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To deploy language models safely, it is crucial that they abstain from responding to inappropriate requests. Several prior studies test the safety promises of models based on their effectiveness in blocking malicious requests. In this work, we focus on evaluating the underlying techniques that cause models to abstain. We create `SELECT`, a benchmark derived from a set of benign concepts (e.g., &#39;&#39;rivers&#39;&#39;) from a knowledge graph. Focusing on benign concepts isolates the effect of safety training, and grounding these concepts in a knowledge graph allows us to study the *generalization* and *specificity* of abstention techniques. Using `SELECT`, we benchmark different abstention techniques over six open-weight and closed-source models. We find that the examined techniques indeed cause models to abstain with over 80% abstention rates. However, these techniques are not as effective for descendants of the target concepts, where abstention rates drop by 19%. We also characterize the generalization-specificity trade-offs for different techniques. Overall, no single technique is invariably better than others, and our findings inform practitioners of the various trade-offs involved.

NAACL 2025

Knowledge Graph Guided Evaluation of Abstention Techniques

abstention techniques

benchmarking

knowledge graph

### 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)

To deploy language models safely, it is crucial that they abstain from responding to inappropriate requests. Several prior studies test the safety promises of models based on their effectiveness in blocking malicious requests. In this work, we focus on evaluating the underlying techniques that cause models to abstain. We create `SELECT`, a benchmark derived from a set of benign concepts (e.g., ''rivers'') from a knowledge graph. Focusing on benign concepts isolates the effect of safety training, and grounding these concepts in a knowledge graph allows us to study the *generalization* and *specificity* of abstention techniques. Using `SELECT`, we benchmark different abstention techniques over six open-weight and closed-source models. We find that the examined techniques indeed cause models to abstain with over 80% abstention rates. However, these techniques are not as effective for descendants of the target concepts, where abstention rates drop by 19%. We also characterize the generalization-specificity trade-offs for different techniques. Overall, no single technique is invariably better than others, and our findings inform practitioners of the various trade-offs involved.

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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. 
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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

Templatic memes, characterized by a semantic structure adaptable to the creator's intent, represent a significant yet underexplored area within meme processing literature. With the goal of establishing a new direction for computational meme analysis, here we create a knowledge base composed of more than 5,200 meme templates, information about them, and 54,000 examples of template instances (templatic memes). To investigate the semantic signal of meme templates, we show that we can match memes in datasets to base templates contained in our knowledge base with a distance-based lookup. To demonstrate the power of meme templates, we create TSplit, a method to reorganize datasets, where a template or templatic instance can only appear in either the training or test split. Our re-split datasets enhance general meme knowledge and improve sample efficiency, leading to more robust models. Our examination of meme templates results in state-of-the-art performance for every dataset we consider, paving the way for analysis grounded in templateness.

A Template Is All You Meme

The automatic evaluation of instruction following typically involves using large language models (LLMs) to assess response quality. However, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation of these LLM-based evaluators across two dimensions: the base LLMs and the evaluation protocols. Therefore, we present a thorough meta-evaluation of instruction following, including 25 base LLMs and 15 recently proposed evaluation protocols, on 4 human-annotated datasets, assessing the evaluation accuracy of the LLM-evaluators. Our evaluation allows us to identify the best-performing base LLMs and evaluation protocols with a high degree of robustness. Moreover, our evaluation reveals key findings: (1) Base LLM performance ranking remains largely consistent across evaluation protocols, with less capable LLMs showing greater improvement from protocol enhancements; (2) Robust evaluation of evaluation protocols requires many base LLMs with varying capability levels, as protocol effectiveness depends on the base LLM used; (3) Evaluation results on different datasets are not always consistent, so a rigorous evaluation requires multiple datasets with distinctive features. We release our meta-evaluation suite ReIFE, which provides the codebase and evaluation result collection for over 500 LLM-evaluators, laying groundwork for future research in instruction-following evaluation.

