India

The rapid escalation from elementary school-level to frontier problems of the difficulty for LLM benchmarks in recent years seems to bring us close enough to the ``last exam&#39;&#39; for LLMs to surpass humanity. However, is the LLMs&#39; remarkable reasoning ability indeed coming from true intelligence by human standards, or are they actually reciting solutions witnessed during training at an Internet level? To study this problem, we propose RoR-Bench, a novel, multi-modal benchmark for detecting LLM&#39;s recitation behavior when asked simple reasoning problems but with conditions subtly shifted, and conduct empirical analysis on our benchmark. Surprisingly, we found existing cutting-edge LLMs unanimously exhibits extremely severe recitation behavior; by changing one phrase in the condition, top models such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 can suffer 60 percent performance loss on elementary school-level arithmetic and reasoning problems. Such findings are a wake-up call to the LLM community that compels us to reevaluate the true intelligence level of cutting-edge LLMs.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Recitation over Reasoning: How Cutting-Edge Language Models Can Fail on Elementary School-Level Reasoning Problems?

subtle condition shift

large language models

reasoning

benchmark

The rapid escalation from elementary school-level to frontier problems of the difficulty for LLM benchmarks in recent years seems to bring us close enough to the ``last exam'' for LLMs to surpass humanity. However, is the LLMs' remarkable reasoning ability indeed coming from true intelligence by human standards, or are they actually reciting solutions witnessed during training at an Internet level? To study this problem, we propose RoR-Bench, a novel, multi-modal benchmark for detecting LLM's recitation behavior when asked simple reasoning problems but with conditions subtly shifted, and conduct empirical analysis on our benchmark. Surprisingly, we found existing cutting-edge LLMs unanimously exhibits extremely severe recitation behavior; by changing one phrase in the condition, top models such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 can suffer 60 percent performance loss on elementary school-level arithmetic and reasoning problems. Such findings are a wake-up call to the LLM community that compels us to reevaluate the true intelligence level of cutting-edge LLMs.

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

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The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Document retrieval is a critical challenge in information retrieval systems, where the goal is to efficiently retrieve relevant documents in response to a given query. Dense retrieval methods, which utilize vector embeddings to represent semantic information, require effective indexing to ensure fast and accurate retrieval. Existing methods, such as MEVI, have attempted to address this by using hierarchical K-Means for clustering, but they often face limitations in computational efficiency and retrieval accuracy. In this paper, we introduce the Hildoc Index, a novel document indexing approach that leverages the Hilbert Curve to map document embeddings onto a one-dimensional space. This innovative representation facilitates efficient clustering using a 1D quantile-based algorithm, ensuring uniform partition sizes and preserving the inherent structure of the data. As a result, Hildoc Index not only reduces training complexity but also enhances retrieval accuracy and speed during inference. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into both dense retrieval systems and hybrid ensemble systems. Through comprehensive experiments on standard benchmarks like MSMARCO Passage and Natural Questions, we demonstrate that the Hildoc Index significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art MEVI in terms of both retrieval speed and recall. These results underscore the Hildoc Index as a solution for fast and accurate dense document retrieval.

Hildoc: Leveraging Hilbert Curve Representation for Accurate and Efficient Document Retrieval

This paper investigates defenses in LLM-based evaluation, where prompt injection attacks can manipulate scores by deceiving the evaluation system. We formalize blind attacks as a class in which candidate answers are crafted independently of the true answer. To counter such attacks, we propose an evaluation framework that combines standard and counterfactual evaluation. Experiments show it significantly improves attack detection with minimal performance trade-offs for recent models.

Counterfactual Evaluation for Blind Attack Detection in LLM-based Evaluation Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful zero- and few-shot learners. However, when predicting over a set of candidate options, LLMs suffer from label biases, and existing calibration methods overlook biases arising from multi-token class labels. We tackle an issue we call *label length bias*, where labels of different lengths are treated inconsistently, even after standard length normalization. To mitigate it, we propose *normalized contextual calibration* (NCC), an effective method that normalizes and calibrates predictions at the full-label level. NCC achieves statistically significant improvements over prior approaches across multiple datasets and models, with gains of up to 10\% F1. Moreover, NCC extends bias mitigation to broader tasks such as multiple-choice question answering. Our analysis shows that, when combined with in-context learning, NCC is less sensitive to few-shot example selection, requires fewer examples for competitive performance, and produces more reliable confidence estimates. These findings highlight the importance of mitigating full-label biases to improve the performance and robustness of LLM-based methods, particularly in real-world applications where class labels naturally consist of multiple tokens.

Mitigating Label Length Bias in Large Language Models

We present PerMed-MM, the first multimodal benchmark for Persian medical question answering. The dataset comprises 733 expert-authored multiple-choice questions from Iranian National Medical Board Exams, each paired with one to five clinically relevant images, spanning 46 medical specialties and diverse visual modalities. We evaluate five open-source and five proprietary vision language models, and find that reasoning supervision and domain-specific fine-tuning yield performance gains. Our cross-lingual analysis reveals significant unpredictability in translation-based pipelines, motivating the need for benchmarks that support direct, native-language evaluation. Additionally, domain- and modality-level analysis uncovers meaningful variation in model behavior often masked by aggregate metrics. PerMed-MM is publicly available on Hugging Face.

