Austria

Low-bit quantization improves machine learning model efficiency but surprisingly favors undertrained large language models (LLMs). Larger models or those trained on fewer tokens exhibit less quantization-induced degradation (QiD), while smaller, well-trained models face significant performance losses. To gain deeper insights into this trend, we study over 1500+ quantized LLM checkpoints of various sizes and at different training levels (undertrained or fully trained) in a controlled setting, deriving scaling laws for understanding the relationship between QiD and factors: the number of training tokens, model size and bit width.

With our derived scaling laws, we propose a novel perspective that we can use QiD to measure an LLM&#39;s training levels and determine the number of training tokens required for fully training LLMs of various sizes. Moreover, we use the scaling laws to predict the quantization performance of different-sized LLMs trained with tokens. Our projection shows that the low-bit quantization performance of future models, which are expected to be trained with over $\textcolor{red}{100~trillion}$ tokens, may NOT be desirable. This poses a potential challenge for low-bit quantization in the future and highlights the need for awareness of a model&#39;s training level when evaluating low-bit quantization research. To facilitate future research on this problem, we release all the 1500+ quantized checkpoints used in this work at https://huggingface.co/Xu-Ouyang.

ACL 2025

Low-Bit Quantization Favors Undertrained LLMs: Scaling Laws for Quantized LLMs with 100T Training Tokens

data-efficient training

scaling laws

quantization

### 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)

Low-bit quantization improves machine learning model efficiency but surprisingly favors undertrained large language models (LLMs). Larger models or those trained on fewer tokens exhibit less quantization-induced degradation (QiD), while smaller, well-trained models face significant performance losses. To gain deeper insights into this trend, we study over 1500+ quantized LLM checkpoints of various sizes and at different training levels (undertrained or fully trained) in a controlled setting, deriving scaling laws for understanding the relationship between QiD and factors: the number of training tokens, model size and bit width.

With our derived scaling laws, we propose a novel perspective that we can use QiD to measure an LLM's training levels and determine the number of training tokens required for fully training LLMs of various sizes. Moreover, we use the scaling laws to predict the quantization performance of different-sized LLMs trained with tokens. Our projection shows that the low-bit quantization performance of future models, which are expected to be trained with over $\textcolor{red}{100~trillion}$ tokens, may NOT be desirable. This poses a potential challenge for low-bit quantization in the future and highlights the need for awareness of a model's training level when evaluating low-bit quantization research. To facilitate future research on this problem, we release all the 1500+ quantized checkpoints used in this work at https://huggingface.co/Xu-Ouyang.

technical paper

As large language models (LLMs) scale in size and adoption, their computational and environmental costs continue to rise. Prior benchmarking efforts have primarily focused on latency reduction in idealized settings, often overlooking the diverse real-world inference workloads that shape energy use. In this work, we systematically analyze the energy implications of common inference efficiency optimizations across diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads, including conversational AI and code generation. 
We introduce a modeling approach that approximates real-world LLM workflows through a binning strategy for input-output token distributions and batch size variations. Our empirical analysis spans software frameworks, decoding strategies, GPU architectures, online and offline serving settings, and model parallelism configurations. 
We show that the effectiveness of inference optimizations is *highly sensitive to workload geometry, software stack, and hardware accelerators*, demonstrating that naive energy estimates based on FLOPs or theoretical GPU utilization significantly underestimate real-world energy consumption.
Our findings reveal that the proper application of relevant inference efficiency optimizations can reduce total energy use by up to **73%** from unoptimized baselines. These insights provide a foundation for sustainable LLM deployment and inform energy-efficient design strategies for future AI infrastructure.

Energy Considerations of Large Language Model Inference and Efficiency Optimizations

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred growing interest in automatic theorem proving using Lean4, where effective tree search methods are crucial for navigating the underlying large proof search spaces. While the existing approaches primarily rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search (BFS) remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether BFS can achieve competitive performance in large-scale theorem proving tasks. We present \texttt{BFS-Prover}, a scalable expert iteration framework, featuring three key innovations. First, we implement strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. Second, we improve the sample efficiency of BFS through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) applied to state-tactic pairs automatically annotated with compiler error feedback, refining the LLM's policy to prioritize productive expansions. Third, we employ length normalization in BFS to encourage exploration of deeper proof paths. \texttt{BFS-Prover} achieves a state-of-the-art score of 
72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and therefore challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods, demonstrating that BFS can achieve competitive performance when properly scaled.

BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving

State space models (SSMs) achieve efficient sub-quadratic compute complexity but often exhibit significant performance drops as context length increases. Recent work attributes this deterioration to an exponential decay in hidden-state memory. While token filtering has emerged as a promising remedy, its underlying rationale and limitations remain largely non-understood. In this paper, we first investigate the attention patterns of Mamba to shed light on why token filtering alleviates long-context degradation. Motivated by these findings, we propose LAMB, a training-free, attention-guided token filtering strategy designed to preserve critical tokens during inference. LAMB can boost long-context performance for both pure SSMs and hybrid models, achieving up to an average improvement of 30.35% over state-of-the-art techniques on standard long-context understanding benchmarks. Our analysis and experiments reveal new insights into the interplay between attention, token selection, and memory retention, and are thus expected to inspire broader applications of token filtering in long-sequence modeling.

LAMB: A Training-Free Method to Enhance the Long-Context Understanding of SSMs via Attention-Guided Token Filtering

Among the hardest tasks for humans are those found in competitive programming where problems require sophisticated algorithmic thinking, puzzle solving, and the creation of effective code. As a domain to assess language models (LMs), it has not received enough attention, though. This study presents the ICPC benchmark, which consists of 1220 international collegiate programming contest (ICPC) tasks. Each problem includes official analysis, reference code, and sample and high-quality unit and hidden tests. We are able to develop and evaluate a variety of LM inference techniques for competitive programming with these resources. With zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, we find that o1 only achieves a 19.1\% pass@1 solve rate. With our best inference technique, which combines muti-turn self-judge with reflection and retrieval over episodic information, raises this to 42.2\%. Furthermore, we conduct a new human-in-the-loop investigation to gain a deeper understanding of the remaining difficulties. Surprisingly, we discover that o1 can solve 17 out of 18 problems that were previously unsolvable by any model or technique with just a few specific instructions. A footstep toward LMs with grounded, imaginative, and algorithmic thinking is provided by our quantitative findings and qualitative research.

Can Multi-turn Self-judge Single Agent LMs with Retrieval Solve ICPC Problems?

While LLMs demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities and multi-agent applicability, their tendency to "overthink" and "groupthink" pose intriguing parallels to human cognitive limitations. Inspired by this observation, we conduct an exploratory simulation to investigate whether LLMs are wise enough to be thinkers of philosophical reflection. We design two frameworks, Philosopher and Symposium, which simulate self- and group-reflection for multi-persona in hybrid table reasoning tasks. Through experiments across four benchmarks, we discover that while introducing varied perspectives might help, LLMs tend to under-perform simpler end-to-end approaches. We reveal from close reading five emergent behaviors which strikingly resemble human cognitive closure-seeking behaviors, and identify a consistent pattern of "overthinking threshold" across all tasks, where collaborative reasoning often reaches a critical point of diminishing returns. This study sheds light on a fundamental challenge shared by both human and machine intelligence: the delicate balance between deliberation and decisiveness.

Do Androids Question Electric Sheep? A Multi-Agent Cognitive Simulation of Philosophical Reflection on Hybrid Table Reasoning

Puns, as a unique form of linguistic creativity, present significant challenges in cross-lingual translation, particularly between linguistically distant languages like Chinese and English, where it’s often considered a “mission impossible”. We introduce Pun2Pun, a novel benchmark for quantitatively evaluating pun translation between Chinese and English while preserving both linguistic mechanisms and humorous effects. We propose the adaptation of Constant-Variable Optimization (CVO) Model for translation strategy and concomitant Overlap (Ovl) metric for translation quality assessment. Our approach provides a robust quantitative evaluation framework to assess models’ complex linguistic and cultural reasoning capabilities in pun translation. Through extensive experiments on both textual and visual puns, we demonstrate that our translation strategy model significantly improves performance, particularly for better-performing models. Our findings reveal exciting potentials and current limitations of LLMs in preserving sophisticated humor across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Pun2Pun: Benchmarking LLMs on Textual-Visual Chinese-English Pun Translation via Pragmatics Model and Linguistic Reasoning

