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Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities, yet existing prompting methods face a critical trade-off: simple approaches often struggle with complex tasks and reasoning stability, while more sophisticated methods require multiple inferences and substantial computational resources, limiting their practical deployment. To address this challenge, we propose Derailer-Rerailer, a novel framework that adaptively balances reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency. At its core, our framework employs a lightweight Derailer mechanism to assess reasoning stability and selectively triggers an advanced Rerailer verification process only when necessary, thereby optimizing computational resource usage. Extensive evaluation across both open and closed-source models on more than 20 categories of mathematical, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning tasks demonstrates our framework&#39;s effectiveness: Derailer-Rerailer achieves significant accuracy improvements (8-11% across various reasoning tasks) while maintaining 2-3 times better efficiency than existing verification methods, with particularly strong performance in mathematical and symbolic reasoning, offering a practical solution for enhancing LLM reasoning reliability while significantly reducing computational overhead.

ACL 2025

Derailer-Rerailer: Adaptive Verification for Efficient and Reliable Language Model Reasoning

inference time improvement

optimization

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities, yet existing prompting methods face a critical trade-off: simple approaches often struggle with complex tasks and reasoning stability, while more sophisticated methods require multiple inferences and substantial computational resources, limiting their practical deployment. To address this challenge, we propose Derailer-Rerailer, a novel framework that adaptively balances reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency. At its core, our framework employs a lightweight Derailer mechanism to assess reasoning stability and selectively triggers an advanced Rerailer verification process only when necessary, thereby optimizing computational resource usage. Extensive evaluation across both open and closed-source models on more than 20 categories of mathematical, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning tasks demonstrates our framework's effectiveness: Derailer-Rerailer achieves significant accuracy improvements (8-11% across various reasoning tasks) while maintaining 2-3 times better efficiency than existing verification methods, with particularly strong performance in mathematical and symbolic reasoning, offering a practical solution for enhancing LLM reasoning reliability while significantly reducing computational overhead.

poster

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

When confronting long document information retrieval for Query-Focused Summarization(QFS), Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) frameworks struggle to retrieve all relevant knowledge points, and the chunking and retrieve strategies of existing frameworks may disrupt the connections between knowledge points and the integrity of the information. To address these issues, we propose TreeRAG, which employs Tree-Chunking for chunking and embedding in a tree-like structure , coupled with "root-to-leaves" and "leaf-to-root" retrieve strategy named Bidirectional Traversal Retrieval. This approach effectively preserves the hierarchical structure among knowledge points and significantly enhances the ability to retrieve while minimizing noise inference. Our experimental results on the Finance, Law, and Medical subsets of the Dragonball dataset demonstrate that TreeRAG achieves significant enhancements in both recall quality and precision compared to traditional and popular existing methods and achieves better performance to corresponding question-answering tasks, marking a new breakthrough in long document knowledge retrieval.

TreeRAG: Unleashing the Power of Hierarchical Storage for Enhanced Knowledge Retrieval in Long Documents

To assist humans in efficiently validating RAG-generated content, developing a fine-grained attribution mechanism that provides supporting evidence from retrieved documents for every answer span is essential. Existing fine-grained attribution methods rely on model-internal similarity metrics between responses and documents, such as saliency scores and hidden state similarity. However, these approaches suffer from either high computational complexity or coarse-grained representations. Additionally, a common problem shared by the previous works is their reliance on decoder-only Transformers, limiting their ability to incorporate contextual information after the target span. To address the above problems, we propose two techniques applicable to all model-internals-based methods. First, we aggregate token-wise evidence through set union operations, preserving the granularity of representations. Second, we enhance the attributor by integrating dependency parsing to enrich the semantic completeness of target spans. For practical implementation, our approach employs attention weights as the similarity metric. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms all prior works.

Attention with Dependency Parsing Augmentation for Fine-Grained Attribution

Safety, security, and compliance are essential requirements when aligning large language models (LLMs). However, many seemingly aligned LLMs are soon shown to be susceptible to jailbreak attacks. These attacks aim to circumvent the models' safety guardrails and security mechanisms by introducing jailbreak prompts into malicious queries. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces **Defensive Prompt Patch** (DPP), a novel prompt-based defense mechanism specifically designed to protect LLMs against such sophisticated jailbreak strategies. Unlike previous approaches, which have often compromised the utility of the model for the sake of safety, DPP is designed to achieve a minimal Attack Success Rate (ASR) while preserving the high utility of LLMs. Our method uses strategically designed suffix prompts that effectively thwart a wide range of standard and adaptive jailbreak techniques. Empirical results conducted on Llama-2-7B-Chat and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of DPP, showing significant reductions in ASR with negligible impact on utility. Our approach not only outperforms existing defense strategies in balancing safety and functionality, but also provides a scalable and robust solution to various LLM platforms.

Defensive Prompt Patch: A Robust and Generalizable Defense of Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks

Determining and ranking the most salient entities in a text is critical for user-facing systems, especially as users increasingly rely on models to interpret long documents they only partially read. Graded entity salience addresses this need by assigning entities scores that reflect their relative importance in a text. Existing approaches fall into two main categories: subjective judgments of salience, which allow for gradient scoring but lack consistency, and summarization-based methods, which define salience as mention-worthiness in a summary, promoting explainability but limiting outputs to binary labels (entities are either summary-worthy or not). In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for graded entity salience that combines the strengths of both approaches. Using an English dataset spanning 12 spoken and written genres, we collect 5 summaries per document and calculate each entity's salience score based on its presence across these summaries. Our approach shows stronger correlation with scores based on human summaries and alignments, and outperforms existing techniques, including large language models. We release our data and code to support further research on graded salient entity extraction.

