United States

There is a significant gap between patient needs and available mental health support today. In this paper, we aim to thoroughly examine the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist professional psychotherapy. To this end, we propose a new benchmark, CBT-Bench, for the systematic evaluation of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) assistance. We include three levels of tasks in CBT-Bench: **I: Basic CBT knowledge acquisition**, with the task of multiple-choice questions; **II: Cognitive model understanding**, with the tasks of cognitive distortion classification, primary core belief classification, and fine-grained core belief classification; **III: Therapeutic response generation**, with the task of generating responses to patient speech in CBT therapy sessions. These tasks encompass key aspects of CBT that could potentially be enhanced through AI assistance, while also outlining a hierarchy of capability requirements, ranging from basic knowledge recitation to engaging in real therapeutic conversations. We evaluated representative LLMs on our benchmark. Experimental results indicate that while LLMs perform well in reciting CBT knowledge, they fall short in complex real-world scenarios requiring deep analysis of patients&#39; cognitive structures and generating effective responses, suggesting potential future work.

NAACL 2025

CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapy

cognitive behavior therapy

mental health

large language models

There is a significant gap between patient needs and available mental health support today. In this paper, we aim to thoroughly examine the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist professional psychotherapy. To this end, we propose a new benchmark, CBT-Bench, for the systematic evaluation of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) assistance. We include three levels of tasks in CBT-Bench: **I: Basic CBT knowledge acquisition**, with the task of multiple-choice questions; **II: Cognitive model understanding**, with the tasks of cognitive distortion classification, primary core belief classification, and fine-grained core belief classification; **III: Therapeutic response generation**, with the task of generating responses to patient speech in CBT therapy sessions. These tasks encompass key aspects of CBT that could potentially be enhanced through AI assistance, while also outlining a hierarchy of capability requirements, ranging from basic knowledge recitation to engaging in real therapeutic conversations. We evaluated representative LLMs on our benchmark. Experimental results indicate that while LLMs perform well in reciting CBT knowledge, they fall short in complex real-world scenarios requiring deep analysis of patients' cognitive structures and generating effective responses, suggesting potential future work.

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)**

*- 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

Humans are accustomed to reading and writing in a forward manner, and this natural bias extends to text understanding in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). This paper investigates whether LLMs, like humans, struggle with reverse modeling, specifically with reversed text inputs. We found that publicly available pre-trained LLMs cannot understand such inputs. However, LLMs trained from scratch with both forward and reverse texts can understand them equally well during inference across multiple languages. Our case study shows that different-content texts result in different losses if input (to LLMs) in different directions---some get lower losses for forward while some for reverse. This leads us to a simple and nice solution for data selection based on the loss differences between forward and reverse directions. Using our selected data in continued pretraining can boost LLMs' performance by a large margin across different language understanding benchmarks.

Reverse Modeling in Large Language Models

Despite significant advancements, the practical deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is often hampered by their immense sizes, highlighting the need for effective compression techniques. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) emerges as a promising method for compressing LLMs. However, existing SVD-based compression approaches suffer from substantial truncation losses, leading to severe performance degradation in compressed models. In this work, we introduce \sysname, a novel SVD-based LLM compression method that optimizes singular value truncation in SVD compression with two key strategies. First, \sysname employs dynamic compression ratio allocation to effectively balance the extremely large truncation loss across different layers. Second, it implements loss-optimized weight truncation to ensure that the truncated singular values result in a lower and more stable truncation loss in practice. We evaluate \sysname on ten datasets and five models on various scales and demonstrated that \sysname outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/SVD-LLM}.

SVD-LLM V2: Optimizing Singular Value Truncation for Large Language Model Compression

Missing modality issues are common in real-world applications, arising from factors such as equipment failures and privacy concerns. When fine-tuning pre-trained models on downstream datasets with missing modalities, performance can degrade significantly. Current methods often aggregate various missing cases to train recovery modules or align multimodal features, resulting in suboptimal performance, high computational costs, and the risk of catastrophic forgetting in continual environments where data arrives sequentially. In this paper, we formulate the dynamic missing modality problem as a continual learning task and introduce the continual multimodal missing modality task. To address this challenge efficiently, we introduce three types of prompts: modality-specific, task-aware, and task-specific prompts. These prompts enable the model to learn intra-modality, inter-modality, intra-task, and inter-task features. Furthermore, we propose a contrastive task interaction strategy to explicitly learn prompts correlating different modalities. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets, where our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Efficient Prompting for Continual Adaptation to Missing Modalities

Emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced their application in autonomous vehicle (AV) research. Safe integration of LLMs into vehicles, however, necessitates their thorough understanding of dynamic traffic environments. Towards this end, this study introduces a framework leveraging LLMs' built-in extrapolation capabilities for vehicle trajectory prediction, thereby evaluating their comprehension of the evolution of traffic agents' behaviors and interactions over time. The framework employs a traffic encoder to extract spatial-level scene features from agents' observed trajectories to facilitate efficient scene representation. To focus on LLM's innate capabilities, scene features are then converted into LLM-compatible tokens through a reprogramming adapter and finally decoded into predicted trajectories with a linear decoder. Experimental results quantitatively demonstrate the framework's efficacy in enabling off-the-shelf, frozen LLMs to achieve competitive trajectory prediction performance, with qualitative analyses revealing their enhanced understanding of complex, multi-agent traffic scenarios.

