ACL 2025 Papers

This paper explores a novel perspective to speech quality assessment by leveraging natural language descriptions, offering richer, more nuanced insights than traditional numerical scoring methods. Natural language feedback provides instructive recommendations and detailed evaluations, yet existing datasets lack the comprehensive annotations needed for this approach. To bridge this gap, we introduce QualiSpeech, a comprehensive low-level speech quality assessment dataset encompassing 11 key aspects and detailed natural language comments that include reasoning and contextual insights. Additionally, we propose the QualiSpeech Benchmark to evaluate the low-level speech understanding capabilities of auditory large language models (LLMs). Experimental results demonstrate that finetuned auditory LLMs can reliably generate detailed descriptions of noise and distortion, effectively identifying their types and temporal characteristics. The results further highlight the potential for incorporating reasoning to enhance the accuracy and reliability of quality assessments. The dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tsinghua-ee/QualiSpeech.

Large language models (LLMs) have made exciting achievements across various domains, yet their deployment on resource-constrained personal devices remains hindered by the prohibitive computational and memory demands of task-specific fine-tuning. While quantization offers a pathway to efficiency, existing methods struggle to balance performance and overhead, either incurring high computational/memory costs or failing to address activation outliers—a critical bottleneck in quantized fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose the Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis (__OSSH__): _During fine-tuning, certain activation outlier channels retain stable spatial positions across training iterations._ Building on OSSH, we propose __Quaff__, a Quantized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for LLMs, optimizing low-precision activation representations through targeted momentum scaling. Quaff dynamically suppresses outliers exclusively in invariant channels using lightweight operations, eliminating full-precision weight storage and global rescaling while reducing quantization errors. Extensive experiments across ten benchmarks validate OSSH and demonstrate Quaff’s efficacy. Specifically, on the GPQA reasoning benchmark, Quaff achieves a 1.73× latency reduction and 30% memory savings over full-precision fine-tuning while improving accuracy by 0.6% on the Phi-3 model, reconciling the triple trade-off between efficiency, performance, and deployability. By enabling consumer-grade GPU fine-tuning (e.g., RTX 2080 Super) without sacrificing model utility, Quaff democratizes personalized LLM deployment. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Quaff-B322/.

Table-to-text generation aims to automatically produce natural language descriptions from structured or semi-structured tabular data. Unlike traditional text generation tasks, it requires models to accurately understand and represent table structures. Existing approaches typically process tables by linearizing them or converting them into graph structures. However, these methods either fail to adequately capture the table structure or rely on complex attention mechanisms, limiting their applicability. To tackle these challenges, we propose QuASAR, a question-driven self-supervised approach designed to enhance the model’s structural perception and representation capabilities. Specifically, QuASAR formulates a set of structure-related queries for self-supervised training, explicitly guiding the model to capture both local and global table structures. Additionally, we introduce two auxiliary pre-training tasks: a word-to-sentence reconstruction task and a numerical summarization task, which further enhance the fluency and factuality of the generated text. Experimental results on the ToTTo and HiTab datasets demonstrate that our approach produces higher-quality text compared to existing methods.

Large language models (LLMs) are known to have the potential to generate harmful content, posing risks to users. While significant progress has been made in developing taxonomies for LLM risks and safety evaluation prompts, most studies have focused on monolingual contexts, primarily in English. However, language- and region-specific risks in bilingual contexts are often overlooked, and core findings can diverge from those in monolingual settings. In this paper, we introduce Qorǵau, a novel dataset specifically designed for safety evaluation in Kazakh and Russian, reflecting the unique bilingual context in Kazakhstan, where both Kazakh (a low-resource language) and Russian (a high-resource language) are spoken. Experiments with both multilingual and language-specific LLMs reveal notable differences in safety performance, emphasizing the need for tailored, region-specific datasets to ensure the responsible and safe deployment of LLMs in countries like Kazakhstan. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

The attention operator remains a critical performance bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for long-context scenarios. While FlashAttention is the most widely used and effective GPU-aware acceleration algorithm, it must require time-consuming and hardware-specific manual implementation, limiting adaptability across GPU architectures. Existing LLMs have shown a lot of promise in code generation tasks, but struggle to generate high-performance attention code. The key challenge is it cannot comprehend the complex data flow and computation process of the attention operator and utilize low-level primitive to exploit GPU performance.To address the above challenge, we propose an LLM-friendly Thinking Language (LLM-TL) to help LLMs decouple the generation of high-level optimization logic and low-level implementation on GPU, and enhance LLMs’ understanding of attention operator.Along with a 2-stage reasoning workflow, TL-Code generation and translation, the LLMs can automatically generate FlashAttention implementation on diverse GPUs, establishing a self-optimizing paradigm for generating high-performance attention operators in attention-centric algorithms.Verified on A100, RTX8000, and T4 GPUs, the performance of our methods significantly outshines that of vanilla LLMs, achieving a speed-up of up to 35.16×.Besides, our method not only surpasses human-optimized libraries (cuDNN and official library) in most scenarios but also extends support to unsupported hardware and data types, reducing development time from months to minutes compared with human experts.

