Austria

Code generation is a critical reasoning task for large language models (LLMs). Recent advancements have focused on optimizing the thought process of code generation, achieving significant improvements. However, such thought process lacks effective process supervision, making it hard to optimize the thoughts. Although Process Reward Models (PRMs) have been widely established in mathematical reasoning, building a code PRM is still not trivial for the gap between thoughts to code. In this paper, we propose CodePRM, a novel approach that leverages the code execution feedback to build a code PRM. Specifically, we first collect a large dataset of thought traces, where each thought step is labeled with their derived code&#39; pass rates, accompanied by the corresponding code snippets, and execution feedback. During training, we train a PRM to take both the reasoning process and code execution feedback as input to score individual thought steps, enabling it to leverage code execution results to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality thought steps. Finally, to use the PRM during inference, we develop a Generate-Verify-Refine (GVR) pipeline where the CodePRM serves as a process verifier to dynamically identify and correct errors in the thought process during code search. Experimental results demonstrate that CodePRM with the inference algorithm outperforms strong baselines, significantly enhancing code generation performance. Further analysis reveals the key factors for building a code PRM.

ACL 2025

CodePRM: Execution Feedback-enhanced Process Reward Model for Code Generation

process verifier

process reward model

code generation

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Code generation is a critical reasoning task for large language models (LLMs). Recent advancements have focused on optimizing the thought process of code generation, achieving significant improvements. However, such thought process lacks effective process supervision, making it hard to optimize the thoughts. Although Process Reward Models (PRMs) have been widely established in mathematical reasoning, building a code PRM is still not trivial for the gap between thoughts to code. In this paper, we propose CodePRM, a novel approach that leverages the code execution feedback to build a code PRM. Specifically, we first collect a large dataset of thought traces, where each thought step is labeled with their derived code' pass rates, accompanied by the corresponding code snippets, and execution feedback. During training, we train a PRM to take both the reasoning process and code execution feedback as input to score individual thought steps, enabling it to leverage code execution results to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality thought steps. Finally, to use the PRM during inference, we develop a Generate-Verify-Refine (GVR) pipeline where the CodePRM serves as a process verifier to dynamically identify and correct errors in the thought process during code search. Experimental results demonstrate that CodePRM with the inference algorithm outperforms strong baselines, significantly enhancing code generation performance. Further analysis reveals the key factors for building a code PRM.

poster

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform exceedingly well in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks for many languages including English. However, despite being the ﬁfth most-spoken language globally, Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) in Bangla remains underdeveloped. In this work, we investigate how LLMs can be leveraged for improving Bangla GEC. For that, we ﬁrst do an extensive categorization of 12 error classes in Bangla, and take a survey of native Bangla speakers to collect real-world errors. We next devise a rule-based noise injection method to create grammatically incorrect sentences corresponding to correct ones. The Vaiyākaraṇa dataset, thus created, consists of 567,422 sentences of which 227,119 are erroneous. This dataset is then used to instruction-tune LLMs for the task of GEC in Bangla. Evaluations show that instruction-tuning with Vaiyākaraṇa improves GEC performance of LLMs by 3-7 percentage points as compared to zero-shot setting, and makes them achieve human-like performance in error identiﬁcation. Humans, though, remain superior in grammatical error correction.

Leveraging LLMs for Bangla Grammar Error Correction: Error Categorization, Synthetic Data, and Model Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced mathematical reasoning, Process Reward Models (PRMs) have been developed to evaluate the logical validity of reasoning steps. However, PRMs still struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) challenges. This paper identifies the OOD issues including step OOD, arising from differences in reasoning patterns across model types and sizes, and question OOD, due to dataset shifts between training and real-world problems. To address these issues, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented Process Reward Model (RetrievalPRM), a novel framework designed to tackle these OOD issues. By utilizing a two-stage retrieval-enhanced mechanism, RetrievalPRM retrieves semantically similar questions and steps for PRM as a warmup to stimulate its potential to judge target steps, improving generalization and reasoning consistency across different models and problem types. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that RetrievalPRM outperforms existing baselines across multiple real-world datasets. Our open-source contributions include a retrieval-enhanced dataset, a tuning framework for PRM training, and the RetreivalPRM model, establishing a new standard for PRM performance.

