India

Instruction-tuning plays a vital role in enhancing the task-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs), improving their usability in generating helpful responses on various tasks. However, previous work has demonstrated that they are sensitive to minor variations in instruction phrasing. In this paper, we explore whether introducing perturbations in instruction-tuning data can enhance LLMs&#39; resistance against noisy instructions. We focus on how instruction-tuning with perturbations, such as removing stop words or shuffling words, affects LLMs&#39; performance on the original and perturbed versions of widely-used benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, GSM8K). We further assess learning dynamics and potential shifts in model behavior. Surprisingly, our results suggest that instruction-tuning on perturbed instructions can, in some cases, improve downstream performance. These findings highlight the importance of including perturbed instructions in instruction-tuning, which can make LLMs more resilient to noisy user inputs.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Fine-Tuning on Noisy Instructions: Effects on Generalization and Performance

instruction-tuning

robustness

resilience

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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.

Instruction-tuning plays a vital role in enhancing the task-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs), improving their usability in generating helpful responses on various tasks. However, previous work has demonstrated that they are sensitive to minor variations in instruction phrasing. In this paper, we explore whether introducing perturbations in instruction-tuning data can enhance LLMs' resistance against noisy instructions. We focus on how instruction-tuning with perturbations, such as removing stop words or shuffling words, affects LLMs' performance on the original and perturbed versions of widely-used benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, GSM8K). We further assess learning dynamics and potential shifts in model behavior. Surprisingly, our results suggest that instruction-tuning on perturbed instructions can, in some cases, improve downstream performance. These findings highlight the importance of including perturbed instructions in instruction-tuning, which can make LLMs more resilient to noisy user inputs.

technical paper

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

We present Large Temporal Model, a Large Language Model (LLM) that excels in Temporal Relation Classification (TRC). We show how a carefully designed fine-tuning strategy, using a novel two-step fine-tuning approach, can adapt LLMs for TRC. Our approach is focused on global TRC, enabling simultaneous classification of all temporal relations within a document. Unlike traditional pairwise methods, our approach performs global inference in a single step, improving both efficiency and consistency. Evaluations on the MATRES and OmniTemp benchmarks demonstrate that, for the first time, an LLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous pairwise and global TRC methods. Results show that our global approach produces more consistent and accurate temporal graphs. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our two-step fine-tuning strategy, while analyses reveal why our approach succeeds in increasing performance and reducing inconsistencies.

Large Temporal Models: Unlocking Temporal Understanding in LLMs for Temporal Relation Classification

As the adoption of large language models (LLMs) continues to grow, the risk of sensitive data leakage from their training datasets has become a critical concern. This study proposes a novel method for encrypting training data using a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. This approach prevents the model from learning sensitive information while allowing it to capture abstract linguistic patterns. We pre-trained a Llama 3 model (551M parameters) using approximately 7.5 billion tokens of encrypted data and subsequently conducted continual pre-training with another 2.5 billion tokens of plaintext data. The effectiveness of the model was evaluated by comparing its downstream task performance with a model trained solely on plaintext data. In addition, we evaluated the risk of sensitive data leakage through name reconstruction, true-prefix and data extraction attacks. These results demonstrate the potential of our approach to balance data security with model performance.

Crypto-LLM: Two-Stage Language Model Pre-training with Ciphered and Natural Language Data

Tokenization is the first step in training any Large Language Model (LLM), where the text is split into a sequence of tokens as per the model's fixed vocabulary. This tokenization in LLMs is different from the traditional tokenization in NLP where the text is split into a sequence of "natural" words. In LLMs, a natural word may also be broken into multiple tokens due to limited vocabulary size of the LLMs (e.g., Mistral's tokenizer splits "martial" into "mart" and "ial"). In this paper, we hypothesize that such breaking of natural words negatively impacts LLM performance on various NLP tasks. To quantify this effect, we propose a set of penalty functions that compute a tokenization penalty for a given text for a specific LLM, indicating how "bad" the tokenization is. We establish statistical significance of our hypothesis on multiple NLP tasks for a set of different LLMs.

