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With the rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs), safeguarding textual content against unauthorized use is crucial. Watermarking offers a vital solution, protecting both - LLM-generated and plain text sources. This paper presents a unified overview of different perspectives behind designing watermarking techniques through a comprehensive survey of the research literature. Our work has two key advantages: (1) We analyze research based on the specific intentions behind different watermarking techniques, evaluation datasets used, and watermarking addition and removal methods to construct a cohesive taxonomy. (2) We highlight the gaps and open challenges in text watermarking to promote research protecting text authorship. This extensive coverage and detailed analysis sets our work apart, outlining the evolving landscape of text watermarking in Language Models.

NAACL 2025

From Intentions to Techniques: A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Challenges in Text Watermarking for Large Language Models

meta analysis

llm watermarking

text watermarking

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### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We have uncovered a powerful jailbreak technique that leverages large language models' ability to diverge from prior context, enabling them to bypass safety constraints and generate harmful outputs. By simply instructing the LLM to deviate and obfuscate previous attacks, our method dramatically outperforms existing approaches, achieving up to a 62.83% higher success rate in compromising ten leading chatbots, including GPT-4, Gemini, and Llama, while using only 12.9% of the queries. This revelation exposes a critical flaw in current LLM safety training, suggesting that existing methods may merely mask vulnerabilities rather than eliminate them. Our findings sound an urgent alarm for the need to revolutionize testing methodologies to ensure robust and reliable LLM security.

Diversity Helps Jailbreak Large Language Models

Wav2Prompt is proposed which allows integrating spoken input with a text-based large language model (LLM). Wav2Prompt uses a straightforward training process with only the same data used to train an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. After training, Wav2Prompt learns continuous representations from speech and uses them as LLM prompts. To avoid task over-fitting issues found in prior work and preserve the emergent abilities of LLMs, Wav2Prompt takes LLM token embeddings as the training targets and utilises a continuous integrate-and-fire mechanism for explicit speech-text alignment. Therefore, a Wav2Prompt-LLM combination can be applied to zero-shot spoken language tasks such as speech translation (ST), speech understanding (SLU), and spoken-query-based question answering (SQQA). It is shown that for these zero-shot tasks, Wav2Prompt performs similarly to an ASR-LLM cascade and better than recent prior work. If relatively small amounts of task-specific paired data are available, the Wav2Prompt-LLM combination can be end-to-end (E2E) fine-tuned and then yields greatly improved results relative to an ASR-LLM cascade for the above tasks. For instance, for English-French ST, a Wav2Prompt-LLM combination gave a 5 BLEU point increase over an ASR-LLM cascade.

Wav2Prompt: End-to-End Speech Prompt Learning and Task-based Fine-tuning for Text-based LLMs

Code-LLMs, LLMs pre-trained on large code corpora, have shown great progress in learning rich representations of the structure and syntax of code, successfully using it to generate or classify code fragments. At the same time, understanding if they are able to do so because they capture code semantics, and how well, is still an open question. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing SeqCoBench, a benchmark for systematically assessing how Code-LLMs can capture code functional equivalence. SeqCoBench contains over 20 code transformations that either preserve or alter the semantics of Python programs. We conduct extensive evaluations in different settings, including zero-shot and parameter-efficient finetuning methods on state-of-the-art (Code)-LLMs to see if they can discern semantically equivalent or different pairs of programs in SeqCoBench. We find that the performance gap between these LLMs and classical match-based retrieval scores is minimal, with both approaches showing a concerning lack of depth in understanding code semantics.

What can Large Language Models Capture about Code Functional Equivalence?

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

Do Large Language Models Align with Core Mental Health Counseling Competencies?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent common-sense reasoning and Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities, making them promising candidates for developing coordination agents. This study introduces the LLM-Coordination Benchmark, a novel benchmark for analyzing LLMs in the context of Pure Coordination Settings, where agents must cooperate to maximize gains. Our benchmark evaluates LLMs through two distinct tasks. The first is Agentic Coordination, where LLMs act as proactive participants in four pure coordination games. The second is Coordination Question Answering (CoordQA), which tests LLMs on 198 multiple-choice questions across these games to evaluate three key abilities: Environment Comprehension, ToM Reasoning, and Joint Planning. Results from Agentic Coordination experiments reveal that LLM-Agents excel in multi-agent coordination settings where decision-making primarily relies on environmental variables but face challenges in scenarios requiring active consideration of partners' beliefs and intentions. The CoordQA experiments further highlight significant room for improvement in LLMs' Theory of Mind reasoning and joint planning capabilities. Zero-Shot Coordination (ZSC) experiments in the Agentic Coordination setting demonstrate that LLM agents, unlike RL methods, exhibit robustness to unseen partners. These findings indicate the potential of LLMs as Agents in pure coordination setups and underscore areas for improvement.

