Austria

Tokenization serves as a foundational step for Large Language Models (LLMs) to process text. In new domains or languages, the inefficiency of the tokenizer will slow down the training and generation of LLM. The mismatch in vocabulary also hinders deep knowledge transfer between LLMs like token-level distillation. To mitigate this gap, we propose an efficient method named **TokAlign** to replace the vocabulary of LLM from the token co-occurrences view, and further transfer the token-level knowledge between models. It first aligns the source vocabulary to the target one by learning a one-to-one mapping matrix for token IDs. Model parameters, including embeddings, are rearranged and progressively fine-tuned for the new vocabulary. Our method significantly improves multilingual text compression rates and vocabulary initialization for LLMs, decreasing the perplexity from ${3.4e}^{2}$ of strong baseline methods to ${1.2e}^{2}$ after initialization. Experimental results on models across multiple parameter scales demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of TokAlign, which costs as few as 5k steps to restore the performance of the vanilla model. After unifying vocabularies between LLMs, token-level distillation can remarkably boost (+4.4% than sentence-level distillation) the base model, costing only 235M tokens.

ACL 2025

TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignment

large language model

vocabulary adaptation

efficient nlp

technical paper

### 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)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in various complex tasks requiring multi-step reasoning methods like tree search to explore diverse reasoning paths. However, existing methods often suffer from computational inefficiency and redundancy. First, they overlook the diversity of task difficulties, leading to unnecessarily extensive searches even for easy tasks. Second, they neglect the semantics of reasoning paths, resulting in redundant exploration of semantically identical paths. To address these limitations, we propose Semantic Exploration with Adaptive Gating (SEAG), a computationally efficient method. SEAG employs an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically decides whether to conduct a tree search, based on the confidence level of answers from a preceding simple reasoning method. Furthermore, its tree-based exploration consolidates semantically identical reasoning steps, reducing redundant explorations while maintaining or even improving accuracy. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SEAG significantly improves accuracy by 4.3\% on average while requiring only 31\% of computational costs compared to existing tree search-based methods on complex reasoning benchmarks including GSM8K and ARC with diverse language models such as Llama2, Llama3, and Mistral. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-postech/SEAG-semantic-exploration-with-adaptive-gating.

Semantic Exploration with Adaptive Gating for Efficient Problem Solving with Language Models

A widely used strategy to discover and understand language model mechanisms is circuit analysis. A circuit is a minimal subgraph of a model’s computation graph that executes a specific task. We identify a gap in existing circuit discovery methods: they assume circuits are position-invariant, treating model components as equally relevant across input positions. This limits their ability to capture cross-positional interactions or mechanisms that vary across positions. To address this gap, we propose two improvements to incorporate positionality into circuits, even on tasks containing variable-length examples. First, we extend edge attribution patching, a gradient-based method for circuit discovery, to differentiate between token positions. Second, we introduce the concept of a dataset schema, which defines token spans with similar semantics across examples, enabling position-aware circuit discovery in datasets with variable length examples. We additionally develop an automated pipeline for schema generation and application using large language models. Our approach enables fully automated discovery of position-sensitive circuits, yielding better trade-offs between circuit size and faithfulness compared to prior work.

Position-aware Automatic Circuit Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) excel at answering questions but remain passive learners—absorbing static data without the ability to question and refine knowledge. This paper explores how LLMs can transition to interactive, question-driven learning through student-teacher dialogues. We introduce INTERACT (INTERactive learning for Adaptive Concept Transfer), a framework in which a "student" LLM engages a "teacher" LLM through iterative inquiries to acquire knowledge across 1,347 contexts, including song lyrics, news articles, movie plots, academic papers, and images. Our experiments show that across a wide range of scenarios and LLM architectures, interactive learning consistently enhances performance, achieving up to a 25% improvement, with 'cold-start' student models matching static learning baselines in as few as five dialogue turns. Interactive setups can also mitigate the disadvantages of weaker teachers, showcasing the robustness of question-driven learning.

INTERACT: Enabling Interactive, Question-Driven Learning in Large Language Models

Homans' Social Exchange Theory (SET) is widely recognized as a basic framework for understanding the formation and emergence of human civilizations and social structures. In social science, this theory is typically studied based on simple simulation experiments or real-world human studies, both of which either lack realism or are too expensive to control. In artificial intelligence, recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in simulating human behaviors. Inspired by these insights, we adopt an interdisciplinary research perspective and propose using LLM-based agents to study Homans' SET. Specifically, we construct a virtual society composed of three LLM agents and have them engage in a social exchange game to observe their behaviors. Through extensive experiments, we found that Homans' SET is well validated in our agent society, demonstrating the consistency between the agent and human behaviors. Building on this foundation, we intentionally alter the settings of the agent society to extend the traditional Homans' SET, making it more comprehensive and detailed. To the best of our knowledge, this paper marks the first step in studying Homans' SET with LLM-based agents. More importantly, it introduces a novel and feasible research paradigm that bridges the fields of social science and computer science through LLM-based agents. Code is available at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/SET .