GUM-SAGE: A Novel Dataset and Approach for Graded Entity Salience Prediction

As Large Language Models penetrate everyday life more and more, it becomes essential to measure the correctness of their output. In this paper, we propose a novel task: the automatic verification of the reasoning steps in a Chain-of-Thought. This task addresses two well-known problems of LLMs, hallucination and incorrect reasoning. We propose a new dataset of manually annotated correct and incorrect logical reasoning chains, and benchmark several methods on it. We find that LLMs can detect correct reasoning steps well, but argue that this is of little comfort, as LLMs are the models that we want to verify in the first place. We test symbolic methods, but find that they under-perform. We develop a neuro-symbolic baseline called VANESSA that comes closer to the performance of LLMs. Our work is a first step to assess how well language models actually reason.

Verifying the Steps of Deductive Reasoning Chains

Surveys are widely used to collect patient data in healthcare, and there is significant clinical interest in predicting patient outcomes using survey data. However, surveys often include numerous features that lead to high-dimensional inputs for machine learning models. This paper exploits a unique source of information in surveys for feature selection. We observe that feature names (i.e., survey questions) are often semantically indicative of what features are most useful. Using language models, we leverage semantic textual similarity (STS) scores between features and targets to select features. The performance of STS scores in directly ranking features as well as in the minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance (mRMR) algorithm is evaluated using survey data collected as part of a clinical study on persistent post-surgical pain (PPSP) as well as an accessible dataset collected through the NIH All of Us program. Our findings show that features selected with STS can result in higher performance models compared to traditional feature selection algorithms.

Utilizing Semantic Textual Similarity for Clinical Survey Data Feature Selection

We present a simple meta quantization approach that quantizes different layers of a large language model (LLM) at different bit levels, and is independent of the underlying quantization technique. Specifically, we quantize the most important layers to higher bit precision and less important layers to lower bits. We propose two effective strategies to measure the importance of layers within LLMs: the first measures the importance of a layer based on how different its output embeddings are from the input embeddings (higher is better); the second estimates the importance of a layer using the number of layer weights that are much larger than average (smaller is better). We show that quantizing different layers at varying bits as per our importance scores results in minimal performance drop with a far more compressed model. Finally, we present several practical key takeaways from our variable layer-wise quantization experiments: (a) LLM performance under variable quantization remains close to the original model until 25--50% of layers are moved in lower quantization using our proposed ordering but only until 5--10% if moved using no specific ordering; (b) Adding layer importance to inherently dynamic quantization techniques can further improve their performance, showing that our approach is complementary to other dynamic quantization methods; (c) Quantizing LLMs to lower bits performs substantially better than pruning unless extreme quantization (2-bit) is used; and (d) Layer-wise quantization to lower bits works better in the case of larger LLMs with more layers compared to smaller LLMs with fewer layers.

Variable Layerwise Quantization: A Simple and Effective Approach to Quantize LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in natural language processing tasks, but their application to machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to pretraining on English-centric data and the complexity of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a simpler and more efficient alternative, but its performance depends heavily on the quality of preference data. To address this, we propose Confidence-Reward driven Preference Optimization (CRPO), a novel method that combines reward scores with model confidence to improve data selection for fine-tuning. CRPO selects challenging sentence pairs where the model is uncertain or underperforms, leading to more effective learning. While primarily designed for LLMs, CRPO also generalizes to encoder-decoder models like NLLB, demonstrating its versatility. Empirical results show that CRPO outperforms existing methods such as RS-DPO, RSO and MBR score in both translation accuracy and data efficiency.

CRPO: Confidence-Reward Driven Preference Optimization for Machine Translation

Medical quality control indicators are essential to assess the qualifications of healthcare institutions for medical services. With the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 in the medical field, leveraging these technologies for the Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation (MQCIC) presents a promising approach. In this work, (1) we introduce a real-world task MQCIC and propose an open-source Chinese electronic medical records (EMRs)-based dataset (CMQCIC-Bench) comprising 785 instances and 76 indicators. (2) We propose a semi-automatic method to enhance the rule representation. Then we propose the Clinical Facts-based Inferential Rule (CF-IR) method that disentangles the clinical fact verification and inferential rule reasoning actions. (3) We conduct comprehensive experiments on 20 representative LLMs, covering general and medical models. Our findings reveal that CF-IR outperforms Chain-of-Thought methods in MQCIC tasks. (4) We conduct an error analysis and investigate the capabilities of clinical fact verification and inferential rule reasoning, providing insights to improve performance in the MQCIC further. The dataset and code is available in this repository https://github.com/YuY-2001/C-MQCIC.

CMQCIC-Bench: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation

When different groups’ values differ, one approach to model alignment is to steer models at inference time towards each group’s preferences. However, techniques like in-context learning only consider similarity when drawing few-shot examples and not cross-group differences in values. We propose SPICA, a framework that accounts for group-level differences during in-context example retrieval. SPICA introduces three designs: scenario banks, group-informed retrieval metrics, and in-context alignment prompts. From an evaluation of SPICA on an alignment task collecting inputs from four demographic groups (n = 544), our metrics retrieve in-context examples that more closely match observed preferences, with the best prompt configuration using multiple contrastive responses to demonstrate examples. In an end-to-end evaluation (n = 120), we observe that SPICA is higher rated than similarity-based retrieval, with groups seeing up to a +0.16 point improvement on a 5 point scale. Additionally, gains from SPICA were more uniform, with all groups benefiting from alignment rather than only some. Finally, we find that while a group-agnostic approach can align to aggregated values, it is not most suited for divergent groups.

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TreeRAG: Unleashing the Power of Hierarchical Storage for Enhanced Knowledge Retrieval in Long Documents

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