Review-based Product Question Answering (PQA) allows e-commerce platforms to automatically address customer queries by leveraging insights from user reviews. However, existing PQA systems generate answers with only a single perspective, failing to capture the diversity of customer opinions. In this paper we introduce a novel task Quantitative Query-Focused Summarization (QQSUM), which aims to summarize diverse customer opinions into representative Key Points (KPs) and quantify their prevalence to effectively answer user queries. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) shows promise for PQA, its generated answers still fall short of capturing the full diversity of viewpoints. To tackle this challenge, our model QQSUM-RAG, which extends RAG, employs few-shot learning to jointly train a KP-oriented retriever and a KP summary generator, enabling KP-based summaries that capture diverse and representative opinions. Experimental results demonstrate that QQSUM-RAG achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art RAG baselines in both textual quality and quantification accuracy of opinions. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/antangrocket1312/QQSUMM

While the Question Generation (QG) task has been increasingly adopted in educational assessments, its evaluation remains limited by approaches that lack a clear connection to the educational values of test items. In this work, we introduce test item analysis, a method frequently used by educators to assess test question quality, into QG evaluation. Specifically, we construct pairs of candidate questions that differ in quality across dimensions such as topic coverage, item difficulty, item discrimination, and distractor efficiency. We then examine whether existing QG evaluation approaches can effectively distinguish these differences. Our findings reveal significant shortcomings in these approaches with respect to accurately assessing test item quality in relation to student performance. To address this gap, we propose a novel QG evaluation framework, QG-SMS, which leverages Large Language Model for Student Modeling and Simulation to perform test item analysis. As demonstrated in our extensive experiments and human evaluation study, the additional perspectives introduced by the simulated student profiles lead to a more effective and robust assessment of test items.

Automated Theorem Proving is an important and challenging task. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in mathematical reasoning, their performance in formal theorem proving remains constrained by the scarcity of high-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data. To address this limitation, we propose a **Q**uality-**D**riven **T**heorem **S**ynthesis method (QDTSynth) in Lean4. During the statement synthesis, we enhance Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with an adaptive adjustment mechanism that dynamically optimizes the search strategy based on the synthesis of statements. In addition, we propose diversity screening and the self-assessment method to select theorems that exhibit both diversity and high quality from the initially synthetic statements, enabling the synthesis of a high-quality Lean4 theorem dataset. After fine-tuning three open-source large language models on our synthetic dataset, experiments on the miniF2F benchmark demonstrate that QDTSynth significantly improves the performance of various open-source LLMs in theorem proving tasks. Our work offers a promising new direction for the future synthesis of high-quality formal mathematical theorems.

Question answering (QA) tasks serve as a key benchmark for evaluating generation systems. Traditional rule-based metrics, such as accuracy and relaxed-accuracy, struggle with open-ended and unstructured responses. LLM-based evaluation methods offer greater flexibility but suffer from sensitivity to instructions, robustness issues, and high computational costs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce QAEval, a hybrid framework combining rule-based reliability with LLM-based adaptability. QAEval utilizes two high-quality datasets: QAExtract for short-answer extraction and QAScore for scoring model training. By integrating a Mixture of Evaluators model with Dynamic Load Balancing Optimization, QAEval enables accurate, cost-effective QA evaluation. Experimental results show it outperforms models like GPT-4o and Claude-3, achieving 92.3% accuracy with only 0.6B parameters.

Modern QA systems entail retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate and trustworthy responses. However, the inherent gap between user queries and relevant documents hinders precise matching. We introduce QAEncoder, a training-free approach to bridge this gap. Specifically, QAEncoder estimates the expectation of potential queries in the embedding space as a robust surrogate for the document embedding, and attaches document fingerprints to effectively distinguish these embeddings. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, languages, and embedding models confirmed QAEncoder’s alignment capability, which offers a simple-yet-effective solution with zero additional index storage, retrieval latency, training costs, or catastrophic forgetting and hallucination issues. The repository is publicly available at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/QAEncoder.

