Austria

Multi-turn instruction following capability constitutes a core competency of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. Existing evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on fine-grained constraint satisfaction and domain-specific capability assessment, yet overlook the crucial structural dependency between dialogue turns that distinguishes multi-turn from single-turn interactions. This structural dependency not only reflects user intent but also establishes a second dimension for instruction following evaluation beyond constraint satisfaction. To address this gap, we propose StructFlowBench, a multi-turn instruction following benchmark with structural flow modeling. The benchmark innovatively defines a structural flow framework comprising six fundamental inter-turn relationships, which not only introduces novel structural constraints for model evaluation but also serves as generation parameters for creating customized dialogue flows tailored to specific scenarios. Adopting established LLM-based automatic evaluation methodologies, we conduct systematic evaluations of 13 leading open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experimental results reveal significant deficiencies in current models&#39; comprehension of multi-turn dialogue structures.

ACL 2025

StructFlowBench: A Structured Flow Benchmark for Multi-turn Instruction Following

llm evaluation

multi-turn

instruction following

benchmark

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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.

Multi-turn instruction following capability constitutes a core competency of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. Existing evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on fine-grained constraint satisfaction and domain-specific capability assessment, yet overlook the crucial structural dependency between dialogue turns that distinguishes multi-turn from single-turn interactions. This structural dependency not only reflects user intent but also establishes a second dimension for instruction following evaluation beyond constraint satisfaction. To address this gap, we propose StructFlowBench, a multi-turn instruction following benchmark with structural flow modeling. The benchmark innovatively defines a structural flow framework comprising six fundamental inter-turn relationships, which not only introduces novel structural constraints for model evaluation but also serves as generation parameters for creating customized dialogue flows tailored to specific scenarios. Adopting established LLM-based automatic evaluation methodologies, we conduct systematic evaluations of 13 leading open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experimental results reveal significant deficiencies in current models' comprehension of multi-turn dialogue structures.

poster

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

Financial markets exhibit complex dynamics where localized events trigger ripple effects across entities. Previous event studies, constrained by static single-companies analyses and simplistic assumptions, fail to capture these ripple effects. While large language models (LLMs) offer emergent reasoning capabilities, their direct application falters due to structural market unawareness and limited capacity to analyze ripple effects. We propose FinRipple, an elegant framework that empowers LLMs with the ability to analyze ripple effects through financial theory-guided large-scale reinforcement learning. We begin by relaxing the assumptions of previous methods, incorporating a time-varying knowledge graph to accurately represent market structure. By seamlessly integrating classical asset pricing theory, we align the LLM with the market, enabling it to predict ripple effects. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a standardized definition of ripple effect prediction, a task that is extremely important yet unexplored in the financial domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FinRipple provides a promising solution to this task.

FinRipple: Aligning Large Language Models with Financial Market for Event Ripple Effect Awareness

Eligibility criteria (EC) are critical components of clinical trial design, defining the parameters for participant inclusion and exclusion. However, designing EC remains a complex, expertise-intensive process. Traditional approaches to EC generation often rely on user-prompted predefined categories, which limit adaptability and may fail to produce comprehensive, contextually appropriate criteria. To address these challenges, we introduce EC-RAFT, a method that utilizes Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) to generate structured and cohesive EC directly from clinical trial titles and descriptions. EC-RAFT integrates contextual retrieval, synthesized intermediate reasoning, and fine-tuned language models to produce comprehensive EC sets. To enhance clinical alignment evaluation with referenced criteria, we also propose an LLM-guided evaluation pipeline. Our results demonstrate that our solution, which uses Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as a base model, achieves a BERTScore of 86.23 and an EC-matched LLM-as-a-Judge score of 1.66 out of 3, outperforming zero-shot Llama-3.1 and Gemini-1.5 by 0.41 and 0.11 points, respectively. EC-RAFT was trained in a low-cost setup and, therefore, can be used as a practical solution for EC generation while ensuring quality and relevance in clinical trial design.

