United States

The alignment process changes several properties of a large language model&#39;s (LLM&#39;s) output distribution. We analyze two aspects of post-alignment distributional shift of LLM responses. First, we re-examine previously reported reductions in response diversity post-alignment. Our analysis suggests that an apparent drop in the diversity of responses is largely explained by quality control and information aggregation. Alignment suppresses irrelevant and unhelpful content while shifting the output distribution toward longer responses that cover information spanning several responses from the base LLM, essentially presenting diverse information in a single response. Finding little evidence that alignment suppresses useful information, it is natural to ask the opposite question: do aligned models surface information that cannot be recovered from base models? Our second investigation shows this is not the case and the behavior of aligned models is recoverable from base models without fine-tuning. A combination of in-context examples and lower-resolution semantic hints about response content can elicit responses from base LLMs that are as similar to alignment-tuned LLM responses as alignment-tuned LLM responses are to each other. Taken together, these results indicate that current alignment techniques capture but do not extend the useful subset of assistant-like base LLM behavior, providing further evidence for the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis. They also show that in-context alignment can go surprisingly far as a strategy for imitating aligned LLMs without fine-tuning. Our code and data is available at [github.com/thomlake/investigating-alignment](https://github.com/thomlake/investigating-alignment).

NAACL 2025

From Distributional to Overton Pluralism: Investigating Large Language Model Alignment

pluralism

alignment

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

The alignment process changes several properties of a large language model's (LLM's) output distribution. We analyze two aspects of post-alignment distributional shift of LLM responses. First, we re-examine previously reported reductions in response diversity post-alignment. Our analysis suggests that an apparent drop in the diversity of responses is largely explained by quality control and information aggregation. Alignment suppresses irrelevant and unhelpful content while shifting the output distribution toward longer responses that cover information spanning several responses from the base LLM, essentially presenting diverse information in a single response. Finding little evidence that alignment suppresses useful information, it is natural to ask the opposite question: do aligned models surface information that cannot be recovered from base models? Our second investigation shows this is not the case and the behavior of aligned models is recoverable from base models without fine-tuning. A combination of in-context examples and lower-resolution semantic hints about response content can elicit responses from base LLMs that are as similar to alignment-tuned LLM responses as alignment-tuned LLM responses are to each other. Taken together, these results indicate that current alignment techniques capture but do not extend the useful subset of assistant-like base LLM behavior, providing further evidence for the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis. They also show that in-context alignment can go surprisingly far as a strategy for imitating aligned LLMs without fine-tuning. Our code and data is available at [github.com/thomlake/investigating-alignment](https://github.com/thomlake/investigating-alignment).

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

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to persuasion, which can pose risks when models are faced with an adversarial interlocutor. We take a first step towards defending models against persuasion while also arguing that defense against adversarial (i.e. *negative*) persuasion is only half of the equation: models should also be able to accept beneficial (i.e. *positive*) persuasion to improve their answers. We show that optimizing models for only one side results in poor performance on the other. In order to balance positive and negative persuasion, we introduce **P**ersuasion-**B**alanced **T**raining (or **PBT**), which leverages multi-agent recursive dialogue trees to create data and trains models via preference optimization to accept persuasion *when appropriate*. PBT allows us to use data generated from dialogues between smaller 7-8B models for training much larger 70B models. Moreover, PBT consistently improves resistance to misinformation and resilience to being challenged while also resulting in the best overall performance on holistic data containing both positive and negative persuasion. Crucially, we show that PBT models are better teammates in multi-agent debates across two domains (trivia and commonsense QA). We find that without PBT, pairs of stronger and weaker models have unstable performance, with the order in which the models present their answers determining whether the team obtains the stronger or weaker model's performance. PBT leads to better and more stable results and less order dependence, with the stronger model consistently pulling the weaker one up.