ReIFE: Re-evaluating Instruction-Following Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with precise length control, particularly in zero-shot settings. We conduct a comprehensive study evaluating LLMs' length control capabilities across multiple measures and propose practical methods to improve controllability. Our experiments with LLaMA 3 reveal stark differences in length adherence across measures and highlight inherent biases of the model. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of methods: length approximation, target adjustment, sample filtering, and automated revisions. By combining these methods, we demonstrate substantial improvements in length compliance while maintaining or enhancing summary quality, providing highly effective zero-shot strategies for precise length control without the need for model fine-tuning or architectural changes. With our work, we not only advance our understanding of LLM behavior in controlled text generation but also pave the way for more reliable and adaptable summarization systems in real-world applications.

Zero-Shot Strategies for Length-Controllable Summarization

Successful teamwork requires team members to understand each other and communicate effectively, managing multiple linguistic and paralinguistic tasks at once. Because of the potential for interrelatedness of these tasks, it is important to have the ability to make multiple types of predictions on the same dataset. Here, we introduce Multimodal Communication Annotations for Teams (MultiCAT), a speech- and text-based dataset consisting of audio recordings, automated and hand-corrected transcriptions. MultiCAT builds upon data from teams working collaboratively to save victims in a simulated search and rescue mission, and consists of annotations and benchmark results for the following tasks: (1) dialog act classification, (2) adjacency pair detection, (3) sentiment and emotion recognition, (4) closed-loop communication detection, and (5) vocal (phonetic) entrainment detection. We also present exploratory analyses on the relationship between our annotations and team outcomes. We posit that additional work on these tasks and their intersection will further improve understanding of team communication and its relation to team performance. Code & data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14834835

MultiCAT: Multimodal Communication Annotations for Teams

Reward models (RMs) are at the crux of successfully using RLHF to align pretrained models to human preferences, yet there has been relatively little study that focuses on evaluation of those models. Evaluating reward models presents an opportunity to understand the opaque technologies used for alignment of language models and which values are embedded in them. Resources for reward model training and understanding are sparse in the nascent open-source community around them. To enhance scientific understanding of reward models, we present RewardBench, a benchmark dataset and code-base for evaluation. The RewardBench dataset is a collection of prompt-chosen-rejected trios spanning chat, reasoning, and safety, to benchmark how reward models perform on challenging, structured and out-of-distribution queries. We create specific comparison datasets for RMs that have subtle, but verifiable reasons (e.g. bugs, incorrect facts) why one answer should be preferred to another. On the RewardBench leaderboard, we evaluate RMs trained with a variety of methods, such as the direct MLE training of classifiers and the implicit reward modeling of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We present many findings on propensity for refusals, reasoning limitations, and instruction following shortcomings of various reward models towards a better understanding of the RLHF process.

RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models for Language Modeling

Open domain question answering systems frequently rely on information retrieved from large collections of text (such as the Web) to answer questions. However, such collections of text often contain conflicting information, and indiscriminately depending on this information may result in untruthful and inaccurate answers. To understand the gravity of this problem, we collect a human-annotated dataset, Question Answering with Conflicting Contexts (QACC), and find that as much as 25% of unambiguous, open domain questions can lead to conflicting contexts when retrieved using Google Search. We evaluate and benchmark three powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) with our dataset QACC and demonstrate their limitations in effectively addressing questions with conflicting information. To explore how humans reason through conflicting contexts, we request our annotators to provide explanations for their selections of correct answers. We demonstrate that by finetuning LLMs to explain their answers, we can introduce richer information into their training that guide them through the process of reasoning with conflicting contexts. We publicly release our dataset and code to promote research along this line.

