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The Audio Question Answering (AQA) task includes audio event classification, audio captioning, and open-ended reasoning. Recently, AQA has garnered attention due to the advent of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). Current literature focuses on constructing LALMs by integrating audio encoders with text-only Large Language Models (LLMs) through a projection module. While LALMs excel in general audio understanding, they are limited in temporal reasoning, which may hinder their commercial applications and on-device deployment. This paper addresses these challenges and limitations in audio temporal reasoning. First, we introduce a data augmentation technique for generating reliable audio temporal questions and answers using an LLM. Second, we perform a further fine-tuning of an existing baseline using curriculum learning strategy to specialize in temporal reasoning without compromising performance on fine-tuned tasks. We demonstrate the performance of our model using state-of-the-art LALMs on public audio benchmark datasets. Third, we implement our AQA model on-device locally and investigate its CPU inference for edge applications.

NAACL 2025

Enhancing Temporal Understanding in Audio Question Answering for Large Audio Language Models

lalm

audio question answering

temporal reasoning

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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.

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### 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 Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their recent success, are hardly comprehensively tested for their cognitive abilities. Inspired by the prevalent use of the Cookie Theft task in human cognitive tests, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark to evaluate high-level cognitive abilities of LVLMs using images with rich semantics. The benchmark consists of 251 images along with comprehensive annotations. It defines eight reasoning capabilities and comprises an image description task and a visual question answering task. Our evaluation of well-known LVLMs shows that there is still a significant gap in cognitive abilities between LVLMs and humans.

A Cognitive Evaluation Benchmark of Image Reasoning and Description for Large Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at tasks requiring joint understanding of visual and linguistic information. A particularly promising yet under-explored application for these models lies in answering questions based on various kinds of maps. This study investigates the efficacy of VLMs in answering questions based on choropleth maps, which are widely used for data analysis and representation. To facilitate and encourage research in this area, we introduce a novel map-based question-answering benchmark, consisting of maps from three geographical regions (United States, India, China), each containing around 1000 questions. Our benchmark incorporates 43 diverse question templates, requiring nuanced understanding of relative spatial relationships, intricate map features, and complex reasoning. It also includes maps with discrete and continuous values, covering variations in color mapping, category ordering, and stylistic patterns, enabling a comprehensive analysis. We evaluated the performance of multiple VLMs on this benchmark, highlighting gaps in their abilities, and providing insights for improving such models. Our dataset, along with all necessary code scripts, is available at map-wise.github.io.

MAPWise: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Advanced Map Queries

The profound success of transformer-based language models can largely be attributed to their ability to integrate relevant contextual information from an input sequence in order to generate a response or complete a task. However, we know very little about the algorithms that a model employs to implement this capability, nor do we understand their failure modes. For example, given the prompt ''John is going fishing, so he walks over to the bank. Can he make an ATM transaction?'', a model may incorrectly respond ''Yes'' if it has not properly contextualized ''bank'' as a geographical feature, rather than a financial institution. We propose the LLM Race Conditions Hypothesis as an explanation of contextualization errors of this form. This hypothesis identifies dependencies between tokens (e.g., ''bank'' must be properly contextualized before the final token, ''?'', integrates information from ''bank''), and claims that contextualization errors are a result of violating these dependencies. Using a variety of techniques from mechanistic interpretability, we provide correlational and causal evidence in support of the hypothesis and suggest inference-time interventions to address it.

Racing Thoughts: Explaining Contextualization Errors in Large Language Models

Generating high-quality charts with Large
Language Models (LLMs) presents significant challenges due to limited data and the
high cost of scaling through human curation.
⟨instruction, data, code⟩ triplets are scarce and
expensive to manually curate as their creation
demands technical expertise. To address this
scalability challenge, we introduce a referencefree automatic feedback generator, which eliminates the need for costly human intervention.
Our novel framework, C
2
, consists of (1) an automatic feedback provider (CHARTAF) and (2)
a diverse, reference-free dataset (CHARTUIE8K). The results are compelling: in our first
experiment, 74% of respondents strongly preferred, and 10% preferred, the results after
feedback. The second post-feedback experiment demonstrates that CHARTAF outperform nine baselines. Moreover, CHARTUIE8K significantly improves data diversity by increasing queries, datasets, and chart types by
5982%, 1936%, and 91%, respectively, over
benchmarks. Finally, a study of LLM users
revealed that 94% of participants preferred
CHARTUIE-8K’s queries, with 93% deeming
them aligned with real-world use cases. Core
contributions are available as open-source at
chartsquared.github.io, with ample qualitative
examples.

C2 : Scalable Auto-Feedback for LLM-based Chart Generation

Suggested questions (SQs) provide an effective initial interface for users to engage with their documents in AI-powered reading applications. In practical reading sessions, users have diverse backgrounds and reading goals, yet current SQ features typically ignore such user information, resulting in homogeneous or ineffective questions. We introduce a pipeline that generates personalized SQs by incorporating reader profiles (professions and reading goals) and demonstrate its utility in two ways: 1) as an improved SQ generation pipeline that produces higher quality and more diverse questions compared to current baselines, and 2) as a data generator to fine-tune extremely small models that perform competitively with much larger models on SQ generation. Our approach can not only serve as a drop-in replacement in current SQ systems to immediately improve their performance but also help develop on-device SQ models that can run locally to deliver fast and private SQ experience.