Teaching Models to Balance Resisting and Accepting Persuasion

Reverse thinking plays a crucial role in human reasoning. Humans can reason not only from a problem to a solution but also in reverse, i.e., start from the solution and reason towards the problem. This often enhances overall reasoning performance as it enables consistency checks between their forward and backward thinking. To enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform reverse thinking, we introduce Reverse-Enhanced Thinking (RevThink), a framework composed of data augmentation and learning objectives. In RevThink, we augment the dataset by collecting structured forward-backward reasoning from a teacher model, consisting of: (1) the original question, (2) forward reasoning, (3) backward question, and (4) backward reasoning. We then employ three objectives to train a smaller student model in a multi-task learning fashion: (a) generate forward reasoning from a question, (b) generate a backward question from a question, and (c) generate backward reasoning from the backward question. Experiments across 12 datasets covering commonsense, math, and logical reasoning show an average 13.53% improvement over the student model's zero-shot performance and a 6.84% improvement over the strongest knowledge distillation baselines. Moreover, our method demonstrates sample efficiency -- using only 10% of the correct forward reasoning from the training data, it outperforms a standard fine-tuning method trained on 10x more forward reasoning. RevThink also exhibits strong generalization to out-of-distribution held-out datasets.

Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners

Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by Claude and LLama, have exhibited impressive proficiency in tackling a myriad of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, in pursuit of the ambitious goal of attaining Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there remains ample room for enhancing LLM capabilities. Chief among these is the pressing need to bolster long-context comprehension. Numerous real-world scenarios demand LLMs to adeptly reason across extended contexts, such as multi-turn dialogues or agent workflow. Hence, recent advancements have been dedicated to stretching the upper bounds of long-context comprehension, with models like Claude 3 accommodating up to 200k tokens, employing various techniques to achieve this feat. Aligned with this progression, we propose a leaderboard LongLeader that seeks to comprehensively assess different long-context comprehension abilities of diverse LLMs and context length extension strategies across meticulously selected benchmarks. Specifically, we aim to address the following questions: 1) Do LLMs genuinely deliver the long-context proficiency they purport? 2) Which benchmarks offer reliable metrics for evaluating long-context comprehension? 3) What technical strategies prove effective in extending the understanding of longer contexts? We streamline the evaluation process for LLMs on the benchmarks, offering open-source access to the benchmarks and maintaining a dedicated website for leaderboards. We will continuously curate new datasets and update models to the leaderboards.

LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios

Reward modeling is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, especially in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, current reward models mainly produce scalar scores and struggle to incorporate critiques in a natural language format. We hypothesize that predicting both critiques and the scalar reward would improve reward modeling ability. Motivated by this, we propose Critic-RM, a framework that improves reward models using self-generated critiques without extra supervision. Critic-RM employs a two-stage process: generating and filtering high-quality critiques, followed by joint fine-tuning on reward prediction and critique generation. Experiments across benchmarks show that Critic-RM improves reward modeling accuracy by 3.7%-7.3% compared to standard reward models and LLM judges, demonstrating strong performance and data efficiency. Additional studies further validate the effectiveness of the generated critiques.

Self-Generated Critiques Boost Reward Modeling for Language Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) has been shown to be a powerful technique to augment the capabilities of LLMs for a diverse range of tasks. This work proposes AutoParLLM, a novel way to generate context using guidance from graph neural networks (GNNs) to generate efficient parallel codes. We evaluate AutoParLLM on 12 applications from two well-known benchmark suites of parallel codes: NAS Parallel Benchmark and Rodinia Benchmark. Our results show that AutoParLLM improves the state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) by 19.9% in NAS and 6.48% in Rodinia benchmark in terms of CodeBERTScore for the task of parallel code generation. Moreover, AutoParLLM improves the ability of the most powerful LLM to date, GPT-4, by achieving 17% (on NAS benchmark) and 16% (on Rodinia benchmark) better speedup. In addition, we propose OMPScore for evaluating the quality of the parallel code and show its effectiveness in evaluating parallel codes.

