Thailand

Text-adventure games and text role-playing games are grand challenges for reinforcement learning game playing agents. Text role-playing games are open-ended environments where an agent must faithfully play a particular character. We consider the distinction between {\em characters} and {\em actors}, where an actor agent has the ability to play multiple characters. We present a framework we call a {\em thespian agent} that can learn to emulate multiple characters along with a soft prompt that can be used to direct it as to which character to play at any time. We further describe an attention mechanism that allows the agent to learn new characters that are based on previously learned characters in a few-shot fashion. We show that our agent outperforms the state of the art agent framework in multi-character learning and few-shot learning.

ACL 2024

Thespian: Multi-Character Text Role-Playing Game Agents

open-endedness

text role playing games

few-shot learning

reinforcement learning

### 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)

workshop paper

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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.

Recent advances in Automated Theorem Proving have shown the effectiveness of leveraging a (large) language model that generates tactics (i.e. proof steps) to search through proof states. The current model, while trained solely on successful proof paths, faces a discrepancy at the inference stage, as it must sample and try various tactics at each proof state until finding success, unlike its training which does not incorporate learning from failed attempts. Intuitively, a tactic that leads to a failed search path would indicate that similar tactics should receive less attention during the following trials. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefit of training models that additionally learn from failed search paths. Facing the lack of such trial-and-error data in existing open-source theorem-proving datasets, we curate a dataset on intuitionistic propositional logic theorems and formalize it in Lean, such that we can reliably check the correctness of proofs. We compare our model trained on relatively short trial-and-error information (TrialMaster) with models trained only on the correct paths and discover that the former solves more unseen theorems with lower trial searches.

Learn from Failure: Fine-tuning LLMs with Trial-and-Error Data for Intuitionistic Propositional Logic Proving

The increasing scale of large language models (LLMs) brings emergent abilities to various complex tasks requiring reasoning, such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning. It is known that the effective design of task-specific prompts is critical for LLMs' ability to produce high-quality answers. In particular, an effective approach for complex question-and-answering tasks is example-based prompting with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, which significantly improves the performance of LLMs. However, current CoT methods rely on a fixed set of human-annotated exemplars, which are not necessarily the most effective examples for different tasks. This paper proposes a new method, Active-Prompt, to adapt LLMs to different tasks with task-specific example prompts (annotated with human-designed CoT reasoning). For this purpose, we propose a solution to the key problem of determining which questions are the most important and helpful to annotate from a pool of task-specific queries. By borrowing ideas from the related problem of uncertainty-based active learning, we introduce several metrics to characterize the uncertainty so as to select the most uncertain questions for annotation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving superior performance on eight complex reasoning tasks. Further analyses of different uncertainty metrics, pool sizes, zero-shot learning, and accuracy-uncertainty relationships demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models

With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt-learning has become a promising method mainly researched in various research areas. Recently, many attempts based on prompt-learning have been made to improve the performance of text classification. However, most of these methods are based on heuristic Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and tend to be more complex but less efficient. In this paper, we rethink the LLM-based text classification methodology, propose a simple and effective transfer learning strategy, namely LLMEmbed, to address this classical but challenging task. To illustrate, we first study how to properly extract and fuse the text embeddings via various lightweight LLMs at different network depths to improve their robustness and discrimination, then adapt such embeddings to train the classifier. We perform extensive experiments on publicly available datasets, and the results show that LLMEmbed achieves strong performance while enjoys low training overhead using lightweight LLM backbones compared to recent methods based on larger LLMs, *i.e.* GPT-3, and sophisticated prompt-based strategies. Our LLMEmbed achieves adequate accuracy on publicly available benchmarks without any fine-tuning while merely use 4\% model parameters, 1.8\% electricity consumption and 1.5\% runtime compared to its counterparts. Code is available at: https://github.com/ChunLiu-cs/LLMEmbed-ACL2024.

LLMEmbed: Rethinking Lightweight LLM's Genuine Function in Text Classification

We present a new method for large language models to solve compositional tasks. Although they have shown strong performance on traditional language understanding tasks, large language models struggle to solve compositional tasks, where the solution depends on solving smaller instances of the same problem. We propose a natural approach to solve compositional tasks recursively. Our method, Re-Tuning, tunes models to break down a problem into subproblems, solve those subproblems, and combine the results. We show that our method significantly improves model performance on three representative compositional tasks: integer addition, dynamic programming, and parity. Compared to state-of-the-art methods that keep intermediate steps towards solving the problems, Re-Tuning achieves significantly higher accuracy and is more GPU memory efficient.

Re-Tuning: Overcoming the Compositionality Limits of Large Language Models with Recursive Tuning

Pinyin input method engine (IME) refers to the transformation tool from pinyin sequence to Chinese characters, which is widely used on mobile phone applications. Due to the homophones, Pinyin IME suffers from the one-to-many mapping problem in the process of pinyin sequences to Chinese characters. To solve the above issue, this paper makes the first exploration to leverage an effective conditional variational mechanism (CVM) for pinyin IME. However, to ensure the stable and smooth operation of Pinyin IME under low-resource conditions (e.g., on offline mobile devices), we should balance diversity, accuracy, and efficiency with CVM, which is still challenging. To this end, we employ a novel strategy that simplifies the complexity of semantic encoding by facilitating the interaction between pinyin and the Chinese character information during the construction of continuous latent variables. Concurrently, the accuracy of the outcomes is enhanced by capitalizing on the discrete latent variables. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

Exploring Conditional Variational Mechanism to Pinyin Input Method for Addressing One-to-Many Mappings in Low-Resource Scenarios

The translation of gender-neutral person-referring terms (e.g.,the students) is often non-trivial.
Translating from English into German poses an interesting case---in German, person-referring nouns are usually gender-specific, and if the gender of the referent(s) is unknown or diverse, the generic masculine (die Studenten (m.)) is commonly used. 
This solution, however, reduces the visibility of other genders, such as women and non-binary people. To counteract gender discrimination, a societal movement towards using gender-fair language exists (e.g., by adopting neosystems). However, gender-fair German is currently barely supported in machine translation (MT), requiring post-editing or 
manual translations. We address this research gap by studying gender-fair language in English-to-German MT. Concretely, we enrich a community-created gender-fair language dictionary and sample multi-sentence test instances from encyclopedic text and parliamentary speeches.
Using these novel resources, we conduct the first benchmark study involving two commercial systems and six neural MT models for translating words in isolation and natural contexts across two domains. 
Our findings show that most systems produce mainly masculine forms and rarely gender-neutral variants, highlighting the need for future research. 
We release code and data at https://github.com/g8a9/building-bridges-gender-fair-german-mt.

Building Bridges: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender-Fair Machine Translation into German

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages human preference data to train language models to align more closely with human essence. These human preference data, however, are labeled at the sequence level, creating a mismatch between sequence-level preference labels and tokens, which are autoregressively generated from the language model. Although several recent approaches have tried to provide token-level (i.e., dense) rewards for each individual token, these typically rely on predefined discrete reward values (e.g., positive: +1, negative: -1, neutral: 0), failing to account for varying degrees of preference inherent to each token. To address this limitation, we introduce TLCR (Token-Level Continuous Reward) for RLHF, which incorporates a discriminator trained to distinguish positive and negative tokens, and the confidence of the discriminator is used to assign continuous rewards to each token considering the context. Extensive experiments show that our proposed TLCR leads to consistent performance improvements over previous sequence-level or token-level discrete rewards on open-ended generation benchmarks.

TLCR: Token-Level Continuous Reward for Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

We explore the ability of GPT-4 to perform ad-hoc schema-based information extraction from scientific literature. We assess specifically whether it can, with a basic one-shot prompting approach over the full text of the included manusciprts, replicate two existing material science datasets, one pertaining to multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs), and one to silicate diffusion. We collaborate with materials scientists to perform a detailed manual error analysis to assess where and why the model struggles to faithfully extract the desired information, and draw on their insights to suggest research directions to address this broadly important task.

Toward Reliable Ad-hoc Scientific Information Extraction: A Case Study on Two Materials Dataset

Strategic social deduction games serve as valuable testbeds for evaluating the understanding and inference skills of language models, offering crucial insights into social science, artificial intelligence, and strategic gaming. This paper focuses on creating proxies of human behavior in simulated environments, with “Among Us” utilized as a tool for studying simulated human behavior. The study introduces a text-based game environment, named AmongAgents, that mirrors the dynamics of “Among Us”. Players act as crew members aboard a spaceship, tasked with identifying impostors who are sabotaging the ship and eliminating the crew. Within this environment, the behavior of simulated language agents is analyzed. The experiments involve diverse game sequences featuring different configurations of Crewmates and Impostor personality archetypes. Our work demonstrates that state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) can effectively grasp the game rules and make decisions based on the current context. This work aims to promote further exploration of LLMs in goal-oriented games with incomplete information and complex action spaces, as these settings offer valuable opportunities to assess language model performance in socially driven scenarios.

AmongAgents: Evaluating Large Language Models in the Interactive Text-Based Social Deduction Game

Role-playing games (RPGs) provide players with a rich, interactive world to explore. Dialogue serves as the primary means of communication between developers and players, manifesting in various forms such as guides, NPC interactions, and storytelling. While most games rely on written scripts to define the main story and character personalities, player immersion can be significantly enhanced through casual interactions between characters. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), we introduce a dialogue filler framework that utilizes LLMs enhanced by knowledge graphs to generate dynamic and contextually appropriate character interactions. We test this framework within the environments of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Pokémon, providing qualitative evidence that demonstrates GPT-4’s capability to act as specific characters and generate dialogue. However, some flaws remain, such as GPT-4 being overly positive when portraying Cloud. This study aims to assist developers in crafting more nuanced filler dialogues, thereby enriching player immersion and enhancing the overall RPG experience.

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