Persona-SQ: A Personalized Suggested Question Generation Framework For Real-world Documents

Firm risk relations are crucial in financial applications, including hedging and portfolio construction. However, the complexity of extracting relevant information from financial reports poses significant challenges in quantifying these relations. To this end, we introduce SURF, a System to Unveil Explainable Risk Relations between Firms. SURF employs a domain-specific encoder and an innovative scoring mechanism to uncover latent risk connections from financial reports. It constructs a network graph to visualize these firm-level risk interactions and incorporates a rationale explainer to elucidate the underlying links. Our evaluation using stock data shows that SURF outperforms baseline methods in effectively capturing firm risk relations. The demo video of the system is publicly available.

SURF: A System to Unveil Explainable Risk Relations between Firms

Classification tasks in NLP are typically addressed by selecting a pre-trained language model (PLM) from a model hub, and fine-tuning it for the task at hand. However, given the very large number of PLMs that are currently available, a practical challenge is to determine which of them will perform best for a specific downstream task. With this paper, we introduce TransformerRanker, a lightweight library that efficiently ranks PLMs for classification tasks without the need for computationally costly fine-tuning. Our library implements current approaches for transferability estimation (LogME, H-Score, kNN), in combination with layer aggregation options, which we empirically showed to yield state-of-the-art rankings of PLMs (Garbas et al., 2024). We designed the interface to be lightweight and easy to use, allowing users to directly connect to the HuggingFace Transformers and Dataset libraries. Users need only select a downstream classification task and a list of PLMs to create a ranking of likely best-suited PLMs for their task. We make TransformerRanker available as a pip-installable open-source library.

TransformerRanker: A Tool for Efficiently Finding the Best-Suited Language Models for Downstream Classification Tasks

Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to novel tasks and enhancing their overall capabilities often requires large, high-quality training datasets. Synthetic data, generated at scale, serves a valuable alternative when real-world data is scarce or difficult to obtain. However, ensuring the quality of synthetic datasets is challenging, as developers must manually inspect and refine numerous samples to identify errors and areas for improvement. This process is time-consuming and requires specialized tools. We introduce NeMo-Inspector, an open-source tool designed to simplify the analysis of synthetic datasets with integrated inference capabilities. We demonstrate its effectiveness through two real-world cases. Analysis and cleaning of the synthetically generated GSM-Plus dataset with NeMo-Inspector led to a significant decrease in low-quality samples from 46.99% to 19.51%. The tool also helped identify and correct generation errors in OpenMath models, improving accuracy by 1.92% on the MATH dataset and by 4.17% on the GSM8K dataset for a Meta-Llama-3-8B model fine-tuned on synthetic data generated from Nemotron-4-340B.

NeMo-Inspector: A Visualization Tool for LLM Generation Analysis

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for code generation is challenging due to computational costs and the underrepresentation of some programming languages (PLs) in pre-training. We propose PLEX, a lottery-ticket based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method that adapts LLMs to either well-supported and underrepresented PLs.
During lottery ticket selection, PLEX employs a dual strategy: for well-represented PLs, it leverages the LLM's full parametric knowledge by selecting from full layers, while for underrepresented PLs, it narrows the selection scope to dense layers, prioritizing the most influential parameters.
Additionally, PLEX-E, a low-rank extension of PLEX, further reduces computational costs by limiting the scope of fine-tuning. 
On MultiPL-E benchmarks, PLEX achieves state-of-the-art performance among PEFT methods, while PLEX-E maintains competitive results with reduced computational overhead. Both variants demonstrate effective adaptation across diverse programming languages, particularly for those underrepresented in pre-training.

PLEX: Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Code LLMs using Lottery-Tickets

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional versatility across diverse domains, yet their application in e-commerce remains underexplored due to a lack of domain-specific datasets. To address this gap, we introduce eC-Tab2Text, a novel dataset designed to capture the intricacies of e-commerce, including detailed product attributes and user-specific queries. Leveraging eC-Tab2Text, we focus on text generation from product tables, enabling LLMs to produce high-quality, attribute-specific product reviews from structured tabular data. Fine-tuned models were rigorously evaluated using standard Table2Text metrics, alongside correctness, faithfulness, and fluency assessments. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements in generating contextually accurate reviews, highlighting the transformative potential of tailored datasets and fine-tuning methodologies in optimizing e-commerce workflows. This work highlights the potential of LLMs in e-commerce workflows and the essential role of domain-specific datasets in tailoring them to industry-specific challenges.

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A Cognitive Evaluation Benchmark of Image Reasoning and Description for Large Vision-Language Models

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Listening Between the Frames: Bridging Temporal Gaps in Large Audio-Language Models