Austria

Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) often demonstrate poor calibration, with their confidence scores misaligned with actual performance. While calibration has been extensively studied in models trained from scratch, the impact of LLMs&#39; prior knowledge on calibration during fine-tuning remains understudied. Our research reveals that LLMs&#39; prior knowledge causes potential poor calibration due to the ubiquitous presence of known data in real-world fine-tuning, which appears harmful for calibration. Specifically, data aligned with LLMs&#39; prior knowledge would induce overconfidence, while new knowledge improves calibration. Our findings expose a tension: LLMs’ encyclopedic knowledge, while enabling task versatility, undermines calibration through unavoidable knowledge overlaps. To address this, we propose CogCalib, a cognition-aware framework that applies targeted learning strategies according to the model’s prior knowledge. Experiments across 7 tasks using 3 LLM families prove that CogCalib significantly improves calibration while maintaining performance, achieving an average 57% reduction in ECE compared to standard fine-tuning in Llama3-8B. These improvements generalize well to out-of-domain tasks, enhancing the objectivity and reliability of domain-specific LLMs, and making them more trustworthy for critical human-AI interaction applications.

ACL 2025

Towards Objective Fine-tuning: How LLMs&#39; Prior Knowledge Causes Potential Poor Calibration?

calibration/uncertainty

data influence

fine-tuning

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Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) often demonstrate poor calibration, with their confidence scores misaligned with actual performance. While calibration has been extensively studied in models trained from scratch, the impact of LLMs' prior knowledge on calibration during fine-tuning remains understudied. Our research reveals that LLMs' prior knowledge causes potential poor calibration due to the ubiquitous presence of known data in real-world fine-tuning, which appears harmful for calibration. Specifically, data aligned with LLMs' prior knowledge would induce overconfidence, while new knowledge improves calibration. Our findings expose a tension: LLMs’ encyclopedic knowledge, while enabling task versatility, undermines calibration through unavoidable knowledge overlaps. To address this, we propose CogCalib, a cognition-aware framework that applies targeted learning strategies according to the model’s prior knowledge. Experiments across 7 tasks using 3 LLM families prove that CogCalib significantly improves calibration while maintaining performance, achieving an average 57% reduction in ECE compared to standard fine-tuning in Llama3-8B. These improvements generalize well to out-of-domain tasks, enhancing the objectivity and reliability of domain-specific LLMs, and making them more trustworthy for critical human-AI interaction applications.

Towards Objective Fine-tuning: How LLMs' Prior Knowledge Causes Potential Poor Calibration?

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)

A fundamental question in interpretability research is to what extent neural networks, particularly language models, implement reusable functions through subnetworks that can be composed to perform more complex tasks. Recent advances in mechanistic interpretability have made progress in identifying circuits, the minimal computational subgraphs responsible for a model’s behavior on specific tasks. However, most studies focus on identifying circuits for individual tasks without investigating how functionally similar circuits relate to each other. To address this gap, we study the modularity of neural networks by analyzing circuits for highly compositional subtasks within a transformer-based language model. Specifically, given a probabilistic context-free grammar, we identify and compare circuits responsible for ten modular string-edit operations. Our results indicate that functionally similar circuits exhibit both notable node overlap and cross-task faithfulness. Moreover, we demonstrate that the circuits identified can be reused and combined through set operations to represent more complex functional model capabilities.

Circuit Compositions: Exploring Modular Structures in Transformer-Based Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used, but they often generate subtle factual errors, especially in long-form text. These errors are fatal in some specialized domains such as medicine. Existing fact-checking with grounding documents methods face two main challenges: (1) they struggle to understand complex multihop relations in long documents, often overlooking subtle factual errors; (2) most specialized methods rely on pairwise comparisons, requiring multiple model calls, leading to high resource and computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose GraphCheck, a fact-checking framework that uses extracted knowledge graphs to enhance text representation. Graph Neural Networks further process these graphs as a soft prompt, enabling LLMs to incorporate structured knowledge more effectively. Enhanced with graph-based reasoning, GraphCheck captures multihop reasoning chains that are often overlooked by existing methods, enabling precise and efficient fact-checking in a single inference call. Experimental results on seven benchmarks spanning both general and medical domains demonstrate up to a 7.1\% overall improvement over baseline models. Notably, GraphCheck outperforms existing specialized fact-checkers and achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art LLMs, such as DeepSeek-V3 and OpenAI-o1, with significantly fewer parameters.

