Austria

In this reproduction study, we revisit recent claims that self-attention implements kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) (Teo and Nguyen, 2024), positing that (i) value vectors $V$ capture the eigenvectors of the Gram matrix of the keys, and (ii) that self-attention projects queries onto the principal component axes of the key matrix $K$ in a feature space. Our analysis reveals three critical inconsistencies: (1) No alignment exists between learned self-attention value vectors and what is proposed in the KPCA perspective, with average similarity metrics (optimal cosine similarity $\leq 0.32$, linear CKA (Centered Kernel Alignment) $\leq 0.11$, kernel CKA $\leq 0.32$) indicating negligible correspondence; (2) Reported decreases in reconstruction loss $J_\text{proj}$, arguably justifying the claim that the self-attention
minimizes the projection error of KPCA, are misinterpreted, as the quantities involved differ by orders of magnitude ($\sim 10^3$); (3) Gram matrix eigenvalue statistics, introduced to justify that $V$ captures the eigenvector of the gram matrix, are irreproducible without undocumented implementation-specific adjustments. Across 10 transformer architectures, we conclude that the KPCA interpretation of self-attention lacks empirical support.

ACL 2025

A Reproduction Study: The Kernel PCA Interpretation of Self-Attention Fails Under Scrutiny

kernel pca

reproduction

self-attention

workshop 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.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2025". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration details**](https://2025.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

Registration Required

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Filtering and annotating textual data are routine tasks in many areas, like social media or news analytics. Automating these tasks allows to scale the analyses wrt. speed and breadth of content covered and decreases the manual effort required. Due to technical advancements in Natural Language Processing, specifically the success of large foundation models, a new tool for automating such annotation processes by using a text-to-text interface given written guidelines without providing training samples has become available. 

In this work, we assess these advancements \textit{in-the-wild} by empirically testing them in an annotation task on German Twitter data about social and political European crises. We compare the prompt-based results with our human annotation and preceding classification approaches, including Naive Bayes and a BERT-based fine-tuning/domain adaptation pipeline. Our results show that the prompt-based approach – despite being limited by local computation resources during the model selection – is comparable with the fine-tuned BERT but without any annotated training data. Our findings emphasize the ongoing paradigm shift in the NLP landscape, i.e., the unification of downstream tasks and elimination of the need for pre-labeled training data.

Zero-shot prompt-based classification: topic labeling in times of foundation models in German Tweets

Many pre-trained language models (PLMs) exhibit suboptimal performance on mid- and low-resource languages, largely due to limited exposure to these languages during pre-training. A common strategy to address this is to introduce new tokens specific to the target languages, initialize their embeddings, and apply continual pre-training on target-language data. Among such methods, OFA (Liu et al., 2024a) proposes a similarity-based subword embedding initialization heuristic that is both effective and efficient. However, OFA restricts target-language token embeddings to be convex combinations of a fixed number of source-language embeddings, which may limit expressiveness. To overcome this limitation, we propose HYPEROFA, a hypernetwork-based approach for more adaptive token embedding initialization. The hypernetwork is trained to map from an external multilingual word vector space to the PLM’s token embedding space using source-language tokens. Once trained, it can generate flexible embeddings for target-language tokens, serving as a good starting point for continual pretraining. Experiments demonstrate that HYPEROFA consistently outperforms random initialization baseline and matches or exceeds the performance of OFA in both continual pre-training convergence and downstream task performance. We make the code publicly available.

HYPEROFA: Expanding LLM Vocabulary to New Languages via Hypernetwork-Based Embedding Initialization

