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Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising ability to perform commonsense reasoning, bringing machines closer to human-like understanding. However, deciphering the internal reasoning processes of LLMs remains challenging due to the complex interdependencies among generated tokens, especially in practical question-answering. In this study, we introduce a two-dimensional analysis framework—comprising token back-tracing and individual token decoding—to uncover how LLMs conduct factual knowledge recall. Through explanatory analysis of three typical reasoning datasets, we identify a consistent three-phase pattern: Subject Augmentation and Broadcasting, Object Retrieval and Reranking, and Conclusion Fusion and Generation. Our findings reveal that LLMs do not lack relevant knowledge but struggle to select the most accurate information based on context during the retrieval and rerank phase. Leveraging these findings, we apply representation engineering and selective fine-tuning to target specific modules responsible for retrieval and rerank errors. Experimental results show large improvements in response accuracy for both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating the rationality of the interpreting result.

ACL 2025

Tracing and Dissecting How LLMs Recall Factual Knowledge for Real World Questions

factual knowledge recall

mechanistic interpretability

commonsense reasoning

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### 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)

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute and generating long Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Distillation post-training on LRMs-generated data is a straightforward yet effective method to enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller models, but faces a critical bottleneck: we found that distilled long CoT data poses learning difficulty for small models and leads to the inheritance of biases (i.e., formalistic long-time thinking) when using Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods. To alleviate this bottleneck, we propose constructing data from scratch using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). We then exploit a set of CoT-aware approaches, including Thoughts Length Balance, Fine-grained DPO, and Joint Post-training Objective, to enhance SFT and RL on the MCTS data. We conducted evaluation on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). instruction-following (Multi-IF) and planning (Blocksworld), results demonstrate our CoT-aware approaches substantially improve the reasoning performance of distilled models compared to standard distilled models via reducing the hallucinations in long-time thinking.

Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models

While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding tasks, their ability to locate and reason about fine-grained details within complex documents remains understudied. Consider searching a restaurant menu for a specific nutritional detail or identifying a disclaimer in a lengthy newspaper article — tasks that demand careful attention to small but significant details within a broader narrative, akin to Finding Needles in Images (NiM). To address this gap, we introduce NiM-Benchmark, a carefully curated benchmark spanning diverse real-world documents including newspapers, menus, and lecture images, specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs' capability in these intricate tasks. Building on this, we further propose Spot-IT, a simple yet effective approach that enhances MLLMs capability through intelligent patch selection and Gaussian attention, motivated from how humans zoom and focus when searching documents. Our extensive experiments reveal both the capabilities and limitations of current MLLMs in handling fine-grained document understanding tasks, while demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Spot-IT achieves significant improvements over baseline methods, particularly in scenarios requiring precise detail extraction from complex layouts.

Finding Needles in Images: Can Multi-modal LLMs Locate Fine Details?

Hubness, the tendency for a few points to be among the nearest neighbours of a disproportionate number of other points, commonly arises when applying standard distance measures to high-dimensional data, often negatively impacting distance-based analysis. As autoregressive large language models (LLMs) operate on high-dimensional representations, we ask whether they are also affected by hubness. We first prove that the only large-scale representation comparison operation performed by LLMs, namely that between context and unembedding vectors to determine continuation probabilities, is not characterized by the concentration of distances phenomenon that typically causes the appearance of nuisance hubness. We then empirically show that this comparison still leads to a high degree of hubness, but the hubs in this case do not constitute a disturbance. They are rather the result of context-modulated frequent tokens often appearing in the pool of likely candidates for next token prediction. However, when other distances are used to compare LLM representations, we do not have the same theoretical guarantees, and, indeed, we see nuisance hubs appear. There are two main takeaways. First, hubness, while omnipresent in high-dimensional spaces, is not a negative property that needs to be mitigated when LLMs are being used for next token prediction. Second, when comparing representations from LLMs using Euclidean or cosine distance, there is a high risk of nuisance hubs and practitioners should use mitigation techniques if relevant.

Prediction Hubs are Context-Informed Frequent Tokens in LLMs

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in Language Models (LMs) is key to improving their safety and reliability. Evaluations often use metrics like AUROC to assess how well UQ methods (e.g., negative sequence probabilities) correlate with task correctness functions (e.g., ROUGE-L). We show that mutual biases-when both UQ methods and correctness functions are biased by the same factors-systematically distort evaluation. First, we formally prove that any mutual bias non-randomly skews AUROC rankings, compromising benchmark integrity. Second, we confirm this happens empirically by testing 7 widely used correctness functions, from lexical-based and embedding-based metrics to LM-as-a-judge approaches, across 4 datasets × 4 models × 8 UQ methods. Our analysis showsthat length biases in correctness functions distort UQ assessments by interacting with length biases in UQ methods. We identify LM-as-a-judge methods as the least length-biased, offering a promising path for a fairer UQ evaluation.

Revisiting Uncertainty Quantification Evaluation in Language Models: Spurious Interactions with Response Length Bias Results

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, but their inherent safety risks -- ranging from harmful content generation to broader societal harms -- pose significant challenges. These risks can be amplified by the recent adversarial attacks, fine-tuning vulnerabilities, and the increasing deployment of LLMs in high-stakes environments. Existing safety-enhancing techniques, such as fine-tuning with human feedback or adversarial training, are still vulnerable as they address specific threats and often fail to generalize across unseen attacks, or require manual system-level defenses. This paper introduces RepBend, a novel approach that fundamentally disrupts the representations underlying harmful behaviors in LLMs, offering a scalable solution to enhance (potentially inherent) safety. RepBend brings the idea of activation steering -- simple vector arithmetic for steering model's behavior during inference -- to loss-based fine-tuning. Through extensive evaluation, RepBend achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming prior methods such as Circuit Breaker, RMU, and NPO, with up to 95% reduction in attack success rates across diverse jailbreak benchmarks, all with negligible reduction in model usability and general capabilities.

