Austria

Multimodal punchlines, which involve humor or sarcasm conveyed in image-caption pairs, are a popular way of communication on online multimedia platforms. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), it is essential to assess their ability to effectively comprehend these punchlines. However, existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from three major limitations: 1) language shortcuts that allow models to solely rely on text, 2) lack of question diversity, and 3) narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content (e.g., cartoon). To address these limitations, we introduce a multimodal **Punch**line comprehension **Bench**mark, named **PunchBench**, which is tailored for accurate and comprehensive evaluation of punchline comprehension. To enhance the evaluation accuracy, we generate synonymous and antonymous captions by modifying original captions, which mitigates the impact of shortcuts in the captions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, PunchBench incorporates diverse question formats and image-captions from various domains. On this basis, we conduct extensive evaluations and reveal a significant gap between state-of-the-art MLLMs and humans in punchline comprehension. To improve punchline comprehension, we propose Simple-to-Complex Chain-of-Question (SC-CoQ) strategy, enabling the models to incrementally address complicated questions by first mastering simple ones. SC-CoQ effectively enhances the performance of various MLLMs on PunchBench, surpassing in-context learning and chain-of-thought.

ACL 2025

PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension

image-caption pairs

punchline comprehension

mllms

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

### 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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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Code generation, the automatic creation of source code from natural language descriptions, has garnered significant attention due to its potential to streamline software development. Inspired by research that links task-personality alignment with improved development outcomes, we conduct an empirical study on personality-guided code generation using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we investigate how emulating personality traits appropriate to the coding tasks affects LLM performance. We extensively evaluate this approach using seven widely adopted LLMs across four representative datasets. Our results show that personality guidance significantly enhances code generation accuracy, with improved pass rates in 23 out of 28 LLM-dataset combinations. Notably, in 11 cases, the improvement exceeds 5%, and in 5 instances, it surpasses 10%, with the highest gain reaching 12.9%. Additionally, personality guidance can be easily integrated with other prompting strategies to further boost performance.

Personality-Guided Code Generation Using Large Language Models

With the increasing demand for substantial amounts of high-quality data to train large language models (LLMs), efficiently filtering large web corpora has become a critical challenge. For this purpose, KenLM, a lightweight n-gram-based language model that operates on CPUs, is widely used. However, the traditional method of training KenLM utilizes only high-quality data and, consequently, does not explicitly learn the linguistic patterns of low-quality data. To address this issue, we propose an ensemble approach that leverages two contrasting KenLMs: (i) Good KenLM, trained on high-quality data; and (ii) Bad KenLM, trained on low-quality data. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces noisy content while preserving high-quality content compared to the traditional KenLM training method. This indicates that our method can be a practical solution with minimal computational overhead for resource-constrained environments.

Rethinking KenLM: Good and Bad Model Ensembles for Efficient Text Quality Filtering in Large Web Corpora

Documents revealing sensitive information about individuals must typically be de-identified. This de-identification is often done by masking all mentions of personally identifiable information (PII), thereby making it more difficult to uncover the identity of the person(s) in question. To investigate the robustness of de-identification methods, we present a novel, RAG-inspired approach that attempts the reverse process of re-identification based on a database of documents representing background knowledge. Given a text in which personal identifiers have been masked, the re-identification proceeds in two steps. A retriever first selects from the background knowledge passages deemed relevant for the re-identification. Those passages are then provided to an infilling model which seeks to infer the original content of each text span. This process is repeated until all masked spans are replaced. We evaluate the re-identification on three datasets (Wikipedia biographies, court rulings and clinical notes). Results show that (1) as many as 80% of de-identified text spans can be successfully recovered and (2) the re-identification accuracy increases along with the level of background knowledge.

Re-identification of De-identified Documents with Autoregressive Infilling

We present MELLE, a novel continuous-valued token based language modeling approach for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). MELLE autoregressively generates continuous mel-spectrogram frames directly from text condition, bypassing the need for vector quantization, which is typically designed for audio compression and sacrifices fidelity compared to continuous representations. Specifically, (i) instead of cross-entropy loss, we apply regression loss with a proposed spectrogram flux loss function to model the probability distribution of the continuous-valued tokens; (ii) we have incorporated variational inference into MELLE to facilitate sampling mechanisms, thereby enhancing the output diversity and model robustness. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to the two-stage codec language model VALL-E and its variants, the single-stage MELLE mitigates robustness issues by avoiding the inherent flaws of sampling vector-quantized codes, achieves superior performance across multiple metrics, and, most importantly, offers a more streamlined paradigm. The demos of our work are provided at https://aka.ms/melle.

Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization

Model extraction attacks (MEAs) on large language models (LLMs) have received increasing attention in recent research. However, existing attack methods typically adapt the extraction strategies originally developed for deep neural networks (DNNs). They neglect the underlying inconsistency between the training tasks of MEA and LLM alignment, leading to suboptimal attack performance. To tackle this issue, we propose Locality Reinforced Distillation (LoRD), a novel model extraction algorithm specifically designed for LLMs. In particular, LoRD employs a newly defined policy-gradient-style training task that utilizes the responses of victim model as the signal to guide the crafting of preference for the local model. Theoretical analyses demonstrate that I) The convergence procedure of LoRD in model extraction is consistent with the alignment procedure of LLMs, and II) LoRD can reduce query complexity while mitigating watermark protection through our exploration-based stealing. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our method in extracting various state-of-the-art commercial LLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/liangzid/LoRD-MEA.

