United States

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.

NAACL 2025

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

long context

long-context

in-context learning

applications

analysis

### 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)

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. 
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*- 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

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.

Neuro-symbolic Training for Reasoning over Spatial Language

Despite the substantial advancements in artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) remain being challenged by generation safety. With adversarial jailbreaking prompts, one can effortlessly induce LLMs to output harmful content, causing unexpected negative social impacts. This vulnerability highlights the necessity for robust LLM red-teaming strategies to identify and mitigate such risks before large-scale application. To detect specific types of risks, we propose a novel red-teaming method that **A**ttacks LLMs with **T**arget **Toxi**c **A**nswers (**Atoxia**). Given a particular harmful answer, Atoxia generates a corresponding user query and a misleading answer opening to examine the internal defects of a given LLM. The proposed attacker is trained within a reinforcement learning scheme with the LLM outputting probability of the target answer as the reward. We verify the effectiveness of our method on various red-teaming benchmarks, such as AdvBench and HH-Harmless. The empirical results demonstrate that Atoxia can successfully detect safety risks in not only open-source models but also state-of-the-art black-box models such as GPT-4o.

Atoxia: Red-teaming Large Language Models with Target Toxic Answers

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task or the characteristics of the training data, resulting in a loss of generalization. This paper introduces Selective Self-to-Supervised Fine-Tuning (S3FT), a fine-tuning approach that achieves better performance than the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while improving generalization. S3FT leverages the existence of multiple valid responses to a query. By utilizing the model's correct responses, S3FT reduces model specialization during the fine-tuning stage. S3FT first identifies the correct model responses from the training set by deploying an appropriate judge. Then, it fine-tunes the model using the correct model responses and the gold response (or its paraphrase) for the remaining samples. The effectiveness of S3FT is demonstrated through experiments on mathematical reasoning, Python programming and reading comprehension tasks. The results show that standard SFT can lead to an average performance drop of up to 4.4 on multiple benchmarks, such as MMLU and TruthfulQA. In contrast, S3FT reduces this drop by half, i.e. 2.5, indicating better generalization capabilities than SFT while performing significantly better on the fine-tuning tasks.

Selective Self-to-Supervised Fine-Tuning for Generalization in Large Language Models

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a widely used training method for the instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we explore an under-investigated aspect of DPO -- its dependency on the reference model or policy. Such reference policies, typically instantiated as the model to be further fine-tuned, are important since they can impose an upper limit on DPO's effectiveness. Therefore, we address three related research questions in this work. First, we explore the optimal strength of the KL divergence constraint in DPO, which penalizes deviations from the reference policy, and find that DPO is sensitive to this strength. Next, we examine the necessity of the KL-constraint from the reference policies in DPO by providing both theoretical and empirical comparisons between DPO and related learning objectives, demonstrating DPO's superiority in this controlled setting. Additionally, we investigate whether DPO benefits from stronger reference policies, finding that a stronger reference policy can lead to improved performance, but only when it is similar to the model being fine-tuned. Our findings highlight the confounding role of reference policies in DPO and offer insights for best practices, while also identifying open research questions for future studies.

Understanding Reference Policies in Direct Preference Optimization

Recent advancements in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have significantly enhanced the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, owing to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, existing methods typically optimize a scalar score or ranking reward, thereby overlooking the multi-dimensional nature of human preferences. In this work, we propose to extend the preference of DPO to two dimensions: segments and aspects. We first introduce a 2D supervision dataset called HelpSteer-2D. For the segment dimension, we divide the response into sentences and assign scores to each segment. For the aspect dimension, we meticulously design several criteria covering the response quality rubrics. With the 2-dimensional signals as feedback, we develop a 2D-DPO framework, decomposing the overall objective into multi-segment and multi-aspect objectives. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that 2D-DPO performs better than methods that optimize for scalar or 1-dimensional preferences.

2D-DPO: Scaling Direct Preference Optimization with 2-Dimensional Supervision

Accelerating research on Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in non-English languages is crucial for enhancing user experiences across broader populations. In this paper, we introduce **JMMMU** (*Japanese MMMU*), the first large-scale Japanese benchmark designed to evaluate LMMs on expert-level tasks based on the Japanese cultural context. To facilitate comprehensive culture-aware evaluation, JMMMU features two complementary subsets: (i) culture-agnostic (CA) subset, where the culture-independent subjects (e.g., Math) are selected and translated into Japanese, enabling one-to-one comparison with its English counterpart MMMU; and (ii) culture-specific (CS) subset, comprising newly crafted subjects that reflect Japanese cultural context. Using the CA subset, we observe performance drop in many LMMs when evaluated in Japanese, which is purely attributable to language variation. Using the CS subset, we reveal their inadequate Japanese cultural understanding. Further, by combining both subsets, we identify that some LMMs perform well on the CA subset but not on the CS subset, exposing a *shallow* understanding of the Japanese language that lacks depth in cultural understanding. We hope this work will not only help advance LMM performance in Japanese but also serve as a guideline to create high-standard, culturally diverse benchmarks for multilingual LMM development.

JMMMU: A Japanese Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark for Culture-aware Evaluation

Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of (1)\ absence of moderation and (2)\ censorship due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been overlooked. These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in **AfriHate** is a tweet annotated by native speakers familiar with the regional culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. We find that model performance highly depends on the language and that multilingual models can help boost performance in low-resource settings.

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

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