India

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced generative applications in natural language processing (NLP). Recent trends in model architectures revolve around efficient variants of transformers or state-space/gated-recurrent models (SSMs, GRMs). However, prevailing SSM/GRM-based methods often emulate only a single attention head, potentially limiting their expressiveness. In this work, we propose MossNet, a novel mixture-of-state-space-experts architecture that emulates a linear multi-head attention (MHA). MossNet leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) implementation not only in channel-mixing multi-layered perceptron (MLP) blocks but also in the time-mixing SSM kernels to realize multiple &quot;attention heads.&quot; Extensive experiments on language modeling and downstream evaluations show that MossNet outperforms both transformer- and SSM-based architectures of similar model size and data budgets. Larger variants of MossNet, trained on trillions of tokens, further confirm its scalability and superior performance. In addition, real-device profiling on a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and an Nvidia A100 GPU demonstrate favorable runtime speed and resource usage compared to similarly sized baselines. Our results suggest that MossNet is a compelling new direction for efficient, high-performing recurrent LLM architectures.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

MossNet: Mixture of State-Space Experts is a Multi-Head Attention

parameter-efficient-training

sparse models

pre-training

fine-tuning

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced generative applications in natural language processing (NLP). Recent trends in model architectures revolve around efficient variants of transformers or state-space/gated-recurrent models (SSMs, GRMs). However, prevailing SSM/GRM-based methods often emulate only a single attention head, potentially limiting their expressiveness. In this work, we propose MossNet, a novel mixture-of-state-space-experts architecture that emulates a linear multi-head attention (MHA). MossNet leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) implementation not only in channel-mixing multi-layered perceptron (MLP) blocks but also in the time-mixing SSM kernels to realize multiple "attention heads." Extensive experiments on language modeling and downstream evaluations show that MossNet outperforms both transformer- and SSM-based architectures of similar model size and data budgets. Larger variants of MossNet, trained on trillions of tokens, further confirm its scalability and superior performance. In addition, real-device profiling on a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and an Nvidia A100 GPU demonstrate favorable runtime speed and resource usage compared to similarly sized baselines. Our results suggest that MossNet is a compelling new direction for efficient, high-performing recurrent LLM architectures.

poster

### 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.

The success of Transformer language models is widely credited to their dot-product attention mechanism, which interweaves a set of key design principles: mixing information across positions (enabling multi-token interactions), sequence-dependent activations (where attention weights adapt to each input), a specific mathematical form (dot-product similarities plus softmax weighting), and coupling of queries and keys to evolving hidden states (grounding attention in the current layer). However, the necessity of each of these principles remains largely untested. In this work, we systematically deconstruct attention by designing controlled variants that selectively relax these principles, applied both uniformly across all layers and in hybrid architectures where only some layers retain standard attention. Our empirical analysis reveals that mechanisms for mixing tokens are indispensable, as their absence collapses models to near-random behavior, while the exact mathematical form and sequence dependency can be substantially relaxed, especially when preserved in just a subset of layers. Surprisingly, even variants that fail in isolation can achieve robust performance when interleaved with standard attention, highlighting a cooperative effect. These findings deepen our understanding of what truly underpins attention's effectiveness and open new avenues for simplifying language models without sacrificing performance.

Deconstructing Attention: Investigating Design Principles for Effective Language Modeling

Generating rational and generally accurate responses to tasks, often accompanied by example demonstrations, highlights Large Language Model's (LLM's) remarkable In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities without requiring updates to the model's parameter space. Despite having an ongoing exploration focused on the inference from a document-level concept, its behavior in learning well-defined functions or relations in context needs a careful investigation. In this article, we present the performance of ICL on partially ordered relation by introducing the notion of inductively increasing complexity in prompts. In most cases, the saturated performance of the chosen metric indicates that while ICL offers some benefits, its effectiveness remains constrained as we increase the complexity in the prompts even in presence of sufficient demonstrative examples. The behavior is evident from our empirical findings and has further been theoretically justified in term of its implicit optimization process.

The code is available \href{https://github.com/DDuttaGit/ICLonPartialOrder}{here}.

Assessing the Limits of In-Context Learning beyond Functions using Partially Ordered Relation

Although behavioral studies have documented numerical reasoning errors in large language models (LLMs), the underlying representational mechanisms remain unclear. We hypothesize that numerical attributes occupy shared latent subspaces and investigate two questions: (1) How do LLMs internally integrate multiple numerical attributes of a single entity? (2) How does irrelevant numerical context perturb these representations and their downstream outputs? To address these questions, we combine linear probing with partial correlation analysis and prompt-based vulnerability tests across models of varying sizes. Our results show that LLMs encode real-world numerical correlations but tend to systematically amplify them. Moreover, irrelevant context induces consistent shifts in magnitude representations, with downstream effects that vary by model size. These findings reveal a vulnerability in LLM decision-making and lay the groundwork for fairer, representation-aware control under multi-attribute entanglement.

Interpreting Multi-Attribute Confounding through Numerical Attributes in Large Language Models

Vision-language Models (VLMs) have made significant strides in visual understanding and query response generation, but often face challenges of high computational cost and inference latency due to autoregressive decoding. In this work, we introduce an imitation-learning-based Self-Speculative Decoding (SSD) framework, named FastVLM, to address these limitations. Our approach employs a lightweight draft model for token generation in an autoregressive manner, while a full model verifies these tokens non-autoregressively. Accepted tokens proceed seamlessly, while rejected tokens are corrected by the full model and used to guide the draft model’s refinement. Through an imitation network, FastVLM enhances the draft model by integrating deeper-level insights from the full model's architecture. Also, it maintains the performance integrity of the full model while training the draft model, achieving a balance between efficiency and accuracy. Our method speeds up the inference process by $1.55-1.85\times$ as compared to the final layer with minimal loss in performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/Div290/SSD.