Query-driven recommendation with unknown items poses a challenge for users to understand why certain items are appropriate for their needs. Query-driven Contrastive Summarization (QCS) is a methodology designed to address this issue by leveraging language-based item descriptions to clarify contrasts between them. However, existing state-of-the-art contrastive summarization methods such as STRUM-LLM fall short of this goal. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Q-STRUM Debate, a novel extension of STRUM-LLM that employs debate-style prompting to generate focused and contrastive summarizations of item aspects relevant to a query. Leveraging modern large language models (LLMs) as powerful tools for generating debates, Q-STRUM Debate provides enhanced contrastive summaries. Experiments across three datasets demonstrate that Q-STRUM Debate yields significant performance improvements over existing methods on key contrastive summarization criteria, thus introducing a novel and performant debate prompting methodology for QCS.

State Space Models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have recently demonstrated potential in language understanding tasks, positioning them as competitors to transformer architectures. However, our investigations reveal that the Mamba architecture still has room for further optimization—not only in linear projections but also in state caches, which contribute significantly to memory consumption, particularly after quantizing the former into low bits. After a theoretical analysis of the causes of outliers in states, we propose Decoupled Scale Quantization (DSQ), which mitigates outliers in both the state and channel dimensions by applying separate quantization scales. To preserve the selective ability of quantized Mamba, we introduce Efficient Selectivity Reconstruction (ESR), a novel quantization simulation scheme in block-wise reconstruction that enables fast parallel scan algorithms with the non-linear quantization function. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Q-Mamba across various quantization settings, model sizes, and both generation and zero-shot tasks. In particular, for Mamba2-2.7B with W8A8H4 (8-bit weights and activations, 4-bit state caches) quantization, Q-Mamba achieves a 50% reduction in memory consumption with only a 2.13% average accuracy degradation on zero-shot tasks.

Key Information Extraction (KIE) is a challenging multimodal task aimed at extracting structured value entities from visually rich documents. Despite recent advancements, two major challenges remain. First, existing datasets typically feature fixed layouts and a limited set of entity categories, while current methods are based on a full-shot setting that is difficult to apply in real-world scenarios, where new entity categories frequently emerge. Secondly, current methods often treat key entities simply as parts of the OCR-parsed context, neglecting the positive impact of the relationships between key-value entities. To address the first challenge, we introduce a new large-scale, human-annotated dataset, Complex Layout document for Key Information Extraction (CLEX). Comprising 5,860 images with 1,162 entity categories, CLEX is larger and more complex than existing datasets. It also primarily focuses on the zero-shot and few-shot KIE tasks, which are more aligned with real-world applications. To tackle the second challenge, we propose the Parallel Pointer-based Network (P²Net). This model frames KIE as a pointer-based classification task and effectively leverages implicit relationships between key-value entities to enhance extraction. Its parallel extraction mechanism enables simultaneous and efficient extraction of multiple results. Experiments on widely-used datasets, including SROIE, CORD, and the newly introduced CLEX, demonstrate that P²Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods (including GPT-4V) while maintaining fast inference speeds.

Automatic exploit generation (AEG) refers to the automatic discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities against unknown targets. Traditional AEG often targets a single type of vulnerability and still relies on templates built from expert experience. To achieve intelligent exploit generation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark using Binary Exploitation (pwn) challenges in Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions and investigate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in AEG based on the benchmark. To improve the performance of AEG, we propose PwnGPT, an LLM-based automatic exploit generation framework that automatically solves pwn challenges. The structural design of PwnGPT is divided into three main components: analysis, generation, and verification modules. With the help of a modular approach and structured problem inputs, PwnGPT can solve challenges that LLMs cannot directly solve. We evaluate PwnGPT on our benchmark and analyze the outputs of each module. Experimental results show that our framework is highly autonomous and capable of addressing various challenges. Compared to direct input LLMs, PwnGPT increases the completion rate of exploit on our benchmark from 26.3% to 57.9% with the OpenAI o1-preview model and from 21.1% to 36.8% with the GPT-4o model.

Multimodal punchlines, which involve humor or sarcasm conveyed in image-caption pairs, are a popular way of communication on online multimedia platforms. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), it is essential to assess their ability to effectively comprehend these punchlines. However, existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from three major limitations: 1) language shortcuts that allow models to solely rely on text, 2) lack of question diversity, and 3) narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content (e.g., cartoon). To address these limitations, we introduce a multimodal **Punch**line comprehension **Bench**mark, named **PunchBench**, which is tailored for accurate and comprehensive evaluation of punchline comprehension. To enhance the evaluation accuracy, we generate synonymous and antonymous captions by modifying original captions, which mitigates the impact of shortcuts in the captions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, PunchBench incorporates diverse question formats and image-captions from various domains. On this basis, we conduct extensive evaluations and reveal a significant gap between state-of-the-art MLLMs and humans in punchline comprehension. To improve punchline comprehension, we propose Simple-to-Complex Chain-of-Question (SC-CoQ) strategy, enabling the models to incrementally address complicated questions by first mastering simple ones. SC-CoQ effectively enhances the performance of various MLLMs on PunchBench, surpassing in-context learning and chain-of-thought.