EC-RAFT: Automated Generation of Clinical Trial Eligibility Criteria through Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning

Inverse tasks can uncover potential reasoning gaps as Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up. In this work, we explore the redefinition task, in which we assign alternative values to well-known physical constants and units of measure, prompting LLMs to respond accordingly. Our findings show that not only does model performance degrade with scale, but its false confidence also rises. Moreover, while factors such as prompting strategies or response formatting are influential, they do not preclude LLMs from anchoring to memorized values.

Pitfalls of Scale: Investigating the Inverse Task of Redefinition in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used more and more extensively for automated evaluation in various scenarios. Previous studies have attempted to fine-tune open-source LLMs to replicate the evaluation explanations and judgments of powerful proprietary models, such as GPT-4. However, these methods are largely limited to text-based analyses under predefined general criteria, resulting in reduced adaptability for unseen instructions and demonstrating instability in evaluating adherence to quantitative and structural constraints. To address these limitations, we propose a novel evaluation framework, ARJudge, that adaptively formulates evaluation criteria and synthesizes both text-based and code-driven analyses to evaluate LLM responses. ARJudge consists of two components: a fine-tuned Analyzer that generates multi-faceted evaluation analyses and a tuning-free Refiner that combines and refines all analyses to make the final judgment. We construct a Composite Analysis Corpus that integrates tasks for evaluation criteria generation alongside text-based and code-driven analysis generation to train the Analyzer. Our results demonstrate that ARJudge outperforms existing fine-tuned evaluators in effectiveness and robustness. Furthermore, it demonstrates the importance of multi-faceted evaluation and code-driven analyses in enhancing evaluation capabilities.

Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework

Nowadays, single Large Language Model (LLM) struggles with critical issues such as hallucination and inadequate reasoning abilities. To mitigate these issues, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as an effective strategy, where LLM agents engage in in-depth debates with others on tasks. However, existing MAD methods face two major issues: (a) too lengthy input contexts, which causes LLM agents to get lost in plenty of input information and experiences performance drop; and (b) the overconfidence dilemma, where self-assured LLM agents dominate the debate, leading to low debating effectiveness. To address these limitations, we propose a novel MAD method called ''CortexDebate''. Inspired by the human brain's tendency to establish a sparse and dynamically optimized network among cortical areas governed by white matter, CortexDebate constructs a sparse debating graph among LLM agents, where each LLM agent only debates with the ones that are helpful to it. To optimize the graph, we propose a module named McKinsey-based Debate Matter (MDM), which acts as an artificial analog to white matter. By integrating the McKinsey Trust Formula, a well-established measure of trustworthiness from sociology, MDM enables credible evaluations that guide graph optimization. The effectiveness of our CortexDebate has been well demonstrated by extensive experimental results across eight datasets from four task types.

CortexDebate: Debating Sparsely and Equally for Multi-Agent Debate

Dealing with long and highly complex technical text is a challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), which still have to unfold their potential in supporting expensive and time intensive processes like patent drafting. Within patents, the description constitutes more than 90% of the document on average. Yet, its automatic generation remains understudied. When drafting patent applications, patent attorneys typically receive invention reports (IRs), which are usually confidential, hindering research on LLM-supported patent drafting.Often, pre-publication research papers serve as IRs. We leverage this duality to build PAP2PAT, an open and realistic benchmark for patent drafting consisting of 1.8k patent-paper pairs describing the same inventions. To address the complex long-document patent generation task, we propose chunk-based outline-guided generation using the research paper as invention specification. Our extensive evaluation using PAP2PAT and a human case study show that LLMs can effectively leverage information from the paper, but still struggle to provide the necessary level of detail. Fine-tuning leads to more patent-style language, but also to more hallucination. We release our data and code.

PAP2PAT: Benchmarking Outline-Guided Long-Text Patent Generation with Patent-Paper Pairs

Code generation models have shown significant potential for automating programming tasks. However, the challenge of generating accurate and reliable code persists due to the highly complex and long-reasoning nature of the task. Even state-of-the-art models often fail in code generation due to small errors, which can drastically affect the overall functionality of code. Our study identifies that current models tend to produce errors concentrated at specific error-prone points, which significantly impacts the accuracy of the generated code. To address this issue, we introduce Focused-DPO, a framework that enhances code generation by directing preference optimization towards these critical error-prone areas. This approach builds on Direct Preference Optimization, emphasizing accuracy in parts prone to errors. Additionally, we develop a method called Error-Point Identification, which constructs a dataset that targets these problematic points without requiring costly human annotations. Our experiments on benchmarks such as HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), and LiveCodeBench demonstrate that Focused-DPO significantly improves the precision and reliability of code generation, reducing common errors and enhancing overall code quality. By focusing on error-prone points, Focused-DPO advances the accuracy and functionality of model-generated code.

