Austria

Current vision-language models may grasp basic spatial cues and simple directions (e.g. left, right, front, back), but struggle with the multi-dimensional spatial reasoning necessary for human-like understanding and real-world applications. To address this gap, we develop SPHERE (Spatial Perception and Hierarchical Evaluation of REasoning), a hierarchical evaluation framework supported by a new human-annotated dataset. SPHERE systematically probes models across increasing levels of complexity, from fundamental skills to multi-skill integration and high-level reasoning that combines spatial, visual, and logical understanding. Benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art models reveals significant deficiencies, especially in reasoning about distance and proximity, understanding both egocentric and allocentric perspectives, and applying spatial logic in physical contexts. These findings expose critical blind spots in existing models and underscore the need for more advanced spatial reasoning techniques, driving the development of vision-language models that align more closely with human spatial cognition.

ACL 2025

SPHERE: Unveiling Spatial Blind Spots in Vision-Language Models Through Hierarchical Evaluation

spatial perception

vision-language models

evaluation benchmark

spatial reasoning

### 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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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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### 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)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective solution to the issues faced by Large Language Models (LLMs) in hallucination generation and knowledge obsolescence by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge. However, existing methods lack effective control mechanisms for integrating internal and external knowledge. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we propose Parenting, a novel framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. Specifically, Parenting utilizes a key parameter mining method that combines forward and backward propagation signals to localize subspaces representing different capabilities. Then, Parenting employs a type-tailored tuning strategy, applying specific and appropriate optimizations to different subspaces, aiming to achieve a balanced enhancement of both adherence and robustness. Extensive experiments on various datasets and models validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nostradamus4869/Parenting.

Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning

LLMs have achieved remarkable fluency and coherence in text generation, yet their widespread adoption has raised concerns about content reliability and accountability. In high-stakes domains, it is crucial to understand where and how the content is created. To address this, we introduce the Text pROVEnance (TROVE) challenge, designed to trace each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences within potentially lengthy or multi-document inputs. Beyond identifying sources, TROVE annotates the fine-grained relationships (quotation, compression, inference, and others), providing a deep understanding of how each target sentence is formed.
To benchmark TROVE, we construct our dataset by leveraging three public datasets covering 11 diverse scenarios (e.g., QA and summarization) in English and Chinese, spanning source texts of varying lengths (0–5k, 5–10k, 10k+), emphasizing the multi-document and long-document settings essential for provenance. To ensure high-quality data, we employ a three-stage annotation process: sentence retrieval, GPT-4o provenance, and human provenance. We evaluate 11 LLMs under direct prompting and retrieval-augmented paradigms, revealing that retrieval is essential for robust performance, larger models perform better in complex relationship classification, and closed-source models often lead, yet open-source models show significant promise, particularly with retrieval augmentation. We make our dataset available here: https://github.com/ZNLP/ZNLP-Dataset.

TROVE: A Challenge for Fine-Grained Text Provenance via Source Sentence Tracing and Relationship Classification

Despite rising global usage of large language models (LLMs), their ability to generate *long-form* answers to *culturally specific* questions remains unexplored in many languages. To fill this gap, we perform the first study of textual multilingual long-form QA by creating CaLMQA, a dataset of **51.7K** culturally specific questions across **23** different languages. We define culturally specific questions as those that refer to concepts unique to one or a few cultures, or have different answers depending on the cultural or regional context. We obtain these questions by crawling naturally-occurring questions from community web forums in high-resource languages, and by hiring native speakers to write questions in under-resourced, rarely-studied languages such as Fijian and Kirundi. Our data collection methodologies are translation-free, enabling the collection of culturally unique questions like "Kuber iki umwami wa mbere w'uburundi yitwa Ntare?" (Kirundi; English translation: "Why was the first king of Burundi called Ntare (Lion)?"). We evaluate factuality, relevance and surface-level quality of LLM-generated long-form answers, finding that (1) for many languages, even the best models make critical surface-level errors (e.g., answering in the wrong language, repetition), especially for low-resource languages; and (2) answers to culturally specific questions contain more factual errors than answers to culturally agnostic questions – questions that have consistent meaning and answer across many cultures. We release CaLMQA to facilitate future research in cultural and multilingual long-form QA.

CaLMQA: Exploring culturally specific long-form question answering across 23 languages

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in handling long-context tasks because of their limited effective context window size during pretraining, which restricts their ability to generalize over extended sequences. Meanwhile, extending the context window in LLMs through post-pretraining is highly resource-intensive.
To address this, we introduce LongRecipe, an efficient training strategy for extending the context window of LLMs, including impactful token analysis, position index transformation, and training optimization strategies. It simulates long-sequence inputs while maintaining training efficiency and significantly improves the model's understanding of long-range dependencies. Experiments on three types of LLMs show that LongRecipe can utilize long sequences while requiring only 30\% of the target context window size, and reduces computational training resource over 85\% compared to full sequence training. Furthermore, LongRecipe also preserves the original LLM's capabilities in general tasks. Ultimately, \textit{we can extend effective context window of open-source LLMs from 8k to 128k, achieving performance close to GPT-4 with just one day of dedicated training using a single GPU with 80G memory.}
Our code is released at https://github.com/zhiyuanhubj/LongRecipe.