AutoParLLM: GNN-guided Context Generation for Zero-Shot Code Parallelization using LLMs

As model context lengths continue to increase, the number of demonstrations that can be provided in-context approaches the size of entire training datasets. We study the behavior of in-context learning (ICL) at this extreme scale on multiple datasets and models. We show that, for many datasets with large label spaces, performance continues to increase with thousands of demonstrations. We contrast this with example retrieval and finetuning: example retrieval shows excellent performance at low context lengths but has diminished gains with more demonstrations; finetuning is more data hungry than ICL but can exceed long-context ICL performance with additional data. We use the ICL setting to study several properties of both in-context learning and long-context models. We show that long-context ICL is less sensitive to random input shuffling than short-context ICL, that grouping of same-label examples negatively impacts performance, and that the performance boosts do not arise from cumulative gain from encoding many examples together. We conclude that long-context ICL can be an effective tool, and may not require long-context attention for encoding the demonstration set at all.

In-Context Learning with Long-Context Models: An In-Depth Exploration

Inconsistent annotations in training corpora, particularly within preference learning datasets, pose challenges in developing advanced language models. These inconsistencies often arise from variability among annotators and inherent multi-dimensional nature of the preferences. To address these issues, we introduce a self-curation method that preprocesses annotated datasets by leveraging proxy models trained directly on them. Our method enhances preference learning by automatically detecting and selecting consistent annotations. We validate the proposed approach through extensive instruction-following tasks, demonstrating performance improvements of up to 33% across various learning algorithms and proxy capabilities. This work offers a straightforward and reliable solution to address preference inconsistencies without relying on heuristics, serving as an initial step toward the development of more advanced preference learning methodologies. Code is available at https://github.com/Self-Curation/ .

Preference Consistency Matters: Enhancing Preference Learning in Language Models with Automated Self-Curation of Training Corpora

Large language models (LLMs) remain prone to factual inaccuracies and computational errors, including hallucinations and mistakes in mathematical reasoning. Recent work augmented LLMs with tools to mitigate these shortcomings, but often requires curated gold tool-use demonstrations. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can learn to use tools without demonstrations. First, we analyse zero-shot prompting strategies to guide LLMs in tool utilisation. Second, we propose a self-training method to synthesise tool-use traces using the LLM itself. We compare supervised fine-tuning and preference fine-tuning techniques for fine-tuning the model on datasets constructed using existing Question Answering (QA) datasets, i.e., TriviaQA and GSM8K. Experiments show that tool-use enhances performance on a long-tail knowledge task: 3.7% on PopQA, which is used solely for evaluation, but leads to mixed results on other datasets, i.e., TriviaQA, GSM8K, and NQ-Open. Our findings highlight the potential and challenges of integrating external tools into LLMs without demonstrations.

Self-Training Large Language Models for Tool-Use Without Demonstrations

Sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) have emerged as an effective approach for scaling large language models while keeping a constant computational cost. Regardless of several notable successes of SMoE, effective training such architecture remains elusive due to the representation collapse problem, which in turn harms model performance and causes parameter redundancy. In this work, we present Similarity-based Sparse Mixture of Experts (SimSMoE), a novel similarity of neural network algorithm, that guarantees a solution to address the representation collapse issue between experts given a fixed FLOPs budget. We conduct extensive empirical evaluations on three large language models for both Pre-training and Fine-tuning tasks to illustrate the efficacy, robustness, and scalability of our method. The results demonstrate that SimSMoE significantly enhances existing routing policy and outperforms other SMoE routing methods in performance for the tasks. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/giangdip2410/SimSMoE.

SimSMoE: Toward Efficient Training Mixture of Experts via Solving Representational Collapse

Spatial reasoning based on natural language expressions is essential for everyday human tasks. This reasoning ability is also crucial for machines to interact with their environment in a human-like manner. However, recent research shows that even state-of-the-art language models struggle with spatial reasoning over text, especially when facing nesting spatial expressions. This is attributed to not achieving the right level of abstraction required for generalizability. To alleviate this issue, we propose training language models with neuro-symbolic techniques that exploit the spatial logical rules as constraints, providing additional supervision to improve spatial reasoning and question answering. Training language models to adhere to spatial reasoning rules guides them in making more effective and general abstractions for transferring spatial knowledge to various domains. We evaluate our approach on existing spatial question-answering benchmarks. Our results indicate the effectiveness of our proposed technique in improving language models in complex multi-hop spatial reasoning over text.

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