Deception is the intentional practice of twisting information. It is a nuanced societal practice deeply intertwined with human societal evolution, characterized by a multitude of facets. This research explores the problem of deception through the lens of psychology, employing a framework that categorizes deception into three forms: lies of omission, lies of commission, and lies of influence. The primary focus of this study is specifically on investigating only lies of omission. We propose a novel framework for deception detection leveraging NLP techniques. We curated an annotated dataset of 876,784 samples by amalgamating a popular large-scale fake news dataset and scraped news headlines from the Twitter handle of "Times of India", a well-known Indian news media house. Each sample has been labeled with four layers, namely: (i) the type of omission (speculation, bias, distortion, sounds factual, and opinion), (ii) colors of lies (black, white, grey, and red), and (iii) the intention of such lies (to influence, gain social prestige, etc) (iv) topic of lies (political, educational, religious, racial, and ethnicity). We present a novel multi-task learning [MTL] pipeline that leverages the dataless merging of fine-tuned language models to address the deception detection task mentioned earlier. Our proposed model achieved an impressive F1 score of 0.87, demonstrating strong performance across all layers including the type, color, intent, and topic aspects of deceptive content. Finally, our research aims to explore the relationship between the lies of omission and propaganda techniques. To accomplish this, we conducted an in-depth analysis, uncovering compelling findings. For instance, our analysis revealed a significant correlation between loaded language and opinion, shedding light on their interconnectedness. To encourage further research in this field, we will publicly release the SEPSIS dataset and models.

SEPSIS: I Can Catch Your Lies -- A New Paradigm for Deception Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) face deployment challenges due to high computational costs, and while Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) offers a solution, existing rotation-based methods struggle at very low bit-widths like 2-bit. We introduce a novel, training-free approach to construct an improved rotation matrix, addressing the limitations of current methods. The key contributions include leveraging the Walsh-Hadamard transform with sequency ordering, which clusters similar frequency components to reduce quantization error compared to standard Hadamard matrices, significantly improving performance. Furthermore, we propose a Grouped Sequency-arranged Rotation (GSR) using block-diagonal matrices with smaller Walsh blocks, effectively isolating outlier impacts and achieving performance comparable to optimization-based methods without requiring any training. Our method demonstrates robust performance on reasoning tasks and Perplexity (PPL) score on WikiText-2. Our method also enhances results even when applied over existing learned rotation techniques.

Grouped Sequency-arranged Rotation: Optimizing Rotation Transformation for Quantization for Free

Language tagging, a method whereby source and target inputs are prefixed with a unique language token, has become the de facto standard for conditioning Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) models on specific language directions. This conditioning can manifest effective zero-shot translation abilities in MT models at scale for many languages. Expanding on previous work, we propose a novel method of language tagging for MNMT, injection, in which the embedded representation of a language token is concatenated to the input of every linear layer. We explore a variety of different tagging methods, with and without injection, showing that injection improves zero-shot translation performance with up to a 2+ BLEU score point gain for certain language directions in our dataset.

Neuron-Level Language Tag Injection Improves Zero-Shot Translation Performance

Curriculum learning is a widely adopted training strategy in natural language processing (NLP), where models are exposed to examples organized by increasing difficulty to enhance learning efficiency and performance. 
However, most existing approaches rely on manually defined difficulty metrics -- such as text length -- which may not accurately reflect the model’s own perspective. 
To overcome this limitation, we present a self-adaptive curriculum learning paradigm that prioritizes fine-tuning examples based on difficulty scores predicted by pre-trained language models (PLMs) themselves. 
Building on these scores, we explore various training strategies that differ in the ordering of examples for the fine-tuning: from easy-to-hard, hard-to-easy, to mixed sampling. 
We evaluate our method on four natural language understanding (NLU) datasets covering both binary and multi-class classification tasks.
Experimental results show that our approach leads to faster convergence and improved performance compared to standard random sampling.

Your Pretrained Model Tells the Difficulty Itself: A Self-Adaptive Curriculum Learning Paradigm for Natural Language Understanding

Prompt engineering has made significant contributions to the era of large language models, yet its effectiveness depends on the skills of a prompt author. This paper introduces $\textit{iPrOp}$, a novel interactive prompt optimization approach, to bridge manual prompt engineering and automatic prompt optimization while offering users the flexibility to assess evolving prompts. We aim to provide users with task-specific guidance to enhance human engagement in the optimization process, which is structured through prompt variations, informative instances, predictions generated by large language models along with their corresponding explanations, and relevant performance metrics. This approach empowers users to choose and further refine the prompts based on their individual preferences and needs. It can not only assist non-technical domain experts in generating optimal prompts tailored to their specific tasks or domains, but also enable to study the intrinsic parameters that influence the performance of prompt optimization. The evaluation shows that our approach has the capability to generate improved prompts, leading to enhanced task performance.

