India

Session-based recommendation systems have attracted growing interest for their ability to provide personalized recommendations based on users&#39; in-session behaviors. While ID-based methods have shown strong performance, they often struggle with long-tail items and overlook valuable textual information. To incorporate text information, various approaches have been proposed, generally employing a naive fusion framework. Interestingly, this approach often fails to outperform the best single-modality baseline. Further exploration indicates a potential imbalance issue in the naive fusion method, where the ID tends to dominate the training and the text is undertrained. This issue indicates that the naive fusion method might not be as effective in combining ID and text as once believed. To address this, we propose AlterRec, an alternative training framework that separates the optimization of ID and text to avoid the imbalance issue. AlterRec also designs an effective strategy to enhance the interaction between the two modalities, facilitating mutual interaction and more effective text integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AlterRec in session-based recommendation.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Enhancing ID and Text Fusion via Alternative Training in Session-based Recommendation

text information

id-based model

session-based recommendation

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Session-based recommendation systems have attracted growing interest for their ability to provide personalized recommendations based on users' in-session behaviors. While ID-based methods have shown strong performance, they often struggle with long-tail items and overlook valuable textual information. To incorporate text information, various approaches have been proposed, generally employing a naive fusion framework. Interestingly, this approach often fails to outperform the best single-modality baseline. Further exploration indicates a potential imbalance issue in the naive fusion method, where the ID tends to dominate the training and the text is undertrained. This issue indicates that the naive fusion method might not be as effective in combining ID and text as once believed. To address this, we propose AlterRec, an alternative training framework that separates the optimization of ID and text to avoid the imbalance issue. AlterRec also designs an effective strategy to enhance the interaction between the two modalities, facilitating mutual interaction and more effective text integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AlterRec in session-based recommendation.

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
<br>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.<br>
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025*<br>
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).
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The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated efficacy in various linguistic applications, including question answering and controlled text generation. However, studies into their ability to switch between opposite styles of responses in professional domains remain underexplored. This study introduces a novel approach, named ProSwitch, which enables a language model to switch between professional and non-professional answers, by tuning and evaluating through the guidance of domain and style knowledge. ProSwitch unfolds in three phases: LLM-augmented preparation to collect domain knowledge and QA pairs, instruction tuning to optimize LLMs with multiple levels of knowledge, and comprehensive evaluation to assess both style discrimination and reference-based quality of the generated text. Comparative analysis of ProSwitch against general and specialized LLMs reveals that our approach outperforms baselines in switching between professional and non-professional responses.

ProSwitch: Knowledge-Guided Instruction Tuning to Switch Between Professional and Non-Professional Responses

Multi-hop Question Generation (QG) effectively evaluates reasoning but remains confined to text; Video Question Generation (VideoQG) is limited to zero-hop questions over single segments. To address this, we introduce VideoChain, a novel Multi-hop Video Question Generation (MVQG) framework designed to generate questions that require reasoning across multiple, temporally separated video segments. VideoChain features a modular architecture built on a modified BART backbone enhanced with video embeddings, capturing textual and visual dependencies. Using the TVQA+ dataset, we automatically construct the large-scale MVQ-60 dataset by merging zero-hop QA pairs, ensuring scalability and diversity. Evaluations show VideoChain's strong performance across standard generation metrics: ROUGE-L (0.6454), ROUGE-1 (0.6854), BLEU-1 (0.6711), BERTScore-F1 (0.7967), and semantic similarity (0.8110). These results highlight the model’s ability to generate coherent, contextually grounded, and reasoning-intensive questions. To facilitate future research, we publicly release our code and dataset.

VideoChain: A Transformer-Based Framework for Multi-hop Video Question Generation

State‐of‐the‐art Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high pass@1 on general benchmarks like HumanEval (Chen et al., 2021) but underperform on specialized suites such as ParEval (Nichols et al., 2024). Is this due to LLMs missing domain knowledge or insufficient prompt detail is given? To answer this, we introduce PartialOrderEval, which augments any code generation benchmark with a partial order of prompts from minimal to maximally detailed. Applying it to HumanEval and both serial and OpenMP subsets of ParEval, we measure how pass@1 scales with prompt specificity. Our experiments with Llama‐3.x and Qwen2.5‐Coder demonstrate varying degrees of prompt sensitivity across different tasks, and a qualitative analysis highlights explicit I/O specifications, edge‐case handling, and stepwise breakdowns as the key drivers of prompt detail improvement.

More Than a Score: Probing the Impact of Prompt Specificity on LLM Code Generation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved mathematical problem-solving. Among various techniques, paraphrasing problem statements has emerged as a promising strategy to enhance model understanding and accuracy.

We define twelve paraphrasing types grounded in mathematics education theory and analyze their impact on LLM performance across different configurations. To automate selection, we propose a Paraphrase Type Selector that predicts effective paraphrases for each problem.

Experiments on MATH-500, SVAMP, and AIME shows consistent performance gain from paraphrased problems. On MATH-500 with LLaMA 3.1-8B, combining the original with the best five paraphrased problems improves accuracy by +8.4%, with the selector achieving an additional +1.33% gain.

An Analysis of the Impact of Problem Paraphrasing on LLM-Based Mathematical Problem Solving

Causal probing aims to analyze foundation models by examining how intervening on their representation of various latent properties impacts their outputs. Recent works have cast doubt on the theoretical basis of several leading causal probing methods, but it has been unclear how to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of these methods in practice. To address this, we define two key causal probing desiderata: *completeness* (how thoroughly the representation of the target property has been transformed) and *selectivity* (how little non-targeted properties have been impacted). We find that there is an inherent tradeoff between the two, which we define as *reliability*, their harmonic mean. We introduce an empirical analysis framework to measure and evaluate these quantities, allowing us to make the first direct comparisons between different families of leading causal probing methods (e.g., linear vs. nonlinear, or concept removal vs. counterfactual interventions). We find that: (1) all methods show a clear tradeoff between completeness and selectivity; (2) more complete and reliable methods have a greater impact on LLM behavior; and (3) nonlinear interventions are almost always more reliable than linear interventions.