This study evaluates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, testing three configurations: (1) with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), (2) without SFT, and (3) without SFT but using an instruction-tuned model. We further investigate how training set size influences model performance. Our evaluation spans 13 benchmarks—covering dialogue, reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, question answering, truthfulness, MT-Bench, Big Bench, and the Open LLM Leaderboard. We find that: (1) alignment methods often achieve near-optimal performance even with smaller subsets of training data; (2) although they offer limited improvements on complex reasoning tasks, they enhance mathematical problem-solving; and (3) using an instruction-tuned model improves truthfulness. These insights highlight the conditions under which alignment methods excel, as well as their limitations.

Insights into Alignment: Evaluating DPO and its Variants Across Multiple Tasks

As the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) expands, so do concerns about their vulnerability to jailbreak attacks. We introduce SequentialBreak, a novel single-query jailbreak technique that arranges multiple benign prompts in sequence with a hidden malicious instruction among them to bypass safety mechanisms. Sequential prompt chains in a single query can lead LLMs to focus on certain prompts while ignoring others. By embedding a malicious prompt within a prompt chain, we show that LLMs tend to ignore the harmful context and respond to all prompts including the harmful one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack across diverse scenarios—including Q\&A systems, dialogue completion tasks, and levelwise gaming scenario—highlighting its adaptability to varied prompt structures. The variability of prompt structures shows that SequentialBreak is adaptable to formats beyond those discussed here. Experiments show that SequentialBreak only uses a single query to significantly outperform existing baselines on both open-source and closed-source models. These findings underline the urgent need for more robust defenses against prompt-based attacks. The Results and website are available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JailBreakAttack-4F3B/.

SequentialBreak: Large Language Models Can be Fooled by Embedding Jailbreak Prompts into Sequential Prompt Chains

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, understanding their behavior in both factual and disputable scenarios is essential—especially when their outputs may shape public opinion or reinforce dominant narratives. This study investigates two types of bias in LLMs: model bias (bias stemming from model training) and inference bias (bias induced by the language of the query), through a two-phase evaluation. 
The first phase evaluates LLMs on factual questions where a single verifiable answer exists, assessing whether models maintain consistency across different query languages. The second phase expands the scope by probing geopolitically sensitive disputes, where responses may reflect culturally embedded or ideologically aligned perspectives. We construct a manually curated dataset spanning both factual and disputable QA, across four languages and question types. Our findings show that while Phase 1 reveals primarily language-induced alignment, Phase 2 reveals entangled effects of both language and model training. This study offers a structured framework for evaluating LLM behavior across neutral and sensitive topics, providing insights for future LLM deployment and culturally-aware evaluation practices in multilingual contexts.

A Dual-Layered Evaluation of Geopolitical and Cultural Bias in LLMs

Search engines increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to generate direct answers, while AI chatbots retrieve updated information from the
Internet. As information curators for billions of users, LLMs must evaluate the accuracy and reliability of sources. This study audits nine LLMs
from OpenAI, Google, and Meta to assess their ability to evaluate the credibility and quality of the top 20 most popular Bangladeshi news outlets.
While LLMs rate most tested outlets, larger models more often refuse to rate sources due to insufficient information, while smaller models are
prone to hallucinations. When ratings are provided, LLMs show strong internal consistency with an average correlation coefficient (𝜌) of 0.72, but
their alignment with human expert evaluations is moderate, with an average 𝜌 of 0.45. We introduce a dataset of expert opinions (journalism and
media studies students) on the credibility and political bias of Bangladeshi news outlets to evaluate LLMs’ political bias and credibility assessments.
Our analysis reveals that LLMs in default configurations favor the Bangladesh Awami League-affiliated sources in credibility ratings. Assigning
partisan identities to LLMs further amplifies politically congruent biases in their assessments. These findings highlight the need to address political
bias and improve credibility evaluations as LLMs increasingly shape how news and political information are curated worldwide.

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