iPrOp: Interactive Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models with a Human in the Loop

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising solution for decomposing large language model representations into interpretable features. However, Paulo & Belrose (2025) have highlighted instability across different initialization seeds, and Heap et al. (2025) have pointed out that SAEs may not capture model-internal features. These problems likely stem from training SAEs on external datasets—either collected from the Web or generated by another model—which may contain out-of-distribution (OOD) data beyond the model’s generalisation capabilities. This can result in hallucinated SAE features, which we term ”Fake Features”, that misrepresent the model’s internal activations. To address these issues, we propose FaithfulSAE, a method that trains SAEs on the model’s own synthetic dataset. Using FaithfulSAEs, we demonstrate that training SAEs on less-OOD instruction datasets results in SAEs being more stable across seeds. Notably, FaithfulSAEs outperform SAEs trained on webbased datasets in the SAE probing task and exhibit a lower Fake Feature Ratio in 5 out of 7 models. Overall, our approach eliminates the dependency on external datasets, advancing interpretability by better capturing model-internal features while highlighting the often neglected importance of SAE training datasets.

FaithfulSAE: Towards Capturing Faithful Features with Sparse Autoencoders without External Datasets Dependency

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing by understanding, generating, and manipulating texts.
Although recent studies have shown that prompt engineering can reduce computational effort and potentially improve translation quality, prompt designs specific to different domains remain challenging. Besides, movie subtitle translation is particularly challenging and understudied, as it involves handling colloquial language, preserving cultural nuances, and requires contextual information such as the movie's theme and storyline to ensure accurate meaning. This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the translation of movie subtitles through the use of prompting strategies that incorporate the movie's meta-information, e.g., movie title, summary, and genre. We build a multilingual dataset which aligns the OpenSubtitles dataset with their corresponding Wikipedia articles and investigate different prompts and their effect on translation performance. Our experiments with GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, and LLaMA-3 models have shown that the presence of meta-information improves translation accuracy. These findings further emphasize the importance of designing appropriate prompts and highlight the potential of LLMs to enhance subtitle translation quality.

Translating Movie Subtitles by Large Language Models using Movie-meta Information

Low-resource languages (LRLs) face significant challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to limited data. While current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) still struggle with LRLs, smaller multilingual models (mLMs) such as mBERT and XLM-R offer greater promise due to a better fit of their capacity to low training data sizes. This study systematically investigates parameter-efficient adapter-based methods for adapting mLMs to LRLs, evaluating three architectures: Sequential Bottleneck, Invertible Bottleneck, and Low-Rank Adaptation. Using unstructured text from GlotCC and structured knowledge from ConceptNet, we show that small adaptation datasets (e.g., up to 1 GB of free-text or a few MB of knowledge graph data) yield gains in intrinsic (masked language modeling) and extrinsic tasks (topic classification, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition). We find that Sequential Bottleneck adapters excel in language modeling, while Invertible Bottleneck adapters slightly outperform other methods on downstream tasks due to better embedding alignment and larger parameter counts. Adapter-based methods match or outperform full fine-tuning while using far fewer parameters, and smaller mLMs prove more effective for LRLs than massive LLMs like LLaMA-3, GPT-4, and DeepSeek-R1-based distilled models. While adaptation improves performance, pre-training data size remains the dominant factor, especially for languages with extensive pre-training coverage.

A Reproduction Study: The Kernel PCA Interpretation of Self-Attention Fails Under Scrutiny

Downloads

Next from ACL 2025

Zero-shot prompt-based classification: topic labeling in times of foundation models in German Tweets

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

A Reproduction Study: The Kernel PCA Interpretation of Self-Attention Fails Under Scrutiny

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from ACL 2025

Zero-shot prompt-based classification: topic labeling in times of foundation models in German Tweets

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads