In the private prediction framework, we only require the output synthetic data to satisfy differential privacy guarantees. This is in contrast to approaches that train a generative model on potentially sensitive user-supplied source data and seek to ensure the model itself is safe to release.

We prompt a pretrained LLM with source data, but ensure that next-token predictions are made with differential privacy guarantees. Previous work in this paradigm reported generating a small number of examples ($<$10) at reasonable privacy levels, an amount of data that is useful only for downstream in-context learning or prompting. In contrast, we make changes that allow us to generate thousands of high-quality synthetic data points, greatly expanding the set of potential applications. Our improvements come from an improved privacy analysis and a better private selection mechanism, which makes use of the equivalence between the softmax layer for sampling tokens in LLMs and the exponential mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce a novel use of public predictions via the sparse vector technique, in which we do not pay privacy costs for tokens that are predictable without sensitive data; we find this to be particularly effective for structured data.

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Perception of Phonological Assimilation by Neural Speech Recognition Models

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