Austria

This paper introduces MMRefine, a Multi-Modal Refinement Benchmark designed to evaluate the error refinement capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). As the emphasis shifts toward enhancing reasoning during inference, MMRefine provides a framework that assesses refinement beyond final answer accuracy by categorizing errors into diverse levels. The benchmark evaluates MLLMs&#39; abilities to detect and correct errors across six distinct scenarios. Experiments with various open and closed MLLMs reveal refinement bottlenecks and factors impeding performance, highlighting areas for improvement in effective reasoning enhancement.

ACL 2025

MMRefine: Unveiling the Obstacles to Robust Refinement in Multimodal Large Language Models

multimodal qa

educational applications

refinement

logical reasoning

benchmarking

evaluation

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper introduces MMRefine, a Multi-Modal Refinement Benchmark designed to evaluate the error refinement capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). As the emphasis shifts toward enhancing reasoning during inference, MMRefine provides a framework that assesses refinement beyond final answer accuracy by categorizing errors into diverse levels. The benchmark evaluates MLLMs' abilities to detect and correct errors across six distinct scenarios. Experiments with various open and closed MLLMs reveal refinement bottlenecks and factors impeding performance, highlighting areas for improvement in effective reasoning enhancement.

poster

### 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)

Several studies have explored the mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) in coding tasks, but most have focused on programming languages (PLs) in a monolingual setting. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between multiple PLs and English in the concept space of LLMs. We perform a few-shot translation task on 21 PL pairs using two Llama-based models. By decoding the embeddings of intermediate layers during this task, we observe that the concept space is closer to English (including PL keywords) and assigns higher probabilities to English tokens in the second half of the middle layers, but not in the top layers. We analyze neuron activations for 11 PLs and English, finding that while language-specific neurons are primarily concentrated in the bottom layers, those exclusive to each PL tend to appear in the top layers. For PLs that are highly aligned with multiple other PLs, identifying language-specific neurons is not feasible. These PLs also tend to have a larger keyword set than other PLs and are closer to the model's concept space regardless of the input/output PL in translation task. Our findings provide insights into how LLMs internally represent PLs, revealing structural patterns in the model's concept space. Code is available at [anon. URL].

How Programming Concepts and Neurons Are Shared in Code Language Models

The rapidly changing nature of real-world information presents challenges for large language models (LLMs), which are typically trained on static datasets. This limitation makes it difficult for LLMs to accurately perform tasks that require up-to-date knowledge, such as time-sensitive question answering (QA). In this paper, we introduce **DynaQuest**, a **Dyna**mic **Quest**ion answering dataset reflecting knowledge updates in the real world. DynaQuest is based on Wikipedia Infoboxes, which are frequently updated to reflect real-world changes. Our dataset is created by automatically identifying and comparing changes between different versions of Wikipedia pages and generating question-answer pairs based on these updates. To address the challenges posed by our dynamic dataset, we propose **CARL**, a **C**ontext-**A**ware **R**einforcement **L**earning framework to improve the performance of LLMs on time-sensitive question answering. We conduct experiments on our collected dataset across recent time periods and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, we maintain a dynamic knowledge updating process, providing a periodically evolving benchmark to continually evaluate LLMs' ability to answer time-sensitive questions.

DynaQuest: A Dynamic Question Answering Dataset Reflecting Real-World Knowledge Updates

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique by which language models make predictions based on examples provided in their input context. Previously, their context window size imposed a limit on the number of examples that can be shown, making example selection techniques crucial for identifying the maximally effective set of examples. However, the recent advent of Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) has significantly increased the number of examples that can be included in context, raising an important question of whether ICL performance in a many-shot regime is still sensitive to the method of sample selection. To answer this, we revisit these approaches in the context of LCLMs through extensive experiments on 18 datasets spanning 4 tasks. Surprisingly, we observe that sophisticated example selection techniques do not yield significant improvements over a simple random sample selection method. Instead, we discover that the advent of LCLMs has fundamentally shifted the challenge of ICL from that of selecting the most effective examples to that of collecting sufficient examples to fill the context window. Specifically, in certain datasets, including all available examples does not fully utilize the context window; however, by augmenting the examples in context with a simple data augmentation approach, we substantially improve ICL performance by 5%.

Revisiting In-Context Learning with Long Context Language Models

Audiobook interpretations are attracting increasing attention, as they provide accessible and in-depth analyses of books that offer readers practical insights and intellectual inspiration. However, their manual creation process remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose AI4Reading, a multi-agent collaboration system leveraging large language models (LLMs) and speech synthesis technology to generate podcast-like audiobook interpretations. The system is designed to meet three key objectives: accurate content preservation, enhanced comprehensibility, and a logical narrative structure. To achieve these goals, We develop a framework composed of 11 specialized agents—including topic analysts, case analysts, editors, a narrator, and proofreaders—that work in concert to explore themes, extract real-world cases, refine content organization, and synthesize natural spoken language. By comparing expert interpretations with our system's output, the results show that although AI4Reading still has a gap in speech generation quality, the generated interpretative scripts are simpler and more accurate. The code of AI4Reading is publicly accessible \footnote{https://github.com/9624219/AI4reading}, with a demonstration video available \footnote{https://youtu.be/XCLAsRI9v2k}.

AI4Reading: Chinese Audiobook Interpretation System Based on Multi-Agent Collaboration

High-quality code documentation is crucial for software development especially in the era of AI. However, generating it automatically using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging, as existing approaches often produce incomplete, unhelpful, or factually incorrect outputs. We introduce DocAgent, a novel multi-agent collaborative system using topological code processing for incremental context building. Specialized agents (Reader, Searcher, Writer, Verifier, Orchestrator) then collaboratively generate documentation. We also propose a multi-faceted evaluation framework assessing Completeness, Helpfulness, and Truthfulness. Comprehensive experiments show DocAgent significantly outperforms baselines consistently. Our ablation study confirms the vital role of the topological processing order. DocAgent offers a robust approach for reliable code documentation generation in complex and proprietary repositories.