LongRecipe: Recipe for Efficient Long Context Generalization in Large Language Models

***Video Comment Art*** enhances user engagement by providing creative content that conveys humor, satire, or emotional resonance, requiring a nuanced and comprehensive grasp of cultural and contextual subtleties. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities in STEM tasks (e.g. mathematics and coding), they still struggle to generate creative expressions such as resonant jokes and insightful satire. Moreover, existing benchmarks are constrained by their limited modalities and insufficient categories, hindering the exploration of comprehensive creativity in video-based Comment Art creation. To address these limitations, we introduce **GODBench**, a novel benchmark that integrates video and text modalities to systematically evaluate MLLMs' abilities to compose Comment Art. Furthermore, inspired by the propagation patterns of waves in physics, we propose **Ripple of Thought (RoT)**, a multi-step reasoning framework designed to enhance the creativity of MLLMs. Extensive experiments on GODBench reveal that existing MLLMs and CoT methods still face significant challenges in understanding and generating creative video comments. In contrast, RoT provides an effective approach to improving creative composing, highlighting its potential to drive meaningful advancements in MLLM-based creativity.

GODBench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Video Comment Art

Despite the impressive capabilities of LLMs, they often generate content with factual inaccuracies in LegalAI, which may lead to serious legal consequences. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a promising approach, can conveniently integrate specialized knowledge into LLMs. In practice, there are diverse legal knowledge retrieval demands (e.g. law articles and similar cases). However, existing retrieval methods are either designed for general domains, struggling with legal knowledge, or tailored for specific legal tasks, unable to handle diverse legal knowledge types. Therefore, we propose a novel **Uni**fied **L**egal **R**etriever (UniLR) capable of performing multiple legal retrieval tasks for LLMs. Specifically, we introduce attention supervision to guide the retriever in focusing on key elements during knowledge encoding. Next, we design a graph-based method to integrate meta information through a heterogeneous graph, further enriching the knowledge representation. These two components work together to enable UniLR to capture the essence of knowledge hidden beneath formats. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets of common legal tasks demonstrate that UniLR achieves the best retrieval performance and can significantly enhance the performance of LLM.

UniLR: Unleashing the Power of LLMs on Multiple Legal Tasks with a Unified Legal Retriever

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized role-playing, enabling the development of general role-playing models. However, current role-playing training has two significant issues: (I) Using a predefined role profile to prompt dialogue training for specific scenarios usually leads to biases and even conflicts between the dialogue and the profile, resulting in training biases. (II) Models learn to imitate the role based solely on the profile, neglecting profile-dialogue alignment at the sentence level. To overcome the aforementioned hurdles, we propose a novel framework **Beyond Dialogue**, which introduces "beyond dialogue" tasks to align dialogue with profile traits for each scenario, eliminating biases during training. Furthermore, the framework achieves a sentence-level fine-grained alignment between profile and dialogue through an innovative prompting mechanism that generates reasoning data for training. Moreover, the aforementioned methods are fully automated and low-cost. Experimental results demonstrate our model excels in adhering to role profiles, outperforming most proprietary general and specialized role-playing baselines. The code and data are provided in https://github.com/yuyouyu32/BeyondDialogue.

Beyond Dialogue: A Profile-Dialogue Alignment Framework Towards General Role-Playing Language Model

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) decompose image classification into a process governed by interpretable, human-readable concepts. Recent advances in CBMs have used Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate candidate concepts. However, a critical question remains: What is the optimal number of concepts to use? Current concept banks suffer from redundancy or insufficient coverage. To address this issue, we introduce a dynamic, agent-based approach that adjusts the concept bank in response to environmental feedback, optimizing the number of concepts for sufficiency yet concise coverage. Moreover, we propose Conditional Concept Bottleneck Models (CoCoBMs) to overcome the limitations in traditional CBMs' concept scoring mechanisms. It enhances the accuracy of assessing each concept’s contribution to classification tasks and feature an editable matrix that allows LLMs to correct concept scores that conflict with their internal knowledge. Our evaluations across 6 datasets show that our method not only improves classification accuracy by 6% but also enhances interpretability assessments by 30%.

Enhancing Interpretable Image Classification Through LLM Agents and Conditional Concept Bottleneck Models

The rapid advancement of large language models has raised significant concerns regarding their potential misuse by malicious actors. As a result, developing effective detectors to mitigate these risks has become a critical priority. However, most existing detection methods focus excessively on detection accuracy, often neglecting the societal risks posed by high false positive rates (FPRs). This paper addresses this issue by leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP), which effectively constrains the upper bound of FPRs. While directly applying CP constrains FPRs, it also leads to a significant reduction in detection performance. To overcome this trade-off, this paper proposes a Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction (MCP), which both enforces the FPR constraint and improves detection performance. This paper also introduces RealDet, a high-quality dataset that spans a wide range of domains, ensuring realistic calibration and enabling superior detection performance when combined with MCP. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MCP effectively constrains FPRs, significantly enhances detection performance, and increases robustness against adversarial attacks across multiple detectors and datasets.

Reliably Bounding False Positives: A Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction

Role-playing agents (RPAs) are garnering increasing interests as a novel form of conversational AI. While previous research has predominantly concentrated on their ability to portray specified characters, we argue from a user-centered perspective that RPAs' capability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction. To bridge this gap, we propose RolePlot, a role-playing framework specifically designed to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of RPAs. RolePlot begins by constructing a plot-progression dataset extended from human-written literary scripts and specially designed synthetic data, followed by narrative theory-driven manual annotation and automated labeling validated through human verification. We then exploit the over-parameterized embedding space of LLMs to detect a ``trigger subspace'' that identifies dialogue segments catalyzing plot transitions. When user's inputs align with this subspace, we explicitly prompt RPAs to advance the plot. For evaluation, we simulate User-RPA interactions and track both the conversation longevity (measured in dialogue turns before disengagement) and users' arousal levels across different stages. Empirically, our method improves RPAs' capability to time plot developments, and more importantly, yielding a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels, thereby confirming that users experience more immersive engagements.

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