Investigating and Extending Homans’ Social Exchange Theory with Large Language Model based Agents

Tabular data analysis is crucial in many scenarios, yet efficiently identifying relevant queries and results for new tables remains challenging due to data complexity, diverse analytical operations, and high-quality analysis requirements. To address these challenges, we aim to recommend query–code–result triplets tailored for new tables in tabular data analysis workflows. In this paper, we present TablePilot, a pioneering tabular data analysis framework leveraging large language models to autonomously generate comprehensive and superior analytical results without relying on user profiles or prior interactions. Additionally, we propose Rec-Align, a novel method to further improve recommendation quality and better align with human preferences. Experiments on DART, a dataset specifically designed for comprehensive tabular data analysis recommendation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Based on GPT-4o, the tuned TablePilot achieves 77.0% top-5 recommendation recall. Human evaluations further highlight its effectiveness in optimizing tabular data analysis workflows.

TablePilot: Recommending Human-Preferred Tabular Data Analysis with Large Language Models

Voice assistants, such as Siri and Google Assistant, typically model audio and text separately, resulting in lost speech information and increased complexity. Recent efforts to address this with end-to-end Speech Large Language Models (speech-in, text-out) trained with supervised finetuning (SFT) have led to models ``forgetting" capabilities from text-only LLMs. Our work proposes an alternative paradigm for training Speech LLMs without instruction data, using the response of a text-only LLM to transcripts as self-supervision. Importantly, this process can be performed without annotated responses. We show that our Distilled Voice Assistant (DiVA) generalizes to Spoken Question Answering, Classification, and Translation. Furthermore, DiVA better matches user preferences, achieving a 72\% win rate compared with state-of-the-art models like Qwen 2 Audio, despite using $>$100x less training compute.

Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Data

Argument quality assessment faces inherent challenges due to its subjective nature, where different evaluators may assign varying quality scores for an argument based on personal perspectives. Although existing datasets collect opinions from multiple annotators to model subjectivity, most existing computational methods fail to consider multi-perspective evaluation. To address this issue, we propose MPAQ, a multi-persona framework for argument quality assessment that simulates diverse evaluator perspectives through large language models. It first dynamically generates targeted personas tailored to an input argument, then simulates each persona's reasoning process to evaluate the argument quality from multiple perspectives. To effectively generate fine-grained quality scores, we develop a coarse-to-fine scoring strategy that first generates a coarse-grained integer score and then refines it into a fine-grained decimal score. Experiments on IBM-Rank-30k and IBM-ArgQ-5.3kArgs datasets demonstrate that MPAQ consistently outperforms strong baselines while providing comprehensive multi-perspective rationales.

A Multi-persona Framework for Argument Quality Assessment

Clinical abstractive summarization struggles to balance faithfulness and informativeness, sacrificing key information or introducing confabulations. Techniques like in-context learning and fine-tuning have improved overall summary quality orthogonally, without considering the above issue. Conversely, methods aimed at improving faithfulness and informativeness, such as model reasoning and self improvement, have not been systematically evaluated in the clinical domain. We address this gap by first performing a comprehensive benchmark and study of six advanced abstractive summarization methods across three datasets using five reference-based and reference-free metrics, with the latter specifically assessing faithfulness and informativeness. Based on its findings we then develop uMedSum, a modular hybrid framework introducing novel approaches for sequential confabulation removal and key information addition. Our work outperforms previous GPT-4-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both quantitative metrics and expert evaluations, achieving an 11.8% average improvement in dedicated faithfulness metrics over the previous SOTA. Doctors prefer uMedSum’s summaries 6 times more than previous SOTA in difficult cases containing confabulations or missing information. These results highlight uMedSum’s effectiveness and generalizability across various datasets and metrics, marking a significant advancement in clinical summarization. uMedSum toolkit is made available on GitHub.

uMedSum: A Unified Framework for Advancing Medical Abstractive Summarization

Sequence labeling models often benefit from incorporating external knowledge. However, this practice introduces data heterogeneity and complicates the model with additional modules, leading to increased expenses for training a high-performing model. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-stage curriculum learning (DCL) framework specifically designed for sequence labeling tasks. The DCL framework enhances training by gradually introducing data instances from easy to hard. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic metric for evaluating the difficulty levels of sequence labeling tasks. Experiments on several sequence labeling datasets show that our model enhances performance and accelerates training, mitigating the slow training issue of complex models.

An Effective Incorporating Heterogeneous Knowledge Curriculum Learning for Sequence Labeling

Our quality audit for three widely used public multilingual speech datasets Mozilla Common Voice 17.0, FLEURS, and VoxPopuli shows that in some languages, these datasets suffer from significant quality issues. We believe addressing these issues will make these datasets more useful as evaluation sets, and improve downstream models. We divide these quality issues into two categories: micro-level and macro-level. We find that macro-level issues are more prevalent in less institutionalized, often under-resourced languages. We provide a case analysis of Taiwanese Southern Min (nan_tw}) that highlights the need for proactive language planning (e.g. orthography prescriptions, dialect boundary definition) and enhanced data quality control in the process of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset creation. We conclude by proposing guidelines and recommendations to mitigate these issues in future dataset development, emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic awareness in creating robust and reliable speech data resources.

TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignment

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