United States

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of fine-tuning them with RL in a specific environment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to analyze the sensitivity of LLMs to prompt formulations following RL training in a textual environment. Our findings reveal that the performance of LLMs degrades when faced with prompt formulations different from those used during the RL training phase. Besides, we analyze the source of this sensitivity by examining the model&#39;s internal representations and salient tokens. Finally, we propose to use a contrastive loss to mitigate this sensitivity and improve the robustness and generalization capabilities of LLMs.

NAACL 2025

Reinforcement Learning for Aligning Large Language Models Agents with Interactive Environments: Quantifying and Mitigating Prompt Overfitting

sequential decision making

agents

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of fine-tuning them with RL in a specific environment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to analyze the sensitivity of LLMs to prompt formulations following RL training in a textual environment. Our findings reveal that the performance of LLMs degrades when faced with prompt formulations different from those used during the RL training phase. Besides, we analyze the source of this sensitivity by examining the model's internal representations and salient tokens. Finally, we propose to use a contrastive loss to mitigate this sensitivity and improve the robustness and generalization capabilities of LLMs.

poster

### 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. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Question Under Discussion (QUD), which is originally a linguistic analytic framework, gains increasing attention in the community of natural language processing over the years. Various models have been proposed for implementing QUD for discourse processing. This survey summarizes these models, with a focus on application to written texts, and examines studies that explore the relationship between QUD and mainstream discourse frameworks, including RST, PDTB and SDRT. Some questions that may require further study are suggested.

A Survey of QUD Models for Discourse Processing

Superlatives are used to single out elements with a maximal/minimal property. Semantically, superlatives perform a set comparison: something (or some things) has the min/max property out of a set. As such, superlatives provide an ideal phenomenon for studying implicit phenomena and discourse restrictions. While this comparison set is often not explicitly defined, its (implicit) restrictions can be inferred from the discourse context the expression appears in. In this work we provide an extensive computational study on the semantics of superlatives. We propose a unified account of superlative semantics which allows us to derive a broad-coverage annotation schema. Using this unified schema we annotated a multi-domain dataset of superlatives and their semantic interpretations. We specifically focus on interpreting implicit or ambiguous superlative expressions, by analyzing how the discourse context restricts the set of interpretations. In a set of experiments we then analyze how well models perform at variations of predicting superlative semantics, with and without context. We show that the fine-grained semantics of superlatives in context can be challenging for contemporary models, including GPT-4.

Superlatives in Context: Modeling the Implicit Semantics of Superlatives

Coherence is an essential property of well-written texts, that refers to the way textual units relate to one another. In the era of generative AI, coherence assessment is essential for many NLP tasks such as summarization, long-form question-answering, and more. Current NLP approaches for modeling coherence often rely on a proxy task, specifically, {*sentence reordering}. However, such an approach may not capture the full range of factors contributing to coherence. To remedy this, in this work we employ the formal linguistic definition by [Reinhart:1980] of what makes a discourse coherent, consisting of three conditions, {*cohesion, consistency} and {*relevance}, and formalize these conditions as respective computational tasks, which are in turn jointly trained. We evaluate this modeling approach on two human-rated coherence benchmarks: one of automatically-generated stories and one of real-world texts. Our experiments show that jointly training on the proposed tasks leads to better performance on each task compared with task-specific models, and to better performance on assessing coherence overall. Our proposed computational framework thus paves the way for a more advanced, broad-coverage coherence assessment.

A Novel Computational Modeling Foundation for Automatic Coherence Assessment

Health-related misinformation claims often falsely cite a credible biomedical publication as evidence. These publications only superficially seem to support the false claim, when logical fallacies are applied. In this work, we aim to detect and to highlight such fallacies, which requires assessing the exact content of the misrepresented publications. To achieve this, we introduce MissciPlus, an extension of the fallacy detection dataset Missci. MissciPlus extends Missci by grounding the applied fallacies in real-world passages from misrepresented studies. This creates a realistic test-bed for detecting and verbalizing fallacies under real-world input conditions, and enables new and realistic passage-retrieval tasks. MissciPlus is the first logical fallacy dataset which pairs the real-world misrepresented evidence with incorrect claims, identical to the input to evidence-based fact-checking models. With MissciPlus, we i) benchmark retrieval models in identifying passages that support claims only with fallacious reasoning, ii) evaluate how well LLMs verbalize fallacious reasoning based on misrepresented scientific passages, and iii) assess the effectiveness of fact-checking models in refuting claims that misrepresent biomedical research. Our findings show that current fact-checking models struggle to use misrepresented scientific passages to refute misinformation. Moreover, these passages can mislead LLMs into accepting false claims as true.

Grounding Fallacies Misrepresenting Scientific Publications in Evidence

The NLP community has broadly focused on text-only approaches of cognitive state tasks, but audio can provide vital missing cues through prosody. We posit that text-to-speech models learn to track aspects of cognitive state in order to produce naturalistic audio, and that the signal audio models implicitly identify is orthogonal to the information that language models exploit. We present Synthetic Audio Data fine-tuning (SAD), a framework where we show that 7 tasks related to cognitive state modeling benefit from multimodal training on both text and zero-shot synthetic audio data from an off-the-shelf TTS system. We show an improvement over the text-only modality when adding synthetic audio data to text-only corpora. Furthermore, on tasks and corpora that do contain gold audio, we show our SAD framework achieves competitive performance with text and synthetic audio compared to text and gold audio.

Synthetic Audio Helps for Cognitive State Tasks

Argument mining (AM) focuses on analyzing argumentative structures such as Argument Components (ACs) and Argumentative Relations (ARs). Modeling dependencies between ACs and ARs is challenging due to the complex interactions between ACs. Existing approaches often overlook crucial conceptual links, such as key phrases that connect two related ACs, and tend to rely on cartesian product methods to model these dependencies, which can result in class imbalances. To extract key phrases from the AM benchmarks, we employ a prompt-based strategy utilizing an open-source Large Language Model (LLM). Building on this, we propose a unified text-to-text generation framework that leverages Augmented Natural Language (ANL) formatting and integrates the extracted key phrases inside the ANL itself to efficiently solve multiple AM tasks in a joint formulation. Our method sets new State-of-the-Art (SoTA) on three structurally distinct standard AM benchmarks, surpassing baselines by up to 9.5% F1 score, demonstrating its strong potential.

On the Role of Key Phrases in Argument Mining

The widespread use of social media has led to a surge in popularity for automated methods of analyzing public opinion. Supervised methods are adept at text categorization, yet the dynamic nature of social media discussions poses a continual challenge for these techniques due to the constant shifting of the focus. On the other hand, traditional unsupervised methods for extracting themes from public discourse, such as topic modeling, often reveal overarching patterns that might not capture specific nuances. Consequently, a significant portion of research into social media discourse still depends on labor-intensive manual coding techniques and a human-in-the-loop approach, which are both time-consuming and costly. In this work, we study the problem of discovering arguments associated with a specific theme. We propose a generic **LLMs-in-the-Loop** strategy that leverages the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract latent arguments from social media messaging. To demonstrate our approach, we apply our framework to contentious topics. We use two publicly available datasets: (1) the climate campaigns dataset of 14k Facebook ads with 25 themes and (2) the COVID-19 vaccine campaigns dataset of 9k Facebook ads with 14 themes. Additionally, we design a downstream task as stance prediction by leveraging talking points in climate debates. Furthermore, we analyze demographic targeting and the adaptation of messaging based on real-world events.

Uncovering Latent Arguments in Social Media Messaging by Employing LLMs-in-the-Loop Strategy

As large language models (LLMs) scale, improving their efficiency and adaptability
across tasks becomes increasingly critical. The Mixture-of-Adapter (MoA) framework
offers a promising solution by training a small pool of lightweight adapters at each layer and selecting the most suitable ones for each input, merging their outputs with the original layer’s. However, existing MoA approaches do not allow sharing adapters across different layers, leading to unnecessary redundancy and poor generalization of trained adapters. To tackle these challenges, we propose “Sparser MoA (SMOA)”, which trains a unified adapter pool shared across layers, introducing a much sparser routing choice of experts per layer. Enforcing such sparsity improves the Cross-Layer Generalization (CLAG) capability and specialization of each adapter, thereby enhancing SMOA’s adaptation to different tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple base LLMs show SMOA reduces active adapters by over 85% while significantly boosting task accuracy, paving the way for developing more efficient, generalizable, and modular LLMs.

Sparser Mixture-of-Adapters with Cross-Layer Generalization

In text classification tasks, models often rely on spurious correlations for predictions, incorrectly associating irrelevant features with the target labels. This issue limits the robustness and generalization of models, especially when faced with out-of-distribution data where such spurious correlations no longer hold. To address this challenge, we propose the Causally Calibrated Robust Classifier (CCR), which aims to reduce models' reliance on spurious correlations and improve model robustness. Our approach integrates a causal feature selection method based on counterfactual reasoning, along with an unbiased inverse propensity weighting (IPW) loss function. By focusing on selecting causal features, we ensure that the model relies less on spurious features during prediction. We theoretically justify our approach and empirically show that CCR achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without group labels, and in some cases, it can compete with the models that utilize group labels. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/yuqing-zhou/Causal-Learning-For-Robust-Classifier.

Fighting Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via a Causal Learning Perspective

Current structured pruning approaches for large language models typically involve two steps: (1) compression using calibration data and (2) costly continued pretraining on billions of tokens to recover lost performance. This second step is necessary as the first significantly impacts model accuracy. Moreover, prior research suggests that pretrained Transformer weights are not necessarily low-rank, unlike their activations, making one-shot structured pruning challenging. Based on this observation, we propose Lillama, a compression method that locally distills activations with low-rank weights. Using SVD for initialization and a joint loss combining teacher and student activations, we accelerate convergence and reduce memory use with local gradient updates. Lillama compresses Mixtral-8x7B within minutes on a single A100 GPU, removing 10 billion parameters while retaining over 95% of its original performance. Phi-2 3B can be compressed by 40% with just 13 million calibration tokens, resulting in a small model that competes with recent models of similar size. The method generalizes well to non-transformer architectures, compressing Mamba-3B by 20% while maintaining 99% performance.

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