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Systematic generalization remains challenging for current language models, which are known to be both sensitive to semantically similar permutations of the input and to struggle with known concepts presented in novel contexts. Although benchmarks exist for assessing compositional behavior, it is unclear how to measure the difficulty of a systematic generalization problem. In this work, we show how one aspect of systematic generalization can be described by the entropy of the distribution of component parts in the training data. We formalize a framework for measuring entropy in a sequence-to-sequence task and find that the performance of popular model architectures scales with the entropy. Our work connects systematic generalization to information efficiency, and our results indicate that success at high entropy can be achieved even without built-in priors, and that success at low entropy can serve as a target for assessing progress towards robust systematic generalization.

ACL 2025

Systematic Generalization in Language Models Scales with Information Entropy

systematicity

compositionality

generalization

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

In psycholinguistic modeling, surprisal from larger pre-trained language models has been shown to be a poorer predictor of naturalistic human reading times. However, it has been speculated that this may be due to data leakage that caused language models to see the text stimuli during training. This paper presents two studies to address this concern at scale. The first study reveals relatively little leakage of five naturalistic reading time corpora in two pre-training datasets in terms of length and frequency of token n-gram overlap. The second study replicates the negative relationship between language model size and the fit of surprisal to reading times using models trained on ‘leakage-free’ data that overlaps only minimally with the reading time corpora. Taken together, this suggests that previous results using language models trained on these corpora are not driven by the effects of data leakage.

The Inverse Scaling Effect of Pre-Trained Language Model Surprisal Is Not Due to Data Leakage

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in multimodal contexts is essential for identifying deviations in different modalities, particularly for interactive dialogue systems in real-life interactions, where the systems are usually infeasible to deploy large language models (LLMs) to generate dialogue responses due to data privacy and ethical issues. This paper aims to improve label detection that involves multi-round long dialogues by efficiently detecting OOD dialogues and images. We introduce a novel scoring framework named Dialogue Image Aligning and Enhancing Framework (DIAEF) that integrates the visual language models with the novel proposed scores that detect OOD in two key scenarios (1) mismatches between the dialogue and image input pair and (2) input pairs with previously unseen labels. Our experimental results, derived from various benchmarks, demonstrate that integrating image and multi-round dialogue OOD detection is more effective with previously unseen labels than using either modality independently. In the presence of mismatched pairs, our proposed score effectively identifies these mismatches and demonstrates strong robustness in long dialogues. This approach enhances domain-aware, adaptive conversational agents and establishes baselines for future studies.

‘No’ Matters: Out-of-Distribution Detection in Multimodality Multi-Turn Interactive Dialogue Download PDF

The CUTE benchmark showed that LLMs struggle with character understanding in English. We extend it to more languages with diverse scripts and writing systems, introducing EXECUTE. Our simplified framework allows easy expansion to any language. Tests across multiple LLMs reveal that challenges in other languages are not always on the character level as in English. Some languages show word-level processing issues, some show no issues at all. We also examine sub-character tasks in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to assess LLMs' understanding of character components.

EXECUTE: A Multilingual Benchmark for LLM Token Understanding

Large language models exhibit high fluency in natural language generation, yet they are prone to hallucinate. Identifying the hallucinated parts of the generated content is a challenging task. We introduce HaluMap, a post-hoc framework that creates heatmap-like relations between the source input and the generated output to identify and quantify hallucinations. HaluMap breaks down the document and summary into sentences, using a natural language inference (NLI) model to analyze entailment and contradiction relations. By calibrating the entailment and contradiction relations, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art NLI-based methods by five percentage points. Furthermore, HaluMap highlights conflicting elements between the source and the output, naturally providing clear and traceable explanations. This interpretability is valuable for spotting subtle hallucinations, offering a practical tool for verifying model outputs.

Explainable Hallucination through Natural Language Inference Mapping

The rapid advancement of AI-based music generation tools is revolutionizing the music industry but also posing challenges to artists, copyright holders, and providers alike. This necessitates reliable methods for detecting such AI-generated content. However, existing detectors, relying on either audio or lyrics, face key practical limitations: audio-based detectors fail to generalize to new or unseen generators and are vulnerable to audio perturbations; lyrics-based methods require cleanly formatted and accurate lyrics, unavailable in practice. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel, practically grounded approach: a multimodal, modular late-fusion pipeline that combines automatically transcribed sung lyrics and speech features capturing lyrics related information within the audio. By relying on lyrical aspects directly from audio, our method enhances robustness, mitigates susceptibility to low-level artifacts, and enables practical applicability. Experiments show that our method, DE-detect, outperforms existing lyrics-based detectors while also being more robust to audio perturbations. Thus, it offers an effective, robust solution for detecting AI-generated music in real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/deezer/robust-AI-lyrics-detection.