GraphCheck: Breaking Long-Term Text Barriers with Extracted Knowledge Graph-Powered Fact-Checking

This paper introduces MMMU-Pro, a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. MMMU-Pro rigorously assesses multimodal models' true understanding and reasoning capabilities through a three-step process based on MMMU: (1) filtering out questions answerable by text-only models, (2) augmenting candidate options, and (3) introducing a vision-only input setting where questions are embedded within images. This setting challenges AI to truly "see" and "read" simultaneously, testing \textit{a core human cognitive skill of seamlessly integrating visual and textual information}. Results show that model performance is substantially lower on MMMU-Pro than on MMMU, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9% across models. We explore the impact of OCR prompts and Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, finding that OCR prompts have minimal effect while CoT generally improves performance. MMMU-Pro provides a more rigorous evaluation tool, closely mimicking real-world scenarios and offering valuable directions for future multimodal research.

MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, most RM research is centered on English and relies heavily on synthetic resources, which leads to limited and less reliable datasets and benchmarks for Chinese. To address this gap, we introduce CheemsBench, a fully human-annotated RM evaluation benchmark within Chinese contexts, and CheemsPreference, a large-scale and diverse preference dataset annotated through human-machine collaboration to support Chinese RM training. We systematically evaluate open-source discriminative and generative RMs on CheemsBench and observe significant limitations in their ability to capture human preferences in Chinese scenarios. Additionally, based on CheemsPreference, we construct an RM that achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench, demonstrating the necessity of human supervision in RM training. Our findings reveal that scaled AI-generated data struggles to fully capture human preferences, emphasizing the importance of high-quality human supervision in RM development.

Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch

Text-to-SQL, which translates a natural language question into an SQL query, has advanced with in-context learning of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods show little improvement in performance compared to randomly chosen demonstrations, and significant performance drops when smaller LLMs (e.g., Llama 3.1-8B) are used. This indicates that these methods heavily rely on the intrinsic capabilities of hyper-scaled LLMs, rather than effectively retrieving useful demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for effectively retrieving demonstrations and generating SQL queries. We construct a Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph, which contains key information and semantic relationship between a question and its database schema items. This graph-based structure enables effective representation of Text-to-SQL samples and retrieval of useful demonstrations for in-context learning. Experimental results on the Spider benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing consistent improvements in SQL generation performance and efficiency across both hyper-scaled LLMs and small LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/jjklle/DCG-SQL.

DCG-SQL: Enhancing In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph

This paper introduces PreP-OCR, a two-stage pipeline that combines document image restoration with semantic-aware post-OCR correction to enhance both visual clarity and textual consistency, thereby improving text extraction from degraded historical documents.
First, we synthesize document-image pairs from plaintext, rendering them with diverse fonts and layouts and then applying a randomly ordered set of degradation operations. An image restoration model is trained on this synthetic data, using multi-directional patch extraction and fusion to process large images. Second, a ByT5 post-OCR model, fine-tuned on synthetic historical text pairs, addresses remaining OCR errors.
Detailed experiments on 13,831 pages of real historical documents in English, French, and Spanish show that the PreP-OCR pipeline reduces character error rates by 63.9-70.3\% compared to OCR on raw images. Our pipeline demonstrates the potential of integrating image restoration with linguistic error correction for digitizing historical archives.