Harnessing and Evaluating the Intrinsic Extrapolation Ability of Large Language Models for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction

Recent advanced frameworks in topic models have significantly enhanced the performance compared to conventional probabilistic approaches. Such models, mostly constructed from neural network architecture together with other advanced techniques such as contextual embedding, optimal transport distance and pre-trained language model, etc. have effectively improved the topic quality and document topic distribution. Despite the improvements, these methods lack considerations of effective optimization for complex objective functions that contain log-likelihood and additional regularization terms. In this study, we propose to apply an efficient optimization method to improve the generalization and performance of topic models. Our approach explicitly considers the sharpness of the loss landscape during optimization, which forces the optimizer to choose directions in the parameter space that lead to flatter minima, in which the models are typically more stable and robust to small perturbations in the data. Additionally, we propose an effective strategy to select the flatness region for parameter optimization by leveraging the optimal transport distance between doc-topic distributions and doc-cluster proportions, which can effectively enhance document representation. Experimental results on popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method effectively improves the performance of baseline topic models.

Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Topic Models with High-Quality Document Representations

The term Language Models (LMs) as a time-specific collection of models of interest is constantly reinvented, with its referents updated much like the *Ship of Theseus* replaces its parts but remains the same ship in essence. In this paper, we investigate this *Ship of Language Models* problem, wherein scientific evolution takes the form of continuous, implicit retrofits of key *existing* terms. We seek to initiate a novel perspective of scientific progress, in addition to the more well-studied emergence of *new* terms. To this end, we construct the data infrastructure based on recent NLP publications. Then, we perform a series of text-based analyses toward a detailed, quantitative understanding of the use of Language Models as a term of art. Our work highlights how systems and theories influence each other in scientific discourse, and we call for attention to the transformation of this Ship that we all are contributing to.

What We Talk About When We Talk About LMs: Implicit Paradigm Shifts and the Ship of Language Models

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) offers an efficient alternative to full-weight adaptation in federated fine-tuning of language models, significantly reducing computational costs. By adjusting ranks for each client, federated LoRA enables flexible resource allocation. However, we observe that heterogeneous ranks among clients lead to unstable performance. Our analysis attributes this instability to the conventional zero-padding aggregation strategy, which dilutes information from high-rank clients during model aggregation. To address this issue, we propose a replication-based padding strategy that better retains valuable information from clients with high-quality data. Empirically, this approach accelerates convergence and enhances the global model's predictive performance.

Towards Federated Low-Rank Adaptation of Language Models with Rank Heterogeneity

Previous research has revealed the potential of large language models (LLMs) to support cognitive reframing therapy; however, their focus was primarily on text-based methods, often overlooking the importance of non-verbal evidence crucial in real-life therapy. To alleviate this gap, we extend the textual cognitive reframing to multimodality, incorporating visual clues. Specifically, we present a new dataset called Multi Modal-Cognitive Support Conversation (M2CoSC), which pairs each GPT-4-generated dialogue with an image that reflects the virtual client's facial expressions. To better mirror real psychotherapy, where facial expressions lead to interpreting implicit emotional evidence, we propose a multi-hop psychotherapeutic reasoning approach that explicitly identifies and incorporates subtle evidence. Our comprehensive experiments with both LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate that the VLMs' performance as psychotherapists is significantly improved with the M2CoSC dataset. Furthermore, the multi-hop psychotherapeutic reasoning method enables VLMs to provide more thoughtful and empathetic suggestions, outperforming standard prompting methods.

Multimodal Cognitive Reframing Therapy via Multi-hop Psychotherapeutic Reasoning

Grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to correct grammatical, spelling, and semantic errors in natural language text. With the growing of large language models (LLMs), direct text generation has gradually become the focus of the GEC methods, and few-shot in-context learning presents a cost-effective solution. However, selecting effective in-context examples remains challenging, as the similarity between input texts does not necessarily correspond to similar grammatical error patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel retrieval method based on natural language grammatical error explanations (GEE) to address this issue. Our method retrieves suitable few-shot demonstrations by matching the GEE of the test input with that of pre-constructed database samples, where explanations for erroneous samples are generated by LLMs. We conducted multilingual GEC few-shot experiments on both major open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experiments across five languages show that our method outperforms existing semantic and BM25-based retrieval techniques, without requiring additional training or language adaptation. This also suggests that matching error patterns is key to selecting examples. Our code and the constructed database will be publicly available after the paper is published.

Explanation based In-Context Demonstrations Retrieval for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

Large language models (LLMs) frequently make errors when handling even simple numerical problems, such as comparing two small numbers. A natural hypothesis is that these errors stem from how LLMs represent numbers, and specifically, whether their representations of numbers capture their numeric values. We tackle this question from the observation that LLM errors on numerical tasks are often distributed across the digits of the answer rather than normally around its numeric value. Through a series of probing experiments and causal interventions, we show that LLMs internally represent numbers with individual circular representations per-digit in base 10. This digit-wise representation, as opposed to a value representation, sheds light on the error patterns of models on tasks involving numerical reasoning and could serve as a basis for future studies on analyzing numerical mechanisms in LLMs.

CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapy

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