Double Entendre: Robust Audio-Based AI-Generated Lyrics Detection via Multi-View Fusion

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements across various tasks, but their safety alignment remains a major concern. Exploring jailbreak prompts can expose LLMs' vulnerabilities and guide efforts to secure them. Existing methods primarily design sophisticated instructions for the LLM to follow, or rely on multiple iterations, which could hinder the performance and efficiency of jailbreaks. In this work, we propose a novel jailbreak paradigm, Simple Assistive Task Linkage (SATA), which can effectively circumvent LLM safeguards and elicit harmful responses. Specifically, SATA first masks harmful keywords within a malicious query to generate a relatively benign query containing one or multiple [MASK] special tokens. It then employs a simple assistive task—such as a masked language model task or an element lookup by position task—to encode the semantics of the masked keywords. Finally, SATA links the assistive task with the masked query to jointly perform the jailbreak. Extensive experiments show that SATA achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms baselines by a large margin. Specifically, on AdvBench dataset, with mask language model (MLM) assistive task, SATA achieves an overall attack success rate (ASR) of 85% and harmful score (HS) of 4.57, and with element lookup by position (ELP) assistive task, SATA attains an overall ASR of 76% and HS of 4.43.

SATA: A Paradigm for LLM Jailbreak via Simple Assistive Task Linkage

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications requires robust safety guard models to detect and block harmful user prompts. While large safety guard models achieve strong performance, their computational cost is substantial. To mitigate this, smaller distilled models are used, but they often underperform on ``hard'' examples where the larger model provides accurate predictions. We observe that many inputs can be reliably handled by the smaller model, while only a small fraction require the larger model’s capacity. Motivated by this, we propose SafeRoute, a binary router that distinguishes hard examples from easy ones. Our method selectively applies the larger safety guard model to the data that the router considers hard, improving efficiency while maintaining accuracy compared to solely using the larger safety guard model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our adaptive model selection significantly enhances the trade-off between computational cost and safety performance, outperforming relevant baselines.

SafeRoute: Adaptive Model Selection for Efficient and Accurate Safety Guardrails in Large Language Models

English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers often struggle to engage in group discussions due to language barriers. While moderators can facilitate participation, few studies assess conversational engagement and evaluate moderation effectiveness. To address this gap, we develop a dataset comprising 17 sessions from an online ESL conversation club, which includes both moderated and non-moderated discussions. We then introduce an approach that integrates automatic ESL dialogue assessment and a framework that categorizes moderation strategies. Our findings indicate that moderators help improve the flow of topics and start/end a conversation. Interestingly, we find active acknowledgement and encouragement to be the most effective moderation strategy, while excessive information and opinion sharing by moderators has a negative impact. Ultimately, our study paves the way for analyzing ESL group discussions and the role of moderators in non-native conversation settings.

Moderation Matters: Measuring Conversational Moderation Impact in English as a Second Language Group Discussion

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance in English, but their effectiveness in Japanese remains limited due to the lack of high-quality training data. Current Japanese LMMs often rely on translated English datasets, restricting their ability to capture Japan-specific cultural knowledge. To address this, we explore the potential of Japanese PDF data as a training resource, an area that remains largely underutilized. We introduce a fully automated pipeline that leverages pretrained models to extract image-text pairs from PDFs through layout analysis, OCR, and vision-language alignment, removing the need for manual annotation. Additionally, we construct instruction data from extracted image-text pairs to further diversify the training process. To evaluate the effectiveness of PDF-derived data, we train Japanese LMMs and assess their performance on the Japanese LMM Benchmark. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements, with performance gains ranging from 3.9% to 13.8% on Heron-Bench. Further analysis highlights the impact of PDF-based data on various factors, such as model size and language models, reinforcing its value as a multimodal resource for Japanese LMMs. We plan to make the source code and data publicly available upon acceptance.

Harnessing PDF Data for Improving Japanese Large Multimodal Models

AI agents have drawn increasing attention mostly on their ability to perceive environments, understand tasks, and autonomously achieve goals. To advance research on AI agents in mobile scenarios, we introduce the Android Multi-annotation EXpo (AMEX), a comprehensive, large-scale dataset designed for generalist mobile GUI-control agents which are capable of completing tasks by directly interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) on mobile devices. AMEX comprises over 104K high-resolution screenshots from popular mobile applications, which are annotated at multiple levels. Unlike existing GUI-related datasets, e.g., Rico, AitW, etc., AMEX includes three levels of annotations: GUI interactive element grounding, GUI screen and element functionality descriptions, and complex natural language instructions with stepwise GUI-action chains. We develop this dataset from a more instructive and detailed perspective, complementing the general settings of existing datasets. Additionally, we finetune a baseline model SPHINX Agent and illustrate the effectiveness of AMEX.

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The Inverse Scaling Effect of Pre-Trained Language Model Surprisal Is Not Due to Data Leakage

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