"Yes, My LoRD." Guiding Language Model Extraction with Locality Reinforced Distillation

This work introduces a novel framework for evaluating LLMs' capacity to balance instruction-following with critical reasoning when presented with multiple-choice questions containing no valid answers. Through systematic evaluation across arithmetic, domain-specific knowledge, and high-stakes medical decision tasks, we demonstrate that post-training aligned models often default to selecting invalid options, while base models exhibit improved refusal capabilities that scale with model size. Our analysis reveals that alignment techniques, though intended to enhance helpfulness, can inadvertently impair models' reflective judgment--the ability to override default behaviors when faced with invalid options. We additionally conduct a parallel human study showing similar instruction-following biases, with implications for how these biases may propagate through human feedback datasets used in alignment. We provide extensive ablation studies examining the impact of model size, training techniques, and prompt engineering. Our findings highlight fundamental tensions between alignment optimization and preservation of critical reasoning capabilities, with important implications for developing more robust AI systems for real-world deployment.

Wait, that's not an option: LLMs Robustness with Incorrect Multiple-Choice Options

Large Language Models for code often entail significant computational complexity, which grows significantly with the length of the input code sequence. We propose $LeanCode$ for code simplification to reduce training and prediction time, leveraging code contexts in utilizing attention scores to represent the tokens' importance. We advocate for the selective removal of tokens based on the average context-aware attention scores rather than average scores across all inputs. $LeanCode$ uses the attention scores of `CLS' tokens within the encoder for classification tasks, such as code search. It also employs the encoder-decoder attention scores to determine token significance for sequence-to-sequence tasks like code summarization. Our evaluation shows $LeanCode$'s superiority over the SOTAs $DietCode$ and $SlimCode$, with improvements of 60\% and 16\% for code search, and 29\% and 27\% for code summarization, respectively.

LEANCODE: Understanding Models Better for Code Simplification of Pre-trained Large Language Models

To enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to function as conscious agents with generalizable reasoning capabilities, it is crucial that they possess the ability to ***comprehend situational changes (transitions) in distribution*** triggered by environmental factors or actions from other agents. Despite its fundamental significance, this ability remains underexplored due to the complexity of modeling infinite possible changes in an event and their associated distributions, coupled with the lack of benchmark data with situational transitions. Addressing these gaps, we propose a novel formulation of ***reasoning with distributional changes as a three-step discriminative process***, termed as ***MetAphysical ReaSoning***. We then introduce the first-ever benchmark, **MARS**, comprising three tasks corresponding to each step. These tasks systematically assess LLMs’ capabilities in reasoning the plausibility of (i) changes in actions, (ii) states caused by changed actions, and (iii) situational transitions driven by changes in action. Extensive evaluations with 20 (L)LMs of varying sizes and methods indicate that all three tasks in this process pose significant challenges, even after fine-tuning. Further analyses reveal potential causes for the underperformance of LLMs and demonstrate that pre-training on large-scale conceptualization taxonomies can potentially enhance LMs’ metaphysical reasoning capabilities. Our data and models are publicly accessible at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/MARS.

MARS: Benchmarking the Metaphysical Reasoning Abilities of Language Models with a Multi-task Evaluation Dataset

The rise of large language models (LLMs) offers new opportunities for automatic error detection in education, particularly for math word problems (MWPs). While prior studies demonstrate the promise of LLMs as error detectors, they overlook the presence of multiple valid solutions for a single MWP. Our preliminary analysis reveals a significant performance gap between conventional and alternative solutions in MWPs, a phenomenon we term conformity bias in this work. To mitigate this bias, we introduce the Ask-Before-Detect (AskBD) framework, which generates adaptive reference solutions using LLMs to enhance error detection. Experiments on 200 examples of GSM8K show that AskBD effectively mitigates bias and improves performance, especially when combined with reasoning-enhancing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting.

Ask-Before-Detection: Identifying and Mitigating Conformity Bias in LLM-Powered Error Detector for Math Word Problem Solutions

Semi-structured tables, with their varied layouts and formatting artifacts, remain a major obstacle for automated data processing and analytics. To address these challenges, we propose RelationalCoder, which uniformly converts semi-structured tables into relational data, enabling smooth integration with the rich ecosystem of data processing and analytics tools. By leveraging SQL code, RelationalCoder prevents schema errors and markedly improves normalization quality across multiple relational tables.

To address the challenge of large tables, we propose a new technique called Loop Reference Decoding (LRD): it identifies \emph{expandable groups}—repeating regions of similar structure and semantics—and replicates each group using a concise loop over its repetitive region by referencing cell addresses, rather than regenerating each individual cell. This design substantially reduces output length from $\mathcal{O}(N \times M)$—proportional to the table’s height ($N$) and width ($M$)—to approximately $\mathcal{O}(K)$, where $K$ is the total number of unique cell types within detected expandable groups. As a result, LRD is highly scalable: the larger the input table, the greater the compression ratio. It scales seamlessly to extremely large tables, achieving output reductions of up to $100{,}000\times$.

We further create the first human-labeled corpus for table transformation, created with a cost-efficient, actively supervised pipeline. Extensive experiments on HiTab and MultiHiertt show that RelationalCoder not only enables programmatic symbolic reasoning but also boosts QA accuracy—raising Llama-2 and Mistral models by more than 20\%, and GPT-4o by over 4\%. 
Project page: https://github.com/haoyudong/RelationalCoder.

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Personality-Guided Code Generation Using Large Language Models

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