DocAgent: A Multi-Agent System for Automated Code Documentation Generation

As AI technology advances, it is driving innovation across industries, increasing the demand for scalable AI project deployment. However, deployment remains a critical challenge due to complex environment configurations, dependency conflicts, cross-platform adaptation, and debugging difficulties, which hinder automation and adoption.
This paper introduces AI2Agent, an end-to-end framework that automates AI project deployment through guideline-driven execution, self-adaptive debugging, and case \& solution accumulation. AI2Agent dynamically analyzes deployment challenges, learns from past cases, and iteratively refines its approach, significantly reducing human intervention.
To evaluate its effectiveness, we conducted experiments on 30 AI deployment cases, covering TTS, text-to-image generation, image editing, and other AI applications. Results show that AI2Agent significantly reduces deployment time and improves success rates. The code\footnote{\url{https://github.com/continue-ai-company/AI2Agent}} and demo video\footnote{\url{https://youtu.be/seRTYtwgLrk}} are now publicly accessible.

AI2Agent: An End-to-End Framework for Deploying AI Projects as Autonomous Agents

Data synthesis has become a crucial research area in large language models (LLMs), especially for generating high-quality instruction fine-tuning data to enhance downstream performance. In code generation, a key application of LLMs, manual annotation of code instruction data is costly. Recent methods, such as Code Evol-Instruct and OSS-Instruct, leverage LLMs to synthesize large-scale code instruction data, significantly improving LLM coding capabilities. However, these approaches face limitations due to unidirectional synthesis and randomness-driven generation, which restrict data quality and diversity. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Tree-of-Evolution (ToE), a novel framework that models code instruction synthesis process with a tree structure, exploring multiple evolutionary paths to alleviate the constraints of unidirectional generation. Additionally, we propose optimization-driven evolution, which refines each generation step based on the quality of the previous iteration. Experimental results across five widely-used coding benchmarks—HumanEval, MBPP, EvalPlus, LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench—demonstrate that base models fine-tuned on just 75k data synthesized by our method achieve comparable or superior performance to the state-of-the-art open-weight Code LLM, Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct, which was fine-tuned on millions of samples.

Tree-of-Evolution: Tree-Structured Instruction Evolution for Code Generation in Large Language Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in vision language models (VLMs) is crucial for improving interpretability and trustworthiness. However, current training recipes often relying on datasets dominated by short annotations with minimal rationales. In this work, we show that training VLM on short answers leads to poor generalization on reasoning tasks that require more detailed explanations. To address this limitation, we propose a two-stage post-training strategy that extends the usage of short answer data for enhanced CoT reasoning. First, we augment short answers with CoT reasoning generated by GPT-4o, enhancing the VLM’s CoT capabilities through fine-tuning. Second, we leverage short answers as outcome rewards for reinforcement learning. Specifically, short answers are used as correctness indicators to construct positive (correct) and negative (incorrect) pairs from model-generated reasoning chains. These pairs are then used to calibrate the model’s reasoning via Direct Preference Optimization. Our experiments show significant improvements in CoT reasoning on benchmark datasets, along with enhanced generalization to direct answer prediction. This work provides a critical data resource for VLM CoT training and demonstrates the effectiveness of outcome rewards for multimodal models post-training.

Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning

Non-collaborative dialogue involves two participants with conflicting interests engaging in a multi-round dialogue to achieve their own goals. Strategy planning is the key to guiding both participants towards a consensus. Most LLMs-based methods use stimulus prompts or external strategy planners for strategy planning. However, stimulus prompts fail to teach LLMs to plan dialogue strategies explicitly. Moreover, training external strategy planners doesn't fully account for adversarial interactions, thereby limiting their effectiveness against tough resisters. In this paper, to mitigate the above issues, we propose $\textbf{GAIA}$, a $\textbf{G}$ame-based $\textbf{A}$dversarial self-play $\textbf{I}$nter$\textbf{A}$ctive training paradigm, which constructs an adversarial two-player (a persuader and a resister) zero-sum game and guides the game to approximate Nash Equilibrium (NE) via reinforcement learning (RL) for the non-collaborative dialogues. First, we design a Chain-of-Mind prompt to reason the resister’s dialogue act step-by-step to plan the persuasive strategies. Secondly, to adversarially improve the persuader, we construct diverse resistant planners and theoretically improve the persuader's optimal lower bound. Finally, we iteratively optimise their policies via adversarial self-play interactive RL and design an $\epsilon$-NE verification algorithm to approximate the game's NE. Experiments on three datasets show that our model obtains state-of-the-art performance.

Battling against Tough Resister: Strategy Planning with Adversarial Game for Non-collaborative Dialogues

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown exceptional performance in multimodal tasks, but their effectiveness in complex visual reasoning is still constrained, especially when employing Chain-of-Thought prompting techniques. In this paper, we propose VReST, a novel training-free approach that enhances Reasoning in LVLMs through Monte Carlo Tree Search and Self-Reward mechanisms. VReST meticulously traverses the reasoning landscape by establishing a search tree, where each node encapsulates a reasoning step, and each path delineates a comprehensive reasoning sequence. Our innovative multimodal Self-Reward mechanism assesses the quality of reasoning steps by integrating the utility of sub-questions, answer correctness, and the relevance of vision-language clues, all without the need for additional models. VReST surpasses current prompting methods and secures state-of-the-art performance across three multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, it substantiates the efficacy of test-time scaling laws in multimodal tasks, offering a promising direction for future research.

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