Broken Words, Broken Performance: Effect of Tokenization on Performance of LLMs

Test-time scaling has emerged as an effective approach for improving language model performance by utilizing additional compute at inference time. Recent studies have shown that overriding end-of-thinking tokens (e.g., replacing "\</think>" with "Wait") can extend reasoning steps and improve accuracy. In this work, we explore whether a dedicated continue-thinking token can be learned to trigger extended reasoning. We augment distilled versions of DeepSeek-R1 with a single learned "<|continue-thinking|>" token, training only its embedding via reinforcement learning while keeping the model weights frozen. Our experiments show that this learned token achieves improved accuracy on standard math benchmarks compared to both the baseline model and a test-time scaling approach that uses a fixed token (e.g., "Wait") for budget forcing. In particular, we observe that in cases where the fixed-token approach enhances the base model's accuracy, our method achieves a markedly greater improvement. For example, on the GSM8K benchmark, the fixed-token approach yields a 1.3% absolute improvement in accuracy, whereas our learned-token method achieves a 4.2% improvement over the base model that does not use budget forcing.

Learning a Continue-Thinking Token for Enhanced Test-Time Scaling

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual capabilities, yet it remains unclear whether they are truly multicultural. Do they merely process different languages, or can they genuinely comprehend the unique cultural contexts embedded within them? This study investigates this critical question by examining whether LLM's perception of emotion and empathy differs across linguistic and cultural boundaries. To facilitate this, we introduce the Korean Empathetic Dialogues (KoED), a benchmark extending the English-based EmpatheticDialogues (ED) dataset. Moving beyond direct translation, we meticulously reconstructed dialogues specifically selected for their potential for cultural adaptation, aligning them with Korean emotional nuances and incorporating key cultural concepts like ‘jeong’ and ‘han’ that lack direct English equivalents. Our cross-cultural evaluation of leading multilingual LLMs reveals a significant "cultural empathy gap": models consistently underperform on KoED compared to ED, struggling especially with uniquely Korean emotional expressions. Notably, the Korean-centric model, EXAONE, exhibits significantly higher cultural appropriateness. This result provides compelling evidence that aligns with the "data provenance effect", suggesting that the cultural alignment of pre-training data is a critical factor for genuine empathetic communication. These findings demonstrate that current LLMs have cultural blind spots and underscore the necessity of benchmarks like KoED to move beyond simple linguistic fluency towards truly culturally adaptive AI systems.

Multilingual, Not Multicultural: Uncovering the Cultural Empathy Gap in LLMs through a Comparative Empathetic Dialogue Benchmark

In recent years, there has been growing interest in agents that collaborate with humans on creative tasks, and research has begun to explore such collaboration within Minecraft. However, most existing studies on agents in Minecraft focus on scenarios where an agent constructs objects independently on the basis of given instructions, making it difficult to achieve joint construction through dialogue-based cooperation with humans. Prior work, such as the Action-Utterance Model, used small-scale large language models (LLMs), which resulted in limited accuracy. In this study, we attempt to build an agent capable of collaborative construction using LLMs by integrating the framework of the Action-Utterance Model with that of Creative Agents, which leverages more recent and powerful LLMs for more accurate and flexible building. We had two agents conduct the Collaborative Garden Task through simulations and evaluate both the generated gardens and the dialogue content. Through this evaluation, we confirm that the agents are capable of producing gardens with a certain level of quality and can actively offer suggestions and assert their opinions. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis with human-human collaboration to identify current challenges faced by agents and to discuss future directions for improvement toward achieving more human-like cooperative behavior.

Investigating Feasibility of Large Language Model Agent Collaboration in Minecraft and Comparison with Human-Human Collaboration

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o offer the potential for enhancing AI-driven robotic interactions, but their effectiveness in mobile tour guidance remains unexplored. This study investigates the differences between human-operated and AI-driven guidance at an aquarium using Teleco, a teleoperated mobile robot, in a real-world field experiment. A total of 277 guidance sessions were collected under two modes: human-operated, where the operator controlled all dialogue, actions, and movement, and AI-driven, where GPT-4o generated responses while the operator only controlled the robot's actions and movement. Our results indicate that human-operated guidance places greater emphasis on visitor movement, spatial positioning during observation guidance, and empathetic expressions, whereas AI-driven guidance promotes conversational engagement by frequently prompting visitors to ask questions. In addition, we found that user behaviors, including users' gaze patterns and vocabulary richness, also serve as valuable indicators reflecting their overall experience during guidance interactions. Furthermore, empathetic expression is recognized as the key differentiating factor between the two guidance modes, significantly influencing users' overall experience.

A Comparative Study of Human-operated and AI-driven Guidance with a Teleoperated Mobile Robot

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate user opinions has received growing attention. Yet LLMs, especially trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), are known to exhibit biases toward dominant viewpoints, raising concerns about their ability to represent users from diverse demographic and cultural backgrounds. In this work, we examine the extent to which LLMs can simulate human responses to cross-domain survey questions and propose two LLM-based approaches: chain-of-thought (COT) prompting and Diverse Claims Generation (CLAIMSIM), which elicits viewpoints from LLM parametric knowledge as contextual input. Experiments on the survey question answering task indicate that, while CLAIMSIM produces more diverse responses, both approaches struggle to accurately simulate users. Further analysis reveals two key limitations: (1) LLMs tend to maintain fixed viewpoints across varying demographic features, and generate single-perspective claims; and (2) when presented with conflicting claims, LLMs struggle to reason over nuanced differences among demographic features, limiting their ability to adapt responses to specific user profiles.

An Analysis of Large Language Models for Simulating User Responses in Surveys

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly widely used as critical components of knowledge retrieval systems and agentic systems. These systems can benefit from knowledge-seeking capabilities of LLMs, in other words, curiosity. However, this capability has not been evaluated quantitatively. Towards bridging this gap, we propose an evaluation framework, CDQG (Curiosity-Driven Question Generation). The CDQG task prompts LLMs to generate questions about a statement introducing scientific knowledge, simulating a curious person when facing the statement for the first time. The CDQG dataset contains 1,988 statements including physics, chemistry, and mathematics with distinct levels of difficulty, general knowledge statements, and intentionally erroneous statements. We score the qualities of the questions generated by LLMs along multiple dimensions. These scores are validated by rigorous controlled ablation studies and human evaluations. While large models like GPT-4 and Mistral 8x7b can generate highly coherent and relevant questions, the smaller Phi-2 model is equally or more effective. This indicates that size does not solely determine a model’s knowledge acquisition potential. CDQG quantifies a critical model capability, and opens up research opportunities for developing future knowledge retrieval systems driven by LLMs.

What Would You Ask When You First Saw a2+b2=c2? Evaluating LLM on Curiosity-Driven Question Generation

Temporal Table Reasoning poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring effective reasoning to extract relevant insights. Despite existence of multiple prompting methods, their impact on table reasoning remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, model performance varies drastically across different table and context structures, making it difficult to determine an optimal approach. This work investigates multiple prompting technique on diverse table types to determine that performance depends on factors such as entity type, table structure, requirement of additional context and question complexity, with "NO" single method consistently outperforming others. To address this, we introduce SEAR, an adaptive prompting framework inspired by human reasoning that dynamically adjusts to context and integrates structured reasoning. SEAR_Unified, its cost-efficient variant. We also demonstrate that optional table refactoring (preprocessing) enhances both approaches when tables lack structural consistency. Our results demonstrate that SEAR prompts achieve superior performance across all table types compared to baseline prompting techniques

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Large Temporal Models: Unlocking Temporal Understanding in LLMs for Temporal Relation Classification

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