FastVLM: Self-Speculative Decoding for Fast Vision-Language Model Inference

In the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), ``spurious correctness''---where answers are correct but reasoning contains errors---poses a critical risk by creating an illusion of reliability. While prior work on LLM confidence estimation focuses on answer-level or entire reasoning path confidence, these coarse-grained approaches fail to identify which specific parts of the reasoning contain errors. We propose a fine-grained confidence estimation framework that computes confidence scores for individual evidence triplets within reasoning chains, enabling precise localization of errors. Using carefully designed prompts, we generate answers, evidence in triplet format, and their respective confidence scores simultaneously, allowing automatic detection of spurious correctness patterns where partial evidence contains factual errors. Evaluated on both Japanese and English multi-hop QA benchmarks across multiple models from three model families representing different architectures and training approaches, we show that our approach exhibits superior calibration performance for evidence confidence and demonstrates effective ability to detect spurious correct answers (up to 0.84 on our primary discrimination metric). The consistent improvements across languages demonstrate the generalizability of our method. As a secondary benefit, joint generation of confidence scores improves answer confidence calibration by up to 43\%. This prompt-based approach requires no model retraining and is immediately applicable to existing LLMs.

Fine-grained Confidence Estimation for Spurious Correctness Detection in Large Language Models

Multilingual generation with large language models (LLMs) is often of poor quality for mid- to low-resource languages, but the causes for this are not well-understood. We first demonstrate the existence of an implicit task-solving→translation pipeline for generation, whereby the model first solves the required task in a largely target-language-agnostic manner, and subsequently translates answer concepts into the intended target language. We hypothesize that the failure of the translation stage, despite task-solving success, is an important culprit for the observed low quality of final outputs, and formalize this as the translation barrier hypothesis. We quantify the extent to which either stage in the pipeline is responsible for final failure for a word translation task across 108 language pairs, and find that the translation barrier explains a dominant portion of error for a majority of language pairs, and is especially severe for low-resource target languages. Our results highlight an important bottleneck for end-to-end multilingual generation, relevant for future work seeking to improve multilinguality in LLMs.

The Translation Barrier Hypothesis: Multilingual Generation with Large Language Models Suffers from Implicit Translation Failure

Pruning techniques have been studied to construct small models for efficiency, yet the effect of cross-lingual, which shows language performance transferability, is understudied in this field. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual effects in multilingual large language model compression using iterative pruning and recovery. We employ structured layer pruning with LoRA-based recovery and knowledge distillation, testing whether calibration languages different from target evaluation languages can preserve multilingual performance. Experiments on Qwen2.5-7B and Llama3.1-8B demonstrate that any recovery language consistently outperforms no-recovery baselines, with even low-resource languages like Swahili providing ~5% improvements. In contrast to expectations, dominant pretraining languages do not always yield the best results, where Indonesian achieves the highest performance in Llama3.1-8B, while Japanese performs the best in Qwen2.5-7B. Our findings reveal that cross-lingual calibration effectively maintains multilingual capabilities in the iterative pruning.

Multilingual Iterative Model Pruning: What Matters?

Mining parallel document pairs for document-level machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to the limitations of existing Cross-Lingual Document Alignment (CLDA) techniques. Existing methods often rely on metadata such as URLs, which are scarce, or on pooled document representations that fail to capture fine-grained alignment cues. Moreover, the limited context window of sentence embedding models hinders their ability to represent document-level context, while sentence-based alignment introduces a combinatorially large search space, leading to high computational cost. To address these challenges for Indic languages, we introduce Pralekha, a benchmark containing over 3 million aligned document pairs across 11 Indic languages and English, which includes 1.5 million English–Indic pairs. Furthermore, we propose Document Alignment Coefficient (DAC), a novel metric for fine-grained document alignment. Unlike pooling-based methods, DAC aligns documents by matching smaller chunks and computes similarity as the ratio of aligned chunks to the average number of chunks in a pair. Intrinsic evaluation shows that our chunk-based method is 2–3× faster while maintaining competitive performance, and that DAC achieves substantial gains over pooling-based baselines. Extrinsic evaluation further demonstrates that document-level MT models trained on DAC-aligned pairs consistently outperform those using baseline alignment methods. These results highlight DAC’s effectiveness for parallel document mining. The dataset and evaluation framework are publicly available to support further research.

PRALEKHA: Cross-Lingual Document Alignment for Indic Languages

We explore whether synthetic datasets generated by large language models using a few high quality seed samples are useful for low-resource named entity recognition, considering 11 languages from three language families. Our results suggest that synthetic data created with such seed data is a reasonable choice when there is no available labeled data, and is better than using entirely automatically labeled data. However, a small amount of high-quality data, coupled with cross-lingual transfer from a related language, always offers better performance. Data and code available at: https://github.com/grvkamath/low-resource-syn-ner.

Does Synthetic Data Help Named Entity Recognition for Low-Resource Languages?

Language model architectures are predominately first created for English and afterwards applied to other languages. This can lead to problems for languages that are structurally different from English. We study one specific architectural choice: positional encodings. We do this through the lens of the trade-off hypothesis: the supposed interplay between morphological complexity and word order flexibility. This hypothesis states there exists a trade-off between the two: a more morphologically complex language can have a more flexible word order, and vice-versa. Positional encodings are a direct target to investigate the implications of this hypothesis in relation to language modelling. We pre-train and evaluate three monolingual model variants with absolute, relative and no position encodings for seven typologically diverse languages and evaluate on four downstream tasks. We fail to find a consistent trend with various proxies for morphological complexity and word order flexibility. Our work shows choice of tasks, languages, and metrics are essential for drawing stable conclusions.

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