Representation Bending for Large Language Model Safety

Large language models (LLMs) often generate responses that deviate from user input or training data, a phenomenon known as "hallucination." These hallucinations undermine user trust and hinder the adoption of generative AI systems. Addressing hallucinations is important for the advancement of LLMs. This paper introduces a comprehensive hallucination benchmark HalluLens, incorporating both extrinsic and intrinsic evaluation tasks, built upon a clear taxonomy of hallucination. A major challenge in benchmarking hallucinations is the lack of a unified framework due to inconsistent definitions and categorizations. We disentangle LLM hallucination from "factuality" and propose a taxonomy distinguishing extrinsic and intrinsic hallucinations to promote consistency and facilitate research. We emphasize extrinsic hallucinations -- where generated content deviates from training data -- as they become increasingly relevant with LLM advancements. However, no benchmark is solely dedicated to extrinsic hallucinations. To address this gap, HalluLens introduces three new extrinsic tasks with dynamic test set generation to mitigate data leakage and ensure robustness. We release codebase for extrinsic hallucination benchmark.

HalluLens: LLM Hallucination Benchmark

In commonsense generation, given a set of input concepts, a model must generate a response that is not only commonsense bearing, but also capturing multiple diverse viewpoints. Numerous evaluation metrics based on form- and content-level overlap have been proposed in prior work for evaluating the diversity of a commonsense generation model. However, it remains unclear as to which metrics are best suited for evaluating the diversity in commonsense generation. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic meta-evaluation of diversity metrics for commonsense generation. We find that form-based diversity metrics tend to consistently overestimate the diversity in sentence sets, where even randomly generated sentences are assigned overly high diversity scores. We then use an Large Language Model (LLM) to create a novel dataset annotated for the diversity of sentences generated for a commonsense generation task, and use it to conduct a meta-evaluation of the existing diversity evaluation metrics. Our experimental results show that content-based diversity evaluation metrics consistently outperform the form-based counterparts, showing high correlations with the LLM-based ratings. We recommend that future work on commonsense generation should use content-based metrics for evaluating the diversity of their outputs.

Evaluating the Evaluation of Diversity in Commonsense Generation

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse tasks but often struggle to accurately gauge their knowledge boundaries, leading to confident yet incorrect responses. This paper explores leveraging LLMs' internal states to enhance their perception of knowledge boundaries from efficiency and risk perspectives. We investigate whether LLMs can estimate their confidence using internal states before response generation, potentially saving computational resources. Our experiments on datasets like Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and MMLU reveal that LLMs demonstrate significant pre-generation perception, which is further refined post-generation, with perception gaps remaining stable across varying conditions. To mitigate risks in critical domains, we introduce Consistency-based Confidence Calibration ($C^3$), which assesses confidence consistency through question reformulation. $C^3$ significantly improves LLMs' ability to recognize their knowledge gaps, enhancing the unknown perception rate by 5.6\% on NQ and 4.9\% on HotpotQA. Our findings suggest that pre-generation confidence estimation can optimize efficiency, while $C^3$ effectively controls output risks, advancing the reliability of LLMs in practical applications.

Towards Fully Exploiting LLM Internal States to Enhance Knowledge Boundary Perception

Synthetic high-quality multi-step reasoning data can significantly enhance the performance of large language models on various tasks. However, most existing methods rely on rejection sampling, which generates trajectories independently and suffers from inefficiency and imbalanced sampling across problems of varying difficulty. In this work, we introduce FastMCTS, an innovative data synthesis strategy inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search. FastMCTS provides a more efficient sampling method for multi-step reasoning data, offering step-level evaluation signals and promoting balanced sampling across problems of different difficulty levels. Experiments on both English and Chinese reasoning datasets demonstrate that FastMCTS generates over 30% more correct reasoning paths compared to rejection sampling as the number of generated tokens scales up. Furthermore, under comparable synthetic data budgets, models trained on FastMCTS-generated data outperform those trained on rejection sampling data by 3.9% across multiple benchmarks. As a lightweight sampling strategy, FastMCTS offers a practical and efficient alternative for synthesizing high-quality reasoning data.

FastMCTS: A Simple Sampling Strategy for Data Synthesis

In this work, we explore how instance-level memorization in the teacher Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model gets inherited by the student model in sequence-level knowledge distillation (SeqKD). We find that despite not directly seeing the original training data, students memorize more than baseline models (models of the same size, trained on the original data)—3.4% for exact matches and 57% for extractive memorization—and show increased hallucination rates. Further, under this SeqKD setting, we also characterize how students behave on specific training data subgroups, such as subgroups with low quality or specific counterfactual memorization (CM) scores, and find that students exhibit greater denoising on low-quality subgroups. Finally, we propose a modification to SeqKD named Adaptive-SeqKD, which intervenes in SeqKD to reduce memorization and hallucinations. Overall, we recommend caution when applying SeqKD: students inherit both their teachers' superior performance and their fault modes, thereby requiring active monitoring.

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Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models

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