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Prior work has shown that language models can be trained to follow user instructions using only a small set of high-quality instructions. This has accelerated the development of general-purpose instruction selection strategies which enable sampling such high quality subsets from large instruction-tuning datasets. Typically, the performance of these strategies is not demonstrated across a uniform experimental setup and *thus their generalization capabilities are not well established*. In this work, we analyze popular selection strategies across different source datasets, selection budgets and evaluation benchmarks: Our results indicate that selection strategies generalize poorly, often failing to consistently outperform even random baselines. Further, since such strategies are often designed to reduce the cost of fine-tuning, we also study their cost-performance trade-off. Here, our findings reveal that data selection can often exceed the cost of full fine-tuning, yielding only marginal—and sometimes negative—performance gains compared to full fine-tuning and random sampling.

NAACL 2025

Chasing Random: Instruction Selection Strategies Fail to Generalize

convergence validity

instruction finetuning

data selection

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

poster

### 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. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- 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

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as contextualizing literature, generating ideas, validating ideas, interpreting results, and planning new research. Scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured, making it difficult to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To meet this challenge, we introduce **MASSW**, a comprehensive dataset of **M**ulti-**A**spect **S**ummarization of **S**cientific **W**orkflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications -- *context, key idea, method, outcome*, and *projected impact* -- which correspond to five key steps in a research workflow. We show that these LLM-extract summaries have a comparable quality to human annotations, and they facilitate a variety of downstream tasks, corresponding to different types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. Overall, MASSW demonstrates decent utility as a pre-computed and trustful resource for the AI4Science community to create and benchmark a wide-range of new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation. Our code and datasets are made available anonymously: [link](https://osf.io/7ygrq/?view_only=3d8261a0ea09489fa67ece2c68235afa).

MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows

The prevalence of vision-threatening eye diseases is a significant global burden, with many cases remaining undiagnosed or diagnosed too late for effective treatment. Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have the potential to assist in understanding anatomical information, diagnosing eye diseases, and drafting interpretations and follow-up plans, thereby reducing the burden on clinicians and improving access to eye care. However, limited benchmarks are available to assess LVLMs' performance in ophthalmology-specific applications. In this study, we introduce LMOD, a large-scale multimodal ophthalmology benchmark consisting of 21,993 instances across (1) five ophthalmic imaging modalities: optical coherence tomography, color fundus photographs, scanning laser ophthalmoscopy, lens photographs, and surgical scenes; (2) free-text, demographic, and disease biomarker information; and (3) primary ophthalmology-specific applications such as anatomical information understanding, disease diagnosis, and subgroup analysis. In addition, we benchmarked 13 state-of-the-art LVLM representatives from closed-source, open-source, and medical domains. The results demonstrate a significant performance drop for LVLMs in ophthalmology compared to other domains. Systematic error analysis further identified six major failure modes: misclassification, failure to abstain, inconsistent reasoning, hallucination, assertions without justification, and lack of domain-specific knowledge. In contrast, supervised neural networks specifically trained on these tasks as baselines demonstrated high accuracy. These findings underscore the pressing need for benchmarks in the development and validation of ophthalmology-specific LVLMs.

LMOD: A Large Multimodal Ophthalmology Dataset and Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on unseen tasks in English, but their abilities in non-English languages are less explored due to limited benchmarks and training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Indic-QA Benchmark, a large dataset for context-grounded question answering in 11 major Indian languages, covering both extractive and abstractive tasks. Evaluations of multilingual LLMs, including instruction fine-tuned versions, revealed weak performance in low-resource languages due to a strong English-language bias in their training data. We also investigated the Translate-Test paradigm,where inputs are translated to English for processing and the results are translated back into the source language for output. This approach outperformed multilingual LLMs, particularly in low-resource settings. By releasing Indic-QA, we aim to promote further research into LLMs’ question-answering capabilities in low-resource languages. This benchmark offers a critical resource to address existing limitations and foster multilingual understanding.

INDIC QA BENCHMARK: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Question Answering capability of LLMs for Indic Languages

While language models (LMs) excel at generating code, many programs are difficult to generate using only parametric knowledge. Despite the success of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in text-centric tasks, its potential for code generation remains under-explored. This work introduces CodeRAG-bench, a holistic retrieval-augmented code generation benchmark covering tasks like basic programming, open-domain, and repository-level problems and provides reproducible evaluations on both retrieval and end-to-end code generation performance. We further create a diverse, open datastore for code retrieval, aggregating sources such as competition solutions, tutorials, library documentation, StackOverflow posts, and GitHub repositories. Based on CodeRAG-bench, we conduct large-scale evaluations of 10 retrievers and 10 LMs and systematically analyze when retrieval can benefit code generation models and identify remaining challenges. We find that while retrieving high-quality contexts improves code generation, retrievers often struggle to fetch useful contexts, and generators face limitations in using those contexts effectively. We hope CodeRAG-bench encourages further development in code-oriented RAG methods.

CodeRAG-Bench: Can Retrieval Augment Code Generation?

As the performance of Large-scale Vision Language Models (LVLMs) improves, they are increasingly capable of responding in multiple languages, and there is an expectation that the demand for explanations generated by LVLMs will grow. However, pre-training of Vision Encoder and the integrated training of LLMs with Vision Encoder are mainly conducted using English training data, leaving it uncertain whether LVLMs can completely handle their potential when generating explanations in languages other than English. In addition, multilingual QA benchmarks that create datasets using machine translation have cultural differences and biases, remaining issues for use as evaluation tasks. To address these challenges, this study created an extended dataset in multiple languages without relying on machine translation. This dataset that takes into account nuances and country-specific phrases was then used to evaluate the generation explanation abilities of LVLMs. Furthermore, this study examined whether Instruction-Tuning in resource-rich English improves performance in other languages. Our findings indicate that LVLMs perform worse in languages other than English compared to English. In addition, it was observed that LVLMs struggle to effectively manage the knowledge learned from English data.

Towards Cross-Lingual Explanation of Artwork in Large-scale Vision Language Models

Computational modeling of user-generated desires on social media can significantly aid decision-makers across various fields. Initially explored through wish speech,this task has evolved into a nuanced examination of hope speech. To enhance understanding and detection, we propose a novel scheme rooted in formal semantics approaches to modality, capturing both future-oriented hopes through desires and beliefs and the counterfactuality of past unfulfilled wishes and regrets. We manually re-annotated existing hope speech datasets and built a new one which constitutes a new benchmark in the field. We also explore the capabilities of LLMs in automatically detecting hope speech, relying on several prompting strategies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt towards a language-driven decomposition of the notional category hope and its automatic detection in a unified setting.

CDB: A Unified Framework for Hope Speech Detection Through Counterfactual, Desire and Belief

Meta-evaluation of automatic evaluation metrics---assessing evaluation metrics themselves---is crucial for accurately benchmarking natural language processing systems and has implications for scientific inquiry, production model development, and policy enforcement. While existing approaches to metric meta-evaluation focus on general statements about the absolute and relative quality of metrics across arbitrary system outputs, in practice, metrics are applied in highly contextual settings, often measuring the performance for a highly constrained set of system outputs. For example, we may only be interested in evaluating a specific model or class of models. We introduce a method for contextual metric meta-evaluation by comparing the local metric accuracy of evaluation metrics. Across translation, speech recognition, and ranking tasks, we demonstrate that the local metric accuracies vary both in absolute value and relative effectiveness as we shift across evaluation contexts. This observed variation highlights the importance of adopting context-specific metric evaluations over global ones.

Contextual Metric Meta-Evaluation by Measuring Local Metric Accuracy

Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have evolved at an impressive rate over the past few years, coming close to or matching human performance on some benchmarks. We argue that common evaluation metrics used by popular benchmarks do not account for the semantic and multimodal groundedness of a model's outputs. As a result, hallucinations and major semantic errors are treated the same way as well-grounded outputs, and the evaluation scores do not reflect the reasoning capabilities of the model. In response, we propose a new evaluation methodology that accounts for the groundedness of predictions with regard to the semantic characteristics of the output as well as the multimodal placement of the output within the input document. Our proposed methodology is parameterized in such a way that users can configure the score according to their preferences. We validate our scoring methodology using human judgment and show its potential impact on existing popular leaderboards. Through extensive analyses, we demonstrate that our proposed method produces scores that are a better indicator of a model's robustness and tends to give higher rewards to better-calibrated answers.

Where is this coming from? Making groundedness count in the evaluation of Document VQA models

Despite the massive advancements in large language models (LLMs), they still suffer from producing plausible but incorrect responses. To improve the reliability of LLMs, recent research has focused on uncertainty quantification to predict whether a response is correct or not. However, most uncertainty quantification methods have been evaluated on single-labeled questions, which removes data uncertainty—the irreducible randomness often present in user queries, which can arise from factors like multiple possible answers. This limitation may cause uncertainty quantification results to be unreliable in practical settings. In this paper, we investigate previous uncertainty quantification methods under the presence of data uncertainty. Our contributions are two-fold: 1) proposing a new Multi-Answer Question Answering dataset, **MAQA**, consisting of world knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks to evaluate uncertainty quantification regarding data uncertainty, and 2) assessing 5 uncertainty quantification methods of diverse white- and black-box LLMs. Our findings show that previous methods relatively struggle compared to single-answer settings, though this varies depending on the task. Moreover, we observe that entropy- and consistency-based methods effectively estimate model uncertainty, even in the presence of data uncertainty.

MAQA: Evaluating Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs Regarding Data Uncertainty

Instruction following is a core capability of modern Large language models (LLMs), making evaluating this capability essential to understanding these models. The Instruction Following Evaluation (IFEval) benchmark from the literature does this using objective criteria, offering a measure of LLM performance without subjective AI or human judgement. However, it only includes English instructions, limiting its ability to assess LLMs in other languages. We propose the Multilingual Instruction Following Evaluation (M-IFEval) benchmark, expanding the evaluation to French, Japanese, and Spanish, with both general and language-specific instructions. Applying this benchmark to 8 state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that benchmark performance across languages and instruction types can vary widely, underscoring the importance of a multilingual benchmark for evaluating LLMs in a diverse cultural context.

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MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows

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Importance-Aware Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning