Austria

This paper introduces F5-TTS, a fully non-autoregressive text-to-speech system based on flow matching with Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Without requiring complex designs such as duration model, text encoder, and phoneme alignment, the text input is simply padded with filler tokens to the same length as input speech, and then the denoising is performed for speech generation, which was originally proved feasible by E2 TTS. However, the original design of E2 TTS makes it hard to follow due to its slow convergence and low robustness. To address these issues, we first model the input with ConvNeXt to refine the text representation, making it easy to align with the speech. We further propose an inference-time Sway Sampling strategy, which significantly improves our model&#39;s performance and efficiency. This sampling strategy for flow step can be easily applied to existing flow matching based models without retraining. Our design allows faster training and achieves an inference RTF of 0.15, which is greatly improved compared to state-of-the-art diffusion-based TTS models. Trained on a public 100K hours multilingual dataset, our F5-TTS exhibits highly natural and expressive zero-shot ability, seamless code-switching capability, and speed control efficiency. We have released all codes and checkpoints to promote community development, at https://SWivid.github.io/F5-TTS/.

ACL 2025

F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching

flow matching

diffusion model

text-to-speech

speech synthesis

efficiency

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper introduces F5-TTS, a fully non-autoregressive text-to-speech system based on flow matching with Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Without requiring complex designs such as duration model, text encoder, and phoneme alignment, the text input is simply padded with filler tokens to the same length as input speech, and then the denoising is performed for speech generation, which was originally proved feasible by E2 TTS. However, the original design of E2 TTS makes it hard to follow due to its slow convergence and low robustness. To address these issues, we first model the input with ConvNeXt to refine the text representation, making it easy to align with the speech. We further propose an inference-time Sway Sampling strategy, which significantly improves our model's performance and efficiency. This sampling strategy for flow step can be easily applied to existing flow matching based models without retraining. Our design allows faster training and achieves an inference RTF of 0.15, which is greatly improved compared to state-of-the-art diffusion-based TTS models. Trained on a public 100K hours multilingual dataset, our F5-TTS exhibits highly natural and expressive zero-shot ability, seamless code-switching capability, and speed control efficiency. We have released all codes and checkpoints to promote community development, at https://SWivid.github.io/F5-TTS/.

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)

There is an increasing trend towards evaluating NLP models with LLMs instead of human judgments, raising questions about the validity of these evaluations, as well as their reproducibility in the case of proprietary models. We provide JUDGE-BENCH, an extensible collection of 20 NLP datasets with human annotations covering a broad range of evaluated properties and types of data, and comprehensively evaluate 11 current LLMs, covering both open-weight and proprietary models, for their ability to replicate the annotations. Our evaluations show substantial variance across models and datasets. Models are reliable evaluators on some tasks, but overall display substantial variability depending on the property being evaluated, the expertise level of the human judges, and whether the language is human or model-generated. We conclude that LLMs should be carefully validated against human judgments before being used as evaluators.

LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks

Language is not monolithic. While benchmarks, including those designed for multiple languages, are often used as proxies to evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), they tend to overlook the nuances of within-language variation and thus fail to model the experience of speakers of non-standard dialects. 
Focusing on African American Vernacular English (AAVE), we present the first study aimed at objectively assessing the fairness and robustness of LLMs in handling dialects across canonical reasoning tasks, including algorithm, math, logic, and integrated reasoning. We introduce **ReDial** (**Re**asoning with **Dial**ect Queries), a benchmark containing 1.2K+ parallel query pairs in Standardized English and AAVE. We hire AAVE speakers, including experts with computer science backgrounds, to rewrite seven popular benchmarks,
such as HumanEval and GSM8K. With ReDial, we evaluate widely used LLMs, including GPT, Claude, Llama, Mistral, and the Phi model families. Our findings reveal that \textbf{almost all of these widely used models show significant brittleness and unfairness to queries in AAVE}. Our work establishes a systematic and objective framework for analyzing LLM bias in dialectal queries. Moreover, it highlights how mainstream LLMs provide unfair service to dialect speakers in reasoning tasks, laying a critical foundation for future research.

Assessing Dialect Fairness and Robustness of Large Language Models in Reasoning Tasks

This paper introduces a novel task to evaluate the robust understanding capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), termed Unsolvable Problem Detection (UPD). Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is widely used to assess the understanding capability of LMMs, but it does not guarantee that LMMs truly comprehend the answer. UPD assesses the LMM's ability to withhold answers when encountering unsolvable problems of MCQA, verifying whether the model truly understands the answer. UPD encompasses three problems: Absent Answer Detection (AAD), Incompatible Answer Set Detection (IASD), and Incompatible Visual Question Detection (IVQD), covering unsolvable cases like answer-lacking or incompatible choices and image-question mismatches. For the evaluation, we introduce the MM-UPD Bench, a benchmark for assessing performance across various ability dimensions. Our experiments reveal that even most LMMs, which demonstrate adequate performance on existing benchmarks, struggle significantly with MM-UPD, underscoring a novel aspect of trustworthiness that current benchmarks have overlooked. A detailed analysis shows that LMMs have different bottlenecks and chain-of-thought and self-reflection improved performance for LMMs with the bottleneck in their LLM capability. We hope our insights will enhance the broader understanding and development of more reliable LMMs.

Unsolvable Problem Detection: Robust Understanding Evaluation for Large Multimodal Models

The rapid evolution of legal concepts over time necessitates that legal language models adapt swiftly accounting for the temporal dynamics. However, prior works have largely neglected this crucial dimension, treating legal adaptation as a static problem rather than a continuous process. To address this gap, we pioneer LexTempus, a dynamic mixture of experts model that explicitly models the temporal evolution of legal language in a parameter-efficient online learning framework. LexTempus starts with a single lightweight adapter expert and dynamically expands by adding new experts as significant deviations in the data distribution are detected. This self-expansion strategy allows LexTempus to adapt to new information without forgetting past knowledge, thereby improving temporal generalization. We use a a non-parametric similarity-based router to merge relevant experts into a unified expert for each test instance, ensuring efficient inference without additional overhead. We validate the effectiveness of LexTempus on ECHR and EU case law datasets, demonstrating its superiority in both perplexity and open-ended text generation quality metrics.

LexTempus: Enhancing Temporal Generalizability of Legal Language Models Through Dynamic Mixture of Experts

In this paper, we present ControlSpeech, a text-to-speech (TTS) system capable of fully cloning the speaker's voice and enabling arbitrary control and adjustment of speaking style. Prior zero-shot TTS models only mimic the speaker's voice without further control and adjustment capabilities while prior controllable TTS models cannot perform speaker-specific voice generation. Therefore, ControlSpeech focuses on a more challenging task—a TTS system with controllable timbre, content, and style at the same time. ControlSpeech takes speech prompts, content prompts, and style prompts as inputs and utilizes bidirectional attention and mask-based parallel decoding to capture codec representations corresponding to timbre, content, and style in a discrete decoupling codec space. Moreover, we analyze the many-to-many issue in textual style control and propose the Style Mixture Semantic Density (SMSD) module, which is based on Gaussian mixture density networks, to resolve this problem. To facilitate empirical validations, we make available a new style controllable dataset called VccmDataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that ControlSpeech exhibits comparable or state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of controllability, timbre similarity, audio quality, robustness, and generalizability. Codes are available at https://github.com/jishengpeng/ControlSpeech.

Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have proven highly effective for tasks requiring factual consistency and robust knowledge retrieval. However, large-scale RAG systems consume significant computational resources and are prone to generating "hallucinated" content from Humans. In this work, we introduce DRAG, a novel framework for distilling RAG knowledge from large-scale Language Models (LLMs) into small LMs (SLMs). Our approach leverages evidence- and knowledge graph–based distillation, ensuring that the distilled model retains critical factual knowledge while significantly reducing model size and computational cost. By aligning the smaller model's predictions with a structured knowledge graph and ranked evidence, DRAG effectively mitigates hallucinations and improves factual accuracy. We further present a case demonstrating how our framework mitigates user privacy risks and introduce a corresponding benchmark. Experimental evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the prior competitive RAG methods like MiniRAG for SLMs by up to 27.7% using the same models, preserving high-level efficiency and reliability. With DRAG, we provide a practical and resource-efficient roadmap to deploying enhanced retrieval and generation capabilities in small-size LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/DRAG.

DRAG: Distilling RAG for SLMs from LLMs to Transfer Knowledge and Mitigate Hallucination via Evidence and Graph-based Distillation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in chart understanding tasks. 
However, interpreting charts with textual descriptions often leads to information loss, as it fails to fully capture the dense information embedded in charts. 
In contrast, parsing charts into code provides lossless representations that can effectively contain all critical details. Although existing open-source MLLMs have achieved success in chart understanding tasks, they still face two major challenges when applied to chart-to-code tasks: (1) Low executability and poor restoration of chart details in the generated code and (2) Lack of large-scale and diverse training data. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{ChartCoder}, the first dedicated chart-to-code MLLM, which leverages Code LLMs as the language backbone to enhance the executability of the generated code. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{Chart2Code-160k}, the first large-scale and diverse dataset for chart-to-code generation, and propose the \textbf{Snippet-of-Thought (SoT)} method, which transforms direct chart-to-code generation data into step-by-step generation. Experiments demonstrate that ChartCoder, with only 7B parameters, surpasses existing open-source MLLMs on chart-to-code benchmarks, achieving superior chart restoration and code excitability. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/thunlp/ChartCoder}.

ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation

As large language models are increasingly responsible for online content, concerns arise about the impact of repeatedly processing their own outputs.
Inspired by the "broken telephone" effect in chained human communication, this study investigates whether LLMs similarly distort information through iterative generation.
Through translation-based experiments, we find that distortion accumulates over time, influenced by language choice and chain complexity. 
While degradation is inevitable, it can be mitigated through strategic prompting techniques. 
These findings contribute to discussions on the long-term effects of AI-mediated information propagation, raising important questions about the reliability of LLM-generated content in iterative workflows.

LLM as a Broken Telephone: Iterative Generation Distorts Information

There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruction-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models are not either explicitly trained to be safe, or experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. We observe that simple interpolation between the domain and alignment delta parameters leads to safer domain-specific models that preserve their utility. Building on this, we introduce MergeAlign, a simple, efficient, and effective model merging-based alignment method. We apply MergeAlign on Llama3 models that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial safety alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged, as well as the applicability of MergeAlign on more general code and math expert models using the Qwen-2.5 series of models. We hope our findings open new research avenues towards efficient development and deployment of safe expert LLMs.

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors Provides Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

Active perception, a crucial human capability, involves setting a goal based on the current understanding of the environment and performing actions to achieve that goal. Despite significant efforts in evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), active perception has been largely overlooked. To address this gap, we propose a novel benchmark named ActiView to evaluate active perception in MLLMs. We focus on a specialized form of Visual Question Answering (VQA) that eases and quantifies the evaluation yet challenging for existing MLLMs. Meanwhile, intermediate reasoning behaviors of models are also discussed. Given an image, we restrict the perceptual field of a model, requiring it to actively zoom or shift its perceptual field based on reasoning to answer the question successfully. We conduct extensive evaluation over 30 models, including proprietary and open-source models, and observe that restricted perceptual fields play a significant role in enabling active perception. Results reveal a significant gap in the active perception capability of MLLMs, indicating that this area deserves more attention. We hope that ActiView could help develop methods for MLLMs to understand multimodal inputs in more natural and holistic ways.

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LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks

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