Dialogue systems for mental health counseling aim to alleviate client distress and assist individuals in navigating personal challenges. Developing effective conversational agents for psychotherapy requires access to high-quality, real-world, long-term client-counselor interaction data, which is difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Although removing personally identifiable information is feasible, this process is labor-intensive. To address these challenges, we propose a novel privacy-preserving data reconstruction method that reconstructs real-world client-counselor dialogues while mitigating privacy concerns. We apply the RMRR (Retrieve, Mask, Reconstruct, Refine) method, which facilitates the creation of the privacy-preserving PsyDial dataset, with an average of 37.8 turns per dialogue. Extensive analysis demonstrates that PsyDial effectively reduces privacy risks while maintaining dialogue diversity and conversational exchange. To fairly and reliably evaluate the performance of models fine-tuned on our dataset, we manually collect 101 dialogues from professional counseling books. Experimental results show that models fine-tuned on PsyDial achieve improved psychological counseling performance, outperforming various baseline models. A user study involving counseling experts further reveals that our LLM-based counselor provides higher-quality responses. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/qiuhuachuan/PsyDial, serving as valuable resources for future advancements in AI psychotherapy.

Currently, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in the field of psychological counseling. However, existing mental health LLMs overlook a critical issue where they do not consider the fact that different psychological counselors exhibit different personal styles, including linguistic style and therapy techniques, etc. As a result, these LLMs fail to satisfy the individual needs of clients who seek different counseling styles. To help bridge this gap, we propose PsyDT, a novel framework using LLMs to construct the Digital Twin of Psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Compared to the time-consuming and costly approach of collecting a large number of real-world counseling cases to create a specific counselor’s digital twin, our framework offers a faster and more cost-effective solution. To construct PsyDT, we utilize dynamic one-shot learning by using GPT-4 to capture counselor’s unique counseling style, mainly focusing on linguistic style and therapy techniques. Subsequently, using existing single-turn long-text dialogues with client’s questions, GPT-4 is guided to synthesize multi-turn dialogues of specific counselor. Finally, we fine-tune the LLMs on the synthetic dataset, PsyDTCorpus, to achieve the digital twin of psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Experimental results indicate that our proposed PsyDT framework can synthesize multi-turn dialogues that closely resemble real-world counseling cases and demonstrate better performance compared to other baselines, thereby show that our framework can effectively construct the digital twin of psychological counselor with a specific counseling style.

Proactive questioning is essential in psychological conversations as it helps uncover deeper issues and unspoken concerns. Current psychological LLMs are constrained by passive response mechanisms, limiting their capacity to deploy proactive strategies for psychological counseling. To bridge this gap, we first develop the ProPsyC (Proactive Psychological Conversation) dataset, a multi-turn conversation dataset with interpretive labels including strategy decision logic and reaction attribution. Based on ProPsyC, we propose PsyAdvisor by supervised fine-tuning, a plug-and-play proactive questioning strategy planner that empowers psychological LLMs to initiate well-timed questioning through strategic prompting. Experimental results demonstrate that psychological LLMs integrated with PsyAdvisor substantially improve proactive questioning capacity, conversation depth, and response quality.Furthermore, PsyAdvisor shows promising potential in assisting novice counselors by providing strategy recommendations. This study provides new optimization directions for psychological conversation systems and offers valuable insights for future research on proactive questioning mechanisms in psychological LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet their substantial model sizes often demand significant computational resources. To preserve computing resources and accelerate inference speed, it is crucial to prune redundant parameters, especially for experienced users who often need expert models tailored to specific downstream scenarios. However, current pruning methods primarily focus on maintaining models’ general capabilities, either requiring extensive post-training or performing poorly due to coarse-grained pruning. In this work, we design a  ̲Custom  ̲Pruning method (Cus-Prun) to prune a large general model into a smaller lightweight expert model, which is positioned along the “language”, “domain” and “task” dimensions. By identifying and pruning irrelevant neurons of each dimension, Cus-Prun creates expert models without any post-training. Our experiments demonstrate that Cus-Prun consistently outperforms other methods, achieving minimal loss in both expert and general capabilities across various models from different model families and sizes.