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The deployment and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by their memory inefficiency, computational demands, and the high costs of API inferences. Traditional distillation methods, which transfer the capabilities of LLMs to smaller models, often fail to determine whether the knowledge has been sufficiently transferred, potentially resulting in high costs or incomplete distillation. In this paper, we propose an Explanation-Guided LLMs Active Distillation (ELAD) framework that employs an active learning strategy to optimize the balance between annotation costs and model performance. To improve the efficiency of sample selection, we introduce an explanation-guided sample selection method that identifies samples challenging its reasoning by exploiting uncertainties in reasoning explanation steps. Additionally, we present a customized LLM-annotated explanation revision technique where the teacher model detects and corrects flaws in the student model&#39;s reasoning. Our experiments across various reasoning datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the efficiency of LLMs knowledge distillation.

ACL 2024

ELAD: Explanation-Guided Large Language Models Active Distillation

explanation-guided learning

efficient/low-resource methods for llm

knowledge distillation

### 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)

The deployment and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by their memory inefficiency, computational demands, and the high costs of API inferences. Traditional distillation methods, which transfer the capabilities of LLMs to smaller models, often fail to determine whether the knowledge has been sufficiently transferred, potentially resulting in high costs or incomplete distillation. In this paper, we propose an Explanation-Guided LLMs Active Distillation (ELAD) framework that employs an active learning strategy to optimize the balance between annotation costs and model performance. To improve the efficiency of sample selection, we introduce an explanation-guided sample selection method that identifies samples challenging its reasoning by exploiting uncertainties in reasoning explanation steps. Additionally, we present a customized LLM-annotated explanation revision technique where the teacher model detects and corrects flaws in the student model's reasoning. Our experiments across various reasoning datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the efficiency of LLMs knowledge distillation.

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) is a powerful technique for predicting missing links in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) by learning the entities and relations. Hyperbolic space has emerged as a promising embedding space for KGs due to its ability to represent hierarchical data. Nevertheless, most existing hyperbolic KGE methods rely on tangent approximation and are not fully hyperbolic, resulting in distortions and inaccuracies. To overcome this limitation, we propose LorentzKG, a fully hyperbolic KGE method that represents entities as points in the Lorentz model and represents relations as the intrinsic transformation—the Lorentz transformations between entities. We demonstrate that the Lorentz transformation, which can be decomposed into Lorentz rotation/reflection and Lorentz boost, captures various types of relations including hierarchical structures. Experimental results show that our LorentzKG achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Enhancing Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Lorentz Transformations

The proliferation of Conversational AI agents (CAAs) has emphasised the need to distinguish between human and 
machine-generated texts, with implications spanning digital forensics and cybersecurity. While prior research primarily focussed on distinguishing human from machine-generated text, our study takes a more refined approach by analysing different CAAs. We construct linguistic profiles for five CAAs, aiming to identify Uniquely Identifiable Linguistic Patterns (UILPs) for each model using authorship attribution techniques. Authorship attribution (AA) is the task of identifying the author of an unknown text from a pool of known authors. Our research seeks to answer crucial questions about the existence of UILPs in CAAs, the linguistic overlap between various text types generated by these models, and the feasibility of Authorship Attribution (AA) for CAAs based on UILPs. 
Promisingly, we are able to attribute CAAs based on their original texts with a weighted F1-score of 96.94%. Further, we are able to attribute CAAs according to their writing style (as specified by prompts), yielding a weighted F1-score of 95.84%, which sets the baseline for this task. By employing principal component analysis (PCA), we identify the top 100 most informative linguistic features for each CAA, achieving a weighted F1-score ranging from 86.04% to 97.93%, and an overall weighted F1-score of 93.86%.

Probing the Uniquely Identifiable Linguistic Patterns of Conversational AI Agents

In recent years, few-shot and zero-shot learning, which learn to predict labels with limited annotated instances, have garnered significant attention. Traditional approaches often treat frequent-shot (freq-shot; labels with abundant instances), few-shot, and zero-shot learning as distinct challenges, optimizing systems for just one of these scenarios. Yet, in real-world settings, label occurrences vary greatly. Some of them might appear thousands of times, while others might only appear sporadically or not at all. For practical deployment, it is crucial that a system can adapt to any label occurrence. We introduce a novel classification challenge: **X-shot**, reflecting a real-world context where freq-shot, few-shot, and zero-shot labels co-occur without predefined limits. Here, **X** can span from 0 to positive infinity. The crux of **X-shot** centers on open-domain generalization and devising a system versatile enough to manage various label scenarios. To solve **X-shot**, we propose **BinBin** (**B**inary **IN**ference **B**ased on **IN**struction following) that leverages the Indirect Supervision from a large collection of NLP tasks via instruction following, bolstered by Weak Supervision provided by large language models. **BinBin** surpasses previous state-of-the-art techniques on three benchmark datasets across multiple domains. To our knowledge, this is the first work addressing **X-shot** learning, where **X** remains variable.

X-Shot: A Unified System to Handle Frequent, Few-shot and Zero-shot Learning Simultaneously in Classification

In the field of education, for better assessment of students' abilities, generated questions often need to meet experts' requirements, indicating the need for controllable question generation (CQG). However, current CQG methods mainly focus on difficulty control, neglecting the control of question content and assessed abilities, which are also crucial in educational QG. In this paper, we propose an LLM-guided method PFQS (for Planning First, Question Second), which utilizes Llama 2 to generate an answer plan and then generates questions based on it. The plan not only includes candidate answers but also integrates LLM's understanding and multiple requirements, which make question generation simple and controllable. We evaluate our approach on the FairytaleQA dataset, a well-structured QA dataset derived from child-friendly storybooks. In the dataset, the attribute label represents content control, while the local_or_sum and ex_or_im labels denote difficulty control. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art results and achieves better consistency with requirements compared to prompt-based method. Further application of our method to Llama 2 and Mistral also leads to improved requirement consistency in a zero-shot setting.