LLM-Coordination: Evaluating and Analyzing Multi-agent Coordination Abilities in Large Language Models

Assertions have been the de facto collateral for hardware for over a decade. The verification quality, i.e., detection and diagnosis of corner-case design bugs, is critically dependent on the assertion quality. There has been a considerable amount of research to generate high-quality assertions from hardware design source code and design execution trace data. With recent advent of generative AI techniques such as Large-Language Models (LLMs), there has been a renewed interest in deploying LLMs for assertion generation. However, there is little effort to quantitatively establish the effectiveness and suitability of various LLMs for assertion generation. In this paper, we present AssertionBench, a novel benchmark to evaluate LLMs' effectiveness for assertion generation quantitatively. AssertionBench contains 100 curated Verilog hardware designs from OpenCores and formally verified assertions for each design, generated from GoldMine and HARM. We use AssertionBench to compare state-of-the-art LLMs, e.g., GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, CodeLLaMa-2, and LLaMa3-70B, to assess their effectiveness in inferring functionally correct assertions for hardware designs. Our experiments comprehensively demonstrate how LLMs perform relative to each other, the benefits of using more in-context exemplars in generating a higher fraction of functionally correct assertions, and the significant room for improvement for LLM-based assertion generators.

AssertionBench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Large-Language Models for Assertion Generation

Large Language Models (LLM) have become a popular approach for implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, and a significant amount of effort has been spent on building good models and metrics. In spite of increased recognition of the need for rigorous evaluation of RAG systems, few tools exist that go beyond the creation of model output and automatic calculation. We present InspectorRAGet, an introspection platform for performing a comprehensive analysis of the quality of RAG system output. InspectorRAGet allows the user to analyze aggregate and instance-level performance of RAG systems, using both human and algorithmic
metrics as well as annotator quality. InspectorRAGet is suitable for multiple use cases and is available publicly to the community.
A live instance of the platform is available at https://ibm.biz/InspectorRAGet

InspectorRAGet: An Introspection Platform for RAG Evaluation

While much work on web agents emphasizes the promise of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of users, in reality, agents often fall
short on complex tasks in real-world contexts and modeling user preference. This presents an opportunity for humans to collaborate with the agent and leverage the agent’s capabilities effectively. We propose CowPilot, a frame- work supporting autonomous as well as human-agent co llaborative w eb navigation, and evaluation across task success and task efficiency. CowPilot reduces the number of steps humans need to perform by allowing agents to propose next steps, while users are able to pause, reject, or take alternative actions. During execution, users can interleave their actions with the agent’s by overriding suggestions or resuming agent control when needed. We conducted case studies on five common websites and found that the human-agent collaborative mode achieves the highest success rate of 95% while requiring humans to perform only 15.2% of the total steps. Even with human interventions during task execution, the agent successfully drives up to half of task success on its own. CowPilot can serve as a useful tool for data collection and agent evaluation across websites, which we believe will enable research in how users and agents can work together. Video demonstrations are available at https://oaishi.github.io/cowpilot.html

CowPilot: A Framework for Autonomous and Human-Agent Collaborative Web Navigation

Chain of Thought (CoT) of multi-step benefits from the logical structure of the reasoning steps and task-specific actions, significantly enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. As the prevalence of long CoT, the number of reasoning steps exceeds manageable token limits and leads to higher computational demands. Inspired by the fundamental logic of human cognition, ''derive, then reduce'', we conceptualize the standard multi-step CoT as a novel Markov Chain of Thought (MCoT). In this study, we consider the mathematical reasoning task, defining each reasoning step as text accompanied by a Python code snippet. To facilitate a longer reasoning path, self-correction is enabled through interactions with the code interpreter. Our MCoT aims to compress previous reasoning steps into a simplified question, enabling efficient next-step inference without relying on a lengthy KV cache. In our experiments, we curate the `MCoTInstruct` dataset, and the empirical results indicate that MCoT not only significantly enhances efficiency but also maintains comparable accuracy. While much remains to be explored, this work paves the way for exploring the long CoT reasoning abilities of LLMs.

Markov Chain of Thought for Efficient Mathematical Reasoning

The correlation between NLG automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation is often regarded as a critical criterion for assessing the capability of an evaluation metric. However, different grouping methods and correlation coefficients result in various types of correlation measures used in meta-evaluation. In specific evaluation scenarios, prior work often directly follows conventional measure settings, but the characteristics and differences between these measures have not gotten sufficient attention. Therefore, this paper analyzes 12 common correlation measures using a large amount of real-world data from six widely-used NLG evaluation datasets and 32 evaluation metrics, revealing that different measures indeed impact the meta-evaluation results. Furthermore, we propose three perspectives that reflect the capability of meta-evaluation: discriminative power, ranking consistency, and sensitivity to score granularity. We find that the measure using global grouping and Pearson correlation coefficient exhibits the best performance in both discriminative power and ranking consistency. Besides, the measures using system-level grouping or Kendall correlation are the least sensitive to score granularity.

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Diversity Helps Jailbreak Large Language Models

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Revisiting the Robustness of Watermarking to Paraphrasing Attacks