Our project webpage is available at: [https://ahdavies6.github.io/causal_probing_reliability/](https://ahdavies6.github.io/causal_probing_reliability/)

How Reliable are Causal Probing Interventions?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are able to improve their responses when instructed to do so, a capability known as self-correction. When instructions provide only a general and abstract goal without specific details about potential issues in the response, LLMs must rely on their internal knowledge to improve response quality, a process referred to as intrinsic self-correction. The empirical success of intrinsic self-correction is evident in various applications, but how and why it is effective remains unknown. Focusing on moral self-correction in LLMs, we reveal a key characteristic of intrinsic self-correction: performance convergence through multi-round interactions; and provide a mechanistic analysis of this convergence behavior. Based on our experimental results and analysis, we uncover the underlying mechanism of convergence: consistently injected self-correction instructions activate moral concepts that reduce model uncertainty, leading to converged performance as the activated moral concepts stabilize over successive rounds. This paper demonstrates the strong potential of moral self-correction by showing that it exhibits a desirable property of converged performance.

On the Convergence of Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models

Unstructured Knowledge Editing (UKE) is crucial for updating the relevant knowledge of large language models (LLMs). It focuses on unstructured inputs, such as long or free-form texts, which are common forms of real-world knowledge. Although previous studies have proposed effective methods and tested them, some issues exist: (1) Lack of Locality evaluation for UKE, and (2) Abnormal failure of fine-tuning (FT) based methods for UKE.
To address these issues, we first construct two datasets, UnKEBench-Loc and AKEW-Loc (CF), by extending two existing UKE datasets with locality test data from the unstructured and structured views. This enables a systematic evaluation of the Locality of post-edited models. 
Furthermore, we identify four factors that may affect the performance of FT-based methods. Based on these factors, we conduct experiments to determine how the well-performing FT-based methods should be trained for the UKE task, providing a training recipe for future research. Our experimental results indicate that the FT-based method with the optimal setting (FT-UKE) is surprisingly strong, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA).
In batch editing scenarios, FT-UKE shows strong performance as well, with its advantage over SOTA methods increasing as the batch size grows, expanding the average metric lead from +6.78\% to +10.80\%. Our code and data will be released on Github.

Is Fine-Tuning an Effective Solution? Reassessing Knowledge Editing for Unstructured Data

Transformer-based models primarily rely on Next Token Prediction (NTP), which predicts the next token in a sequence based on the preceding context. However, NTP’s focus on single-token prediction often limits a model’s ability to plan ahead or maintain long-range coherence, raising questions about how well LLMs can predict longer contexts, such as full sentences within structured documents. While NTP encourages local fluency, it provides no explicit incentive to ensure global coherence across sentence boundaries—an essential skill for reconstructive or discursive tasks. To investigate this, we evaluate three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash) on Masked Sentence Prediction (MSP) — the task of infilling a randomly removed sentence — from three domains: ROCStories (narrative), Recipe1M (procedural), and Wikipedia (expository). We assess both fidelity (similarity to the original sentence) and cohesiveness (fit within the surrounding context). Our key finding reveals that commercial LLMs, despite their superlative performance in other tasks, are poor at predicting masked sentences in low-structured domains, highlighting a gap in current model capabilities.

What am I missing here?: Evaluating Large Language Models for Masked Sentence Prediction

Quantization offers a practical solution to deploy LLMs in resource-constraint environments. However, its impact on internal representations remains understudied, raising questions about the reliability of quantized models. In this study, we employ a range of interpretability techniques to investigate how quantization affects model and neuron behavior. We analyze multiple LLMs under 4-bit and 8-bit quantization. Our findings reveal that the impact of quantization on model calibration is generally minor. Analysis of neuron activations indicates that the number of dead neurons, i.e., those with activation values close to 0 across the dataset, remains consistent regardless of quantization. In terms of neuron contribution to predictions, we observe that smaller full precision models exhibit fewer salient neurons, whereas larger models tend to have more, with the exception of Llama-2-7B. The effect of quantization on neuron redundancy varies across models. Overall, our findings suggest that effect of quantization may vary by model and tasks, however, we did not observe any drastic change which may discourage the use of quantization as a reliable model compression technique.

Interpreting the Effects of Quantization on LLMs

Understanding the latent space geometry of large language models (LLMs) is key to interpreting their behavior and improving alignment. Yet it remains unclear to what extent LLMs linearly organize representations related to semantic understanding. To explore this, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of hidden representations in 11 autoregressive models across six scientific topics. We find that high-level semantic information consistently resides in low-dimensional subspaces that form linearly separable representations across domains. This separability becomes more pronounced in deeper layers and under prompts that elicit structured reasoning or alignment behavior—even when surface content remains unchanged. These findings motivate geometry-aware tools that operate directly in latent space to detect and mitigate harmful and adversarial content. As a proof of concept, we train an MLP probe on final-layer hidden states as a lightweight latent-space guardrail. This approach substantially improves refusal rates on malicious queries and prompt injections that bypass both the model's built-in safety alignment and external token-level filters.

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2025

ProSwitch: Knowledge-Guided Instruction Tuning to Switch Between Professional and Non-Professional Responses

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