PreP-OCR: A Complete Pipeline for Document Image Restoration and Enhanced OCR Accuracy

We introduce MISP-Meeting, a new real-world, multimodal dataset that covers subject-oriented long-form content. MISP-Meeting integrates information from speech, vision, and text modalities to facilitate automatic meeting transcription and summarization (AMTS). Challenging conditions in human meetings, including far-field speech recognition, audio-visual understanding, and long-term summarization, have been carefully evaluated. We benchmark state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) and large language models (LLMs) on this dataset, enhanced with multimodal cues. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating multimodal cues, such as lip movements and visual focus of attention, significantly enhances transcription accuracy, reducing the character error rate (CER) from 36.60% to 20.27% via guided source separation (GSS), fine-tuning, and audio-visual fusion. Furthermore, our summarization analysis reveals a direct correlation between ASR quality and summary coherence, underscoring the importance of robust multimodal modeling. Our dataset and codebase will be released as open source.

MISP-Meeting: A Real-World Dataset with Multimodal Cues for Long-form Meeting Transcription and Summarization

LLMs such as GPT-4 have shown a remarkable ability to solve complex questions by generating step-by-step rationales. Prior works have utilized this capability to improve smaller and cheaper LMs (say, with 7B parameters). However, various practical constraints, such as copyright and legal issues, owing to lack of transparency in the pre-training data of large (often closed) models, prevent their use in commercial settings. Little focus has been given to improving the innate reasoning ability of smaller models without distilling information from larger LLMs. To address this, we propose COLLATE, a trainable framework that tunes a (small) LLM to generate those outputs from a pool of diverse rationales that selectively improves the downstream task. COLLATE enforces multiple instances of the same LLM to exhibit distinct behavior and employs them to generate rationales to obtain diverse outputs. The LLM is then tuned via preference optimization to choose the candidate rationale which maximizes the likelihood of ground-truth answer. COLLATE outperforms several trainable and prompting baselines on 5 datasets across 3 domains - maths problem solving, natural language inference, and commonsense reasoning. We show the efficacy of COLLATE on LLMs from different model families across varying parameter scales (1B to 8B) and demonstrate the benefit of multiple rationale providers guided by the end task through ablations. Code is released here (https://github.com/Sohanpatnaik106/collate).

Learning Together to Perform Better: Teaching Small-Scale LLMs to Collaborate via Preferential Rationale Tuning

Evaluating models on large benchmarks can be very resource-intensive, especially during a period of rapid model evolution. Existing efficient evaluation methods estimate the performance of target models by testing them on a small, static coreset derived from the publicly available evaluation results of source models, which are separate from the target models. However, these approaches rely on the assumption that target models have high prediction consistency with source models, which doesn’t generalize well in practice. To fill this gap, we propose TailoredBench, a method that conducts customized evaluation tailored to each target model. Specifically, a Global-coreset is first constructed as a probe to identify the most consistent source models for each target model with an adaptive source model selection strategy. Afterwards, a scalable K-Medoids clustering algorithm is proposed to extend the Global-coreset to a tailored Native-coreset for each target model. According to the predictions on respective Native-coreset, we estimate the overall performance of target models with a calibrated estimation strategy. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmarks across over 300 models demonstrate that compared to best performing baselines, TailoredBench achieves an average reduction of 31.4% in MAE of accuracy estimates under the same inference budgets, showcasing strong effectiveness and generalizability.

Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Tailored Benchmarks for Efficient Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of natural language tasks. However, selecting the optimal LLM to respond to a user query often necessitates a delicate balance between performance and cost. While powerful models deliver better results, they come at a high cost, whereas smaller models are more cost-effective but less capable. To address this trade-off, we propose IRT-Router, a multi-LLM routing framework that efficiently routes user queries to the most suitable LLM. Inspired by Item Response Theory (IRT), a psychological measurement methodology, IRT-Router explicitly models the relationship between LLM capabilities and user query attributes. This not only enables accurate prediction of response performance but also provides interpretable insights, such as LLM abilities and query difficulty. Additionally, we design an online query warm-up technique based on semantic similarity, further enhancing the online generalization capability of IRT-Router. Extensive experiments on 20 LLMs and 12 datasets demonstrate that IRT-Router outperforms most baseline methods in terms of effectiveness and interpretability. Its superior performance in cold-start scenarios further confirms the reliability and practicality of IRT-Router in real-world applications. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Mercidaiha/IRT-Router}.

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Circuit Compositions: Exploring Modular Structures in Transformer-Based Language Models

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