Retrieval-Augmented Process Reward Model for Generalizable Mathematical Reasoning

The latent knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contains harmful or unethical content, which introduces significant security risks upon their widespread deployment. Conducting jailbreak attacks on LLMs can proactively identify vulnerabilities to enhance their security measures. However, previous jailbreak attacks primarily focus on single-turn dialogue scenarios, leaving vulnerabilities in multi-turn dialogue contexts inadequately explored. This paper investigates the resilience of black-box LLMs in multi-turn jailbreak attack scenarios from a novel interrogation perspective. We propose an optimal interrogation principle to conceal the jailbreak intent and introduce a multi-turn attack chain generation strategy called CoA. By employing two effective interrogation strategies tailored for LLMs, coupled with an interrogation history record management mechanis, it achieves a significant optimization of the attack process. Our approach enables the iterative generation of attack chains, offering a powerful tool for LLM red team testing. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs exhibit insufficient resistance under multi-turn interrogation, with our method shows more advantages(ASR, 83% vs 64%). This work offers new insights into improving the safety of LLMs.

Chain of Attack: Hide Your Intention through Multi-Turn Interrogation

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in diverse applications has intensified concerns over their security and integrity, especially in cloud environments where internal model parameters are inaccessible to users. Traditional tamper detection methods, designed for deterministic classification models, fail to address the output randomness and massive parameter spaces characteristic of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce \emph{Efficient Sensitive Fingerprinting (ESF)}, the first fingerprinting method tailored for black-box tamper detection of LLMs. ESF generates fingerprint samples by optimizing output sensitivity at selected detection token positions and leverages \emph{Randomness-Set Consistency Checking (RSCC)} to accommodate inherent output randomness. Furthermore, a novel \emph{Max Coverage Strategy (MCS)} is proposed to select an optimal set of fingerprint samples that maximizes joint sensitivity to tampering. Grounded in a rigorous theoretical framework, ESF is both computationally efficient and scalable to large models. Extensive experiments across state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that ESF reliably detects tampering, such as fine-tuning, model compression, and backdoor injection, with a detection rate exceeding 99.2\%, thereby offering a robust solution for securing cloud-based AI systems.

ESF: Efficient Sensitive Fingerprinting for Black-Box Tamper Detection of Large Language Models

Solving expert-level multimodal tasks is a key milestone in general intelligence. As the capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) continue to evolve, evaluation of frontier multimodal intelligence becomes necessary yet challenging. In this work, we introduce ProBench, a benchmark of open-ended user queries encapsulating professional expertise and advanced reasoning. ProBench consists of 4,000 high-quality samples independently collected from professionals based on their productivity demands. It spans across 10 fields and 56 sub-fields, including science, arts, humanities, coding, mathematics, and creative writing. Experimentally, we evaluate and compare 24 latest models using MLLM-as-a-Judge. Our results reveal that although the best open-source models rival the proprietary ones, they all face significant challenges in visual perception, textual understanding, domain knowledge, and advanced reasoning. Our benchmark is publicly accessible at \url{TBC}.

ProBench: Judging Multimodal Foundation Models on Open-ended Multi-domain Expert Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. In this paper, we closely examine the reasons behind this phenomenon, focusing on the pre-training corpus. We find that the existence of code-switching, alternating between different languages within a context, is key to multilingual capabilities. We conduct an analysis to investigate code-switching in the pre-training corpus, examining its presence and categorizing it into four types within two quadrants. We then assess its impact on multilingual performance. These types of code-switching data are unbalanced in proportions and demonstrate different effects on facilitating language transfer. To better explore the power of code-switching for language alignment during pre-training, we investigate the strategy of synthetic code-switching. We continuously scale up the synthetic code-switching data and observe remarkable improvements in both benchmarks and representation space. Extensive experiments indicate that incorporating synthetic code-switching data enables better language alignment and generalizes well to high, medium, and low-resource languages with pre-training corpora of varying qualities.

Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training

Sarcasm is a complex form of sentiment expression widely used in human daily life. Previous work primarily defines sarcasm as a form of verbal irony, which covers only a subset of real-world sarcastic expressions. However, sarcasm serves multifaceted functions and manifests itself through various rhetorical devices, such as echoic mention, rhetorical question and hyperbole. To fully capture its complexity, this paper investigates fine-grained sarcasm classification through the lens of rhetorical devices, and introduces RedSD, a RhEtorical Device-Aware Sarcasm Dataset with counterfactually augmented data.To construct the dataset, we extract sarcastic dialogues from situation comedies (i.e., sitcoms), and summarize nine rhetorical devices commonly employed in sarcasm. We then propose a rhetorical device-aware counterfactual data generation pipeline facilitated by both Large Language Models (LLMs) and human revision. Additionally, we propose duplex counterfactual augmentation that generates counterfactuals for both sarcastic and non-sarcastic dialogues, to further enhance the scale and diversity of the dataset.Experimental results on the dataset demonstrate that fine-tuned models exhibit a more balanced performance compared to zero-shot models, including GPT-3.5 and LLaMA 3.1, underscoring the importance of integrating various rhetorical devices in sarcasm detection. Our dataset is avaliable at https://github.com/qqHong73/RedSD.

Rhetorical Device-Aware Sarcasm Detection with Counterfactual Data Augmentation

Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, such as synonym substitutions. While prior work has focused on improving robustness for feed-forward and convolutional architectures, the robustness of recurrent networks and modern state space models (SSMs), such as S4, remains understudied. These architectures pose unique challenges due to their sequential processing and complex parameter dynamics. In this paper, we introduce a novel regularization technique based on Growth Bound Matrices (GBM) to improve NLP model robustness by reducing the impact of input perturbations on model outputs. We focus on computing the GBM for three architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), State Space models (S4), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Our method aims to (1) enhance resilience against word substitution attacks, (2) improve generalization on clean text, and (3) providing the first systematic analysis of SSM (S4) robustness. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures and benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method improves adversarial robustness by up to (8.8%) over existing baselines. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods in adversarial defense.

Bridging Robustness and Generalization Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP via the Growth Bound Matrix Approach

In-context learning (ICL) relies heavily on high-quality demonstrations drawn from large annotated corpora. Existing methods often detect noisy annotations by ranking local perplexities, presuming that noisy samples yield higher perplexities than their clean counterparts. However, this assumption breaks down when the noise ratio is high and many demonstrations are flawed. We re-examine the perplexity-based paradigm for text generation under noisy annotations, highlighting two sources of bias in perplexity: the annotation itself and the domain-specific knowledge inherent in large language models (LLMs). To overcome these biases, we introduce a dual-debiasing framework that uses synthesized neighbors to explicitly correct perplexity estimates, yielding a robust \emph{Sample Cleanliness Score}. This metric uncovers absolute sample cleanliness regardless of the corpus’s noise level. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method’s superior noise-detection capabilities and show that its final ICL performance is comparable to that of a fully clean demonstration corpus. Moreover, our approach remains robust even when noise ratios are extremely high.

Dual Debiasing for Noisy In-Context Learning for Text Generation

Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models often require substantial computational resources, which remains a major drawback. Reducing the complexity of deep learning architectures, and exploring simpler yet effective approaches can lead to cost-efficient NLP solutions. This is also a step towards explainable AI, i.e., uncovering how a particular task is carried out. For this analysis, we chose the task of hate speech detection. We address hate speech detection by introducing a model that employs a weighted sum of valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) scores for classification. To determine the optimal weights and classification strategies, we analyze hate speech and non-hate speech words based on both their individual and summed VAD-values. Our experimental results demonstrate that this straightforward approach can compete with state-of-the-art neural network methods, including GPT-based models, in detecting hate speech.

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Leveraging LLMs for Bangla Grammar Error Correction: Error Categorization, Synthetic Data, and Model Evaluation

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