Open Domain Question Answering with Conflicting Contexts

GPT-4's purported strong multimodal abilities raise interests in using it to automate radiology report writing, but there lacks thorough evaluations. In this work, we perform a systematic evaluation of GPT-4 (4o and vision-preview) in generating radiology reports across three chest X-ray report benchmarks: MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert Plus, and IU X-Ray. We attempt to directly generate reports with different prompting strategies and find that the models fail terribly in both lexical metrics and clinical efficacy metrics. To understand the low performance, we decompose the task into two steps: 1) the **medical image reasoning** step of predicting medical condition labels from images; and 2) the **report synthesis** step of generating reports from (groundtruth) conditions. We show that GPT-4's performance in image reasoning is consistently low across different prompts. In fact, the distributions of model-predicted labels remain constant regardless of which groundtruth conditions are present on the image, suggesting that the model is not interpreting chest X-rays meaningfully. Even when given groundtruth conditions in report synthesis, its generated reports are less correct and less natural-sounding than a finetuned Llama. Altogether, our findings cast doubt on the viability of using GPT-4 in a radiology workflow.

GPT-4V Cannot Generate Radiology Reports Yet

The rise of unifying frameworks that enable seamless interoperability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made LLM-LLM collaboration for open-ended tasks a possibility. Despite this, there have not been efforts to explore such collaborative writing. We take the next step beyond human-LLM collaboration to explore this multi-LLM scenario by generating the first exclusively LLM-generated collaborative stories dataset called CollabStory. We focus on single-author to multi-author (up to 5 LLMs) scenarios, where multiple LLMs co-author stories. We generate over 32k stories using open-source instruction-tuned LLMs. Further, we take inspiration from the PAN tasks that have set the standard for human-human multi-author writing tasks and analysis. We extend their authorship-related tasks for multi-LLM settings and present baselines for LLM-LLM collaboration. We find that current baselines are not able to handle this emerging scenario. Thus, CollabStory is a resource that could help propel an understanding as well as the development of new techniques to discern the use of multiple LLMs. This is crucial to study in the context of writing tasks since LLM-LLM collaboration could potentially overwhelm ongoing challenges related to plagiarism detection, credit assignment, maintaining academic integrity in educational settings, and addressing copyright infringement concerns. We make our dataset and code available at https://github.com/saranya-venkatraman/CollabStory.

CollabStory: Multi-LLM Collaborative Story Generation and Authorship Analysis

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across various multimodal tasks. However, they suffer from a problem known as language prior, where responses are generated based solely on textual patterns while disregarding image information. Addressing the issue of language prior is crucial, as it can lead to undesirable biases or hallucinations when dealing with images that are out of training distribution. Despite its importance, current methods for accurately measuring language priors in LVLMs are poorly studied. Although existing benchmarks based on counterfactual or out-of-distribution images can partially be used to measure language priors, they fail to disentangle language priors from other confounding factors. To this end, we propose a new benchmark called VLind-Bench, which is the first benchmark specifically designed to measure the language priors, or blindness, of LVLMs. It not only includes tests on counterfactual images to assess language priors but also involves a series of tests to evaluate more basic capabilities such as commonsense knowledge, visual perception, and commonsense biases. For each instance in our benchmark, we ensure that all these basic tests are passed before evaluating the language priors, thereby minimizing the influence of other factors on the assessment. The evaluation and analysis of recent LVLMs in our benchmark reveal that almost all models exhibit a significant reliance on language priors, presenting a strong challenge in the field.

VLind-Bench: Measuring Language Priors in Large Vision-Language Models

Progress in AI is often demonstrated by new models claiming improved performance on tasks measuring model capabilities. Evaluating language models can be particularly challenging, as choices of how a model is evaluated on a task can lead to large changes in measured performance. There is no common standard setup, so different models are evaluated on the same tasks in different ways, leading to claims about which models perform best not being reproducible. We propose OLMES, a completely documented, practical, open standard for reproducible LLM evaluations. In developing this standard, we identify and review the varying factors in evaluation practices adopted by the community - such as details of prompt formatting, choice of in-context examples, probability normalizations, and task formulation. In particular, OLMES supports meaningful comparisons between smaller base models that require the unnatural ''cloze'' formulation of multiple-choice questions against larger models that can utilize the original formulation. OLMES includes well-considered, documented recommendations guided by results from existing literature as well as new experiments resolving open questions.

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A Template Is All You Meme

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