PerMed-MM: A Multimodal, Multi-Specialty Persian Medical Benchmark for Evaluating Vision Language Models

We introduced PerCoR—Persian Commonsense Reasoning—the first large-scale Persian benchmark for commonsense reasoning. PerCoR contains 106K multiple-choice sentence-completion problems drawn from more than forty news, cultural and other web sources. We adopt a linguistically grounded, conjunction-based segmentation strategy to generate coherent prefix–continuation pairs. To create challenging distractors, we propose DRESS-AF—Distractor Ranking via Embedding Similarity Scoring and Adversarial Filtering—a generation-free adversarial filtering method that selects distractors from the pool of gold continuations while maximising model confusion. Human annotators score 89% on PerCoR, while OpenAI-o3 achieves the highest performance at 92.18%, followed closely by Claude-Sonnet-3.7 (91.17%). The strongest open-source model, DeepSeek-R1, reaches 82.51%, underscoring both the dataset’s difficulty and the remaining performance gap in Persian commonsense reasoning. We further show that DRESS-AF transfers to the English HellaSwag benchmark, increasing its difficulty without hurting human solvability. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MCINext/PerCoR .

PerCoR: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning in Persian via Multiple-Choice Sentence Completion

Extracting sensory information from text, particularly olfactory references, is challenging due to limited annotated datasets and the implicit, subjective nature of sensory experiences. This study investigates whether GPT-4o-generated data can complement or replace human annotations. We evaluate human- and LLM-labeled corpora on two tasks: coarse-grained detection of olfactory content and fine-grained sensory term extraction. Despite lexical variation, generated texts align well with real data in semantic and sensorimotor embedding spaces. Models trained on synthetic data perform strongly, especially in low-resource settings. Human annotations offer better recall by capturing implicit and diverse aspects of sensoriality, while GPT-4o annotations show higher precision through clearer pattern alignment. Data augmentation experiments confirm the utility of synthetic data, though trade-offs remain between label consistency and lexical diversity. These findings support using synthetic data to enhance sensory information mining when annotated data is limited.

Enhancing Low-Resource Text Classification with LLM-Generated Corpora : A Case Study on Olfactory Reference Extraction

Recent advances in automatic evaluation of natural language generation have increasingly relied on large language models as general-purpose metrics. While effective, these approaches often require high-capacity models, which introduce substantial computational costs, and remain susceptible to known evaluation pathologies, such as over-reliance on likelihood. We introduce ContrastScore, a contrastive evaluation paradigm that builds on the widely used BARTScore formulation by comparing token-level probabilities between a stronger and a weaker model. Instead of relying on single-model likelihoods or prompt-based judgments, ContrastScore captures disagreement between models to better reflect confidence and uncertainty in generation quality. Empirical results on summarization and machine translation benchmarks show that ContrastScore, instantiated with paired moderate-scale models across both Qwen and LLaMA families, consistently outperforms larger alternatives, such as Qwen 7B and LLaMA 8B, in correlation with human ratings. In addition to improving evaluation quality, ContrastScore significantly reduces susceptibility to likelihood bias, offering a more robust and cost-effective alternative to larger LLM-based evaluation methods.

ContrastScore: Towards Higher Quality, Less Biased, More Efficient Evaluation Metrics with Contrastive Evaluation

Assessing scientific claims requires identifying, extracting, and reasoning with multimodal data expressed in information-rich figures in scientific literature. Despite the large body of work in scientific QA, figure captioning, and other multimodal reasoning tasks over chart-based data, there are no readily usable multimodal benchmarks that directly test claim verification abilities. To remedy this gap, we introduce a new benchmark MuSciClaims accompanied by diagnostics tasks. We automatically extract supported claims from scientific articles, which we manually perturb to produce contradicted claims. The perturbations are designed to test for a specific set of claim verification capabilities. We also introduce a suite of diagnostic tasks that help understand model failures. Our results show most vision-language models are poor ($\sim$0.3-0.5 F1), with even the best model only achieving 0.72 F1. They are also biased towards judging claims as supported, likely misunderstanding nuanced perturbations within the claims. Our diagnostics show models are bad at localizing correct evidence within figures, struggle with aggregating information across modalities, and often fail to understand basic components of the figure.

MuSciClaims: Multimodal Scientific Claim Verification

In this work, we address the problem of text anonymization where the goal is to prevent adversaries from correctly inferring private attributes of the author, while keeping the text utility, i.e., meaning and semantics. We propose IncogniText, a technique that anonymizes the text to mislead a potential adversary into predicting a wrong private attribute value. Our empirical evaluation shows a reduction of private attribute leakage by more than across 8 different private attributes. Finally, we demonstrate the maturity of IncogniText for real-world applications by distilling its anonymization capability into a set of LoRA parameters associated with an on-device model. Our results show the possibility of reducing privacy leakage by more than half with limited impact on utility.

IncogniText: Privacy-enhancing Conditional Text Anonymization via LLM-based Private Attribute Randomization

In this work, we introduce PII-Scope, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate state-of-the-art methodologies for PII extraction attacks targeting LLMs across diverse threat settings. Our study provides a deeper understanding of these attacks by uncovering several hyperparameters (e.g., demonstration selection) crucial to their effectiveness. Building on this understanding, we extend our study to more realistic attack scenarios, exploring PII attacks that employ advanced adversarial strategies, including repeated and diverse querying, and leveraging iterative learning for continual PII extraction. Through extensive experimentation, our results reveal a notable underestimation of PII leakage in existing single-query attacks. In fact, we show that with sophisticated adversarial capabilities and a limited query budget, PII extraction rates can increase by up to fivefold when targeting the pretrained model. Moreover, we evaluate PII leakage on finetuned models, showing that they are more vulnerable to leakage than pretrained models. Overall, our work establishes a rigorous empirical benchmark for PII extraction attacks in realistic threat scenarios and provides a strong foundation for developing effective mitigation strategies.

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Hildoc: Leveraging Hilbert Curve Representation for Accurate and Efficient Document Retrieval

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