Planning First, Question Second: An LLM-Guided Method for Controllable Question Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucinations and outdated information. To address this, Information Retrieval (IR) systems can be employed to augment LLMs with up-to-date knowledge. However, existing IR techniques contain deficiencies, posing a performance bottleneck. Given the extensive array of IR systems, combining diverse approaches presents a viable strategy. Nevertheless, prior attempts have yielded restricted efficacy. In this work, we propose an approach that leverages learning-to-rank techniques to combine heterogeneous IR systems. We demonstrate the method on two Retrieval Question Answering (ReQA) tasks. Our empirical findings exhibit a significant performance enhancement, outperforming previous approaches and achieving state-of-the-art results on ReQA SQuAD.

MrRank: Improving Question Answering Retrieval System through Multi-Result Ranking Model

Social media has emerged as a cornerstone of social movements, wielding significant influence in driving societal change. Simulating the response of the public and forecasting the potential impact has become increasingly important. However, existing methods for simulating such phenomena encounter challenges concerning their efficacy and efficiency in capturing the behaviors of social movement participants. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid framework for social media user simulation, wherein users are categorized into two types. Core users are driven by Large Language Models, while numerous ordinary users are modeled by deductive agent-based models. We further construct a Twitter-like environment to replicate their response dynamics following trigger events. Subsequently, we develop a multi-faceted benchmark SoMoSiMu-Bench for evaluation and conduct comprehensive experiments across real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our method.

Unveiling the Truth and Facilitating Change: Towards Agent-based Large-scale Social Movement Simulation

The success of state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems heavily depends on deep neural networks, which excel in various tasks through strong data fitting and latent feature modeling abilities. However, certain challenges linked to deep neural networks and supervised deep learning deserve considerations, e.g., extensive computing resources, knowledge forgetting, etc. Previous research attempted to tackle these challenges individually through irrelative techniques. However, they do not instigate fundamental shifts in the learning paradigm. In this work, we propose a novel neurosymbolic method for sentiment analysis to tackle these issues. We also propose a novel sentiment-pragmatic knowledge base that places emphasis on human subjectivity within varying domain annotations. We conducted extensive experiments to show that our neurosymbolic framework for sentiment analysis stands out for its lightweight nature, robustness across domains and languages, efficient few-shot training, and rapid convergence.

SenticVec: Toward Robust and Human-Centric Neurosymbolic Sentiment Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) predominantly employ decoder-only transformer architectures, necessitating the retention of keys/values information for historical tokens to provide contextual information and avoid redundant computation. However, the substantial size and parameter volume of these LLMs require massive GPU memory. This memory demand increases with the length of the input text, leading to an urgent need for more efficient methods of information storage and processing. This study introduces Anchor-based LLMs (AnLLMs), which utilize an innovative anchor-based self-attention network (AnSAN) and also an anchor-based inference strategy. This approach enables LLMs to compress sequence information into an anchor token, reducing the keys/values cache and enhancing inference efficiency. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks reveal that AnLLMs maintain similar accuracy levels while achieving up to 99% keys/values cache reduction and up to 3.5 times faster inference. Despite a minor compromise in accuracy, the substantial enhancements of AnLLMs employing the AnSAN technique in resource utilization and computational efficiency underscore their potential for practical LLM applications.

Anchor-based Large Language Models

Memes have evolved as a prevalent medium for diverse communication, ranging from humour to propaganda. With the rising popularity of image-focused content, there is a growing need to explore its potential harm from different aspects. Previous studies have analyzed memes in closed settings - detecting harm, applying semantic labels, and offering natural language explanations. To extend this research, we introduce MemeMQA, a multimodal question-answering framework aiming to solicit accurate responses to structured questions while providing coherent explanations. We curate MemeMQACorpus, a new dataset featuring 1,880 questions related to 1,122 memes with corresponding answer-explanation pairs. We further propose ARSENAL, a novel two-stage multimodal framework that leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to address MemeMQA. We benchmark MemeMQA using competitive baselines and demonstrate its superiority - ~18% enhanced answer prediction accuracy and distinct text generation lead across various metrics measuring lexical and semantic alignment over the best baseline. We analyze ARSENAL's robustness through diversification of question-set, confounder-based evaluation regarding MemeMQA's generalizability, and modality-specific assessment, enhancing our understanding of meme interpretation in the multimodal communication landscape.

MemeMQA: Multimodal Question Answering for Memes via Rationale-Based Inferencing

Syntactic Language Models (SLMs) can be trained efficiently to reach relatively high performance; however, they have trouble with inference efficiency due to the explicit generation of syntactic structures. In this paper, we propose a new method dubbed tree-planting: instead of explicitly generating syntactic structures, we "plant" trees into attention weights of unidirectional Transformer LMs to implicitly reflect syntactic structures of natural language. Specifically, unidirectional Transformer LMs trained with tree-planting will be called Tree-Planted Transformers (TPT), which inherit the training efficiency from SLMs without changing the inference efficiency of their underlying Transformer LMs. Targeted syntactic evaluations on the SyntaxGym benchmark demonstrated that TPTs, despite the lack of explicit generation of syntactic structures, significantly outperformed not only vanilla Transformer LMs but also various SLMs that generate hundreds of syntactic structures in parallel. This result suggests that TPTs can learn human-like syntactic knowledge as data-efficiently as SLMs while maintaining the modeling space of Transformer LMs unchanged.

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Enhancing Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Lorentz Transformations

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