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Commonsense reasoning deals with the implicit knowledge that is well understood by humans and typically acquired via interactions with the world. In recent times, commonsense reasoning and understanding of various LLMs have been evaluated using text-based tasks. In this work, we argue that a proxy of this understanding can be maintained as a graphical structure that can further help to perform a rigorous evaluation of commonsense reasoning abilities about various real-world
activities. We create an annotation scheme for capturing this implicit knowledge in the form of a graphical structure for 37 daily human activities. We find that the created resource can be used to frame an enormous number of commonsense queries (∼ 1017), facilitating rigorous evaluation of commonsense reasoning in LLMs. Moreover, recently, the remarkable performance of LLMs has raised questions about whether these models are truly capable of reasoning in the wild and, in
general, how reasoning occurs inside these models. In this resource paper, we bridge this gap by proposing design mechanisms that facilitate research in a similar direction. Our findings suggest that the reasoning components are localized in LLMs that play a vital role in decision making when prompted with a commonsense query.

NAACL 2025

Towards Quantifying Commonsense Reasoning with Mechanistic Insights

commonsense reasoning; evaluation; reasoning

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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.

technical paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, evaluating them remains a persistent challenge. Many recent evaluations use LLMs as judges to score outputs from other LLMs, often relying on a single large model like GPT-4o. However, using a single LLM judge is prone to intra-model bias, and many tasks – such as those related to emotional intelligence, creative writing, and persuasiveness – may be too subjective for a single model to judge fairly. We introduce the Language Model Council (LMC), where a group of LLMs collaborate to create tests, respond to them, and evaluate each other's responses to produce a ranking in a democratic fashion. Unlike previous approaches that focus on reducing cost or bias by using a panel of smaller models, our work examines the benefits and nuances of a fully inclusive LLM evaluation system. In a detailed case study on emotional intelligence, we deploy a council of 20 recent LLMs to rank each other on open-ended responses to interpersonal conflicts. Our results show that the LMC produces rankings that are more separable and more robust, and through a user study, we show that they are more consistent with human evaluations than any individual LLM judge. Using all LLMs for judging can be costly, however, so we use Monte Carlo simulations and hand-curated sub-councils to study hypothetical council compositions and discuss the value of the incremental LLM judge.

Language Model Council: Democratically Benchmarking Foundation Models on Highly Subjective Tasks

Watermarking has emerged as a prominent technique for LLM-generated content detection by embedding imperceptible patterns. Despite supreme performance, its robustness against adversarial attacks remains underexplored. Previous work typically considers a grey-box attack setting, where the specific type of watermark is already known. Some even necessitates knowledge about hyperparameters of the watermarking method. Such prerequisites are unattainable in real-world scenarios. Targeting at a more realistic black-box threat model with fewer assumptions, we here propose B4, a black-box scrubbing attack on watermarks. Specifically, we formulate the watermark scrubbing attack as a constrained optimization problem by capturing its objectives with two distributions, a Watermark Distribution and a Fidelity Distribution. This optimization problem can be approximately solved using two proxy distributions. Experimental results across 12 different settings demonstrate the superior performance of B4 compared with other baselines.

B4 : A Black-Box Scrubbing Attack on LLM Watermarks

Dead code introduces several challenges in software development, such as increased binary size and maintenance difficulties. It can also obscure logical errors and be exploited for obfuscation in malware. For LLM-based code-related tasks, dead code introduces vulnerabilities that can mislead these models, raising security concerns. Although modern compilers and IDEs offer dead code elimination, sophisticated patterns can bypass these tools. A universal approach that includes classification, location, explanation, and correction is needed, yet current tools often require significant manual effort. We present DCE-LLM, a framework for automated dead code elimination using a small CodeBERT model with an attribution-based line selector to efficiently locate suspect code. LLMs then generate judgments and explanations, fine-tuned on a large-scale, annotated dead code dataset to provide detailed explanations and patches. DCE-LLM outperforms existing tools, with advanced unreachability detection, automated correction, and support for multiple programming languages. Experimental results show DCE-LLM achieves over 94% F1 scores for unused and unreachable code, significantly surpassing GPT-4o by 30%.

DCE-LLM: Dead Code Elimination with Large Language Models

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a lack of corresponding results, both qualitative and quantitative, for the text domain. We aim to address this gap by training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on a synthetic testbed of formal languages. Specifically, we train SAEs on the hidden representations of models trained on formal languages (Dyck-2, Expr, and English PCFG) under a wide variety of hyperparameter settings, finding interpretable latents often emerge in the features learned by our SAEs. However, similar to vision, we find performance turns out to be highly sensitive to inductive biases of the training pipeline. Moreover, we show latents correlating to certain features of the input do not always induce a causal impact on model's computation. We thus argue that causality has to become a central target in SAE training: learning of causal features should be incentivized from the ground-up. Motivated by this, we propose and perform preliminary investigations for an approach that promotes learning of causally relevant features in our formal language setting.