Focused-DPO: Enhancing Code Generation Through Focused Preference Optimization on Error-Prone Points

Contemporary language models (LMs) such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019, T5 (Raffel et al., 2023), GPT-4 (OpenAI, 2023), have exhibited remarkable capabilities, effectively addressing long-standing challenges in the field. However, these models rely on shortcut learning, using a decision rule that relies on superficial cues that are spuriously correlated with the labels (Geirhos et al., 2020). In this research, we focus on the reliance on a specific type of shortcuts, namely syntactic heuristics, in BERT when performing Natural Language Inference (NLI), a representative task in Natural Language Understanding (Jeretic et al., 2020). By making use of two probing methods, one supervised, one unsupervised, we investigate where these shortcuts emerge, how they evolve and how they impact the latent knowledge of the LM. Our findings reveal that syntactic heuristics are absent in pretrained models but emerge and evolve as the model is finetuned with datasets of increasing size. The adoption of these shortcuts varies across different hidden layers, with specific layers closer to the output contributing more to this phenomenon. Despite the model's reliance on shortcuts during inference, it retains information relevant to the task, and our supervised and unsupervised probes process this information differently.

Supervised and Unsupervised Probing of Shortcut Learning: Case Study on the Emergence and Evolution of Syntactic Heuristics in BERT

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently gained attention due to their distinctive performance and broad applicability. While it has been previously shown that their efficacy in usage scenarios involving non-Western contexts falls short, existing studies are limited in scope, covering just a narrow range of cultures, focusing exclusively on a small number of cultural aspects, or evaluating a limited selection of models on a single task only. Towards globally inclusive LVLM research, we introduce GIMMICK, an extensive multimodal benchmark designed to assess a broad spectrum of cultural knowledge across 144 countries representing six global macro-regions. GIMMICK comprises six tasks built upon three new datasets that span 728 unique cultural events or facets on which we evaluated 20 LVLMs and 11 LLMs, including five proprietary and 26 open-weight models of all sizes. We systematically examine (1) regional cultural biases, (2) the influence of model size, (3) input modalities, and (4) external cues. Our analyses reveal strong biases toward Western cultures across models and tasks and highlight strong correlations between model size and performance, as well as the effectiveness of multimodal input and external geographic cues. We further find that models have more knowledge of tangible than intangible aspects (e.g., food vs. rituals) and that they excel in recognizing broad cultural origins but struggle with a more nuanced understanding.

GIMMICK: Globally Inclusive Multimodal Multitask Cultural Knowledge Benchmarking

Visual agent models for automating human activities on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have emerged as a promising research direction, driven by advances in large Vision Language Models (VLMs). A critical challenge in GUI automation is the precise grounding of interface elements across diverse platforms. Existing vision-only GUI agents directly ground elements from large and cluttered screenshots, requiring them to process substantial irrelevant information that compromises their accuracy. In addition, these approaches typically employ basic cross-entropy loss for learning grounding objectives, which fails to effectively capture grounding quality compared to established object detection metrics like Intersection-over-Union (IoU). To address these issues, we introduce R-VLM, a novel GUI grounding approach that leverages zoomed-in region proposals for precise element localization. We also propose an IoU-aware objective function that facilitates model convergence toward high IoU predictions. Our approach bridges the gap between VLMs and conventional object detection techniques, improving the state-of-the-art grounding accuracy by 13% across diverse GUI platforms on the GUI grounding benchmarks ScreenSpot and AgentStudio. In addition, our R-VLM approach shows 3.2-9.7% absolute accuracy improvements in GUI navigation tasks on the AITW and Mind2Web benchmarks.

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FinRipple: Aligning Large Language Models with Financial Market for Event Ripple Effect Awareness

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