Analyzing (In)Abilities of SAEs via Formal Languages

Explaining the decision-making process of machine learning models is crucial for ensuring their reliability and transparency for end users. One popular explanation form highlights key input features, such as i) tokens (e.g., Shapley Values and Integrated Gradients), ii) interactions between tokens (e.g., Bivariate Shapley and Attention-based methods), or iii) interactions between spans of the input (e.g., Louvain Span Interactions). However, these explanation types have only been studied in isolation, making it difficult to judge their respective applicability. To bridge this gap, we develop a unified framework that facilitates an automated and direct comparison between highlight and interactive explanations comprised of four diagnostic properties. We conduct an extensive analysis across these three types of input feature explanations -- each utilizing three different explanation techniques--across two datasets and two models, and reveal that each explanation has distinct strengths across the different diagnostic properties. Nevertheless, interactive span explanations outperform other types of input feature explanations across most diagnostic properties. Despite being relatively understudied, our analysis underscores the need for further research to improve methods generating these explanation types. Additionally, integrating them with other explanation types that perform better in certain characteristics could further enhance their overall effectiveness.

Evaluating Input Feature Explanations through a Unified Diagnostic Evaluation Framework

Deep learning-based expert models have reached superhuman performance in decision-making domains such as chess and Go. However, it is under-explored to explain or comment on given decisions although it is important for model explainability and human education. The outputs of expert models are accurate, but yet difficult to interpret for humans. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) can produce fluent commentary but are prone to hallucinations due to their limited decision-making capabilities. To bridge this gap between expert models and LLMs, we focus on chess commentary as a representative task of explaining complex decision-making processes through language and address both the generation and evaluation of commentary. We introduce Concept-guided Chess Commentary generation (CCC) for producing commentary and GPT-based Chess Commentary Evaluation (GCC-Eval) for assessing it. CCC integrates the decision-making strengths of expert models with the linguistic fluency of LLMs through prioritized, concept-based explanations. GCC-Eval leverages expert knowledge to evaluate chess commentary based on informativeness and linguistic quality. Experimental results, validated by both human judges and GCC-Eval, demonstrate that CCC generates commentary which is accurate, informative, and fluent.

Bridging the Gap between Expert and Language Models: Concept-guided Chess Commentary Generation and Evaluation

Despite recent advances in large language models, open-source models often struggle to consistently perform well on complex reasoning tasks. Existing ensemble methods, whether applied at the token or output levels, fail to address these challenges. In response, we present Language model Ensemble with Monte Carlo Tree Search (LE-MCTS), a novel framework for process-level ensembling of language models. LE-MCTS formulates step-by-step reasoning with an ensemble of language models as a Markov decision process. In this framework, states represent intermediate reasoning paths, while actions consist of generating the next reasoning step using one of the language models selected from a predefined pool. Guided by a process-based reward model, LE-MCTS performs a tree search over the reasoning steps generated by different language models, identifying the most accurate reasoning chain. Experimental results on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms both single language model decoding algorithms and language model ensemble methods. Notably, LE-MCTS improves performance by 3.6% and 4.3% on the MATH and MQA datasets, respectively, highlighting its effectiveness in solving complex reasoning problems.

Ensembling Large Language Models with Process Reward-Guided Tree Search for Better Complex Reasoning

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced code generation from natural language prompts. The HumanEval Benchmark, developed by OpenAI, remains the most widely used code generation benchmark. However, this and other Code LLM benchmarks face critical limitations, particularly in task diversity, test coverage, and linguistic scope. Current evaluations primarily focus on English-to-Python conversion tasks with limited test cases, potentially overestimating model performance. While recent works have addressed test coverage and programming language (PL) diversity, code generation from low-resource language prompts remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce mHumanEval, an extended benchmark supporting prompts in over 200 natural languages. We employ established machine translation methods to compile the benchmark, coupled with a quality assurance process. Furthermore, we provide expert human translations for 15 diverse natural languages (NLs). We conclude by analyzing the multilingual code generation capabilities of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Code LLMs, offering insights into the current landscape of cross-lingual code generation.

mHumanEval - A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Large Language Models for Code Generation

Multilingual LLMs have achieved remarkable benchmark performance, but we find they continue to underperform on non-Latin script languages across contemporary LLM families. This discrepancy arises from the fact that LLMs are pretrained with orthographic scripts, which are dominated by Latin characters that obscure their shared phonology with non-Latin scripts. We propose leveraging phonemic transcriptions as complementary signals to induce script-invariant representations. Our study demonstrates that integrating phonemic signals improves performance across both non-Latin and Latin languages, with a particularly significant impact on closing the performance gap between the two. Through detailed experiments, we show that phonemic and orthographic scripts retrieve distinct examples for in-context learning (ICL). This motivates our proposed Mixed-ICL retrieval strategy, where further aggregation leads to our significant performance improvements for both Latin script languages (up to 12.6%) and non-Latin script languages (up to 15.1%) compared to randomized ICL retrieval.

Prompting with Phonemes: Enhancing LLMs' Multilinguality for Non-Latin Script Languages

We introduce CompAct, a technique that reduces peak memory utilization on GPU by 25-30% for pretraining and 50% for fine-tuning of LLMs. Peak device memory is a major limiting factor in training LLMs, with various recent works aiming to reduce model memory. However most works don't target the largest component of allocated memory during training: the model's compute graph, which is stored for the backward pass. By storing low-rank, compressed activations to be used in the backward pass we greatly reduce the required memory, unlike previous methods which only reduce optimizer overheads or the number of trained parameters. Our compression uses random projection matrices, thus avoiding additional memory overheads. Comparisons with previous techniques for either pretraining or fine-tuning show that CompAct substantially improves existing compute-performance tradeoffs. We expect CompAct's savings to scale even higher for larger models.

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Language Model Council: Democratically Benchmarking Foundation Models on Highly Subjective Tasks

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