United States

Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has been suggested that the effectiveness of BPE stems from its ability to condense text into a relatively small number of tokens. We test the hypothesis that fewer tokens lead to better downstream performance by introducing PathPiece, a new tokenizer that segments a document&#39;s text into the minimum number of tokens for a given vocabulary. Through extensive experimentation we find this hypothesis not to be the case, casting doubt on the understanding of the reasons for effective tokenization. To examine which other factors play a role, we evaluate design decisions across all three phases of tokenization: pre-tokenization, vocabulary construction, and segmentation, offering new insights into the design of effective tokenizers. Specifically, we illustrate the importance of pre-tokenization and the benefits of using BPE to initialize vocabulary construction. We train 64 language models with varying tokenization, ranging in size from 350M to 2.4B parameters, all of which are made publicly available.

EMNLP 2024

Tokenization Is More Than Compression

text-to-text models

safety evaluation

text-to-image models

red teaming

responsible ai

in-context learning

### 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* 
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IJCNLP-AACL 2025

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

Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has been suggested that the effectiveness of BPE stems from its ability to condense text into a relatively small number of tokens. We test the hypothesis that fewer tokens lead to better downstream performance by introducing PathPiece, a new tokenizer that segments a document's text into the minimum number of tokens for a given vocabulary. Through extensive experimentation we find this hypothesis not to be the case, casting doubt on the understanding of the reasons for effective tokenization. To examine which other factors play a role, we evaluate design decisions across all three phases of tokenization: pre-tokenization, vocabulary construction, and segmentation, offering new insights into the design of effective tokenizers. Specifically, we illustrate the importance of pre-tokenization and the benefits of using BPE to initialize vocabulary construction. We train 64 language models with varying tokenization, ranging in size from 350M to 2.4B parameters, all of which are made publicly available.

technical paper

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Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of `non-human' agents, such as the ones backed by large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Nonetheless, spatial reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs in this setup remain unattested and underexplored. In this work, we study their capability to understand and reason over spatial relations from the top view. The focus on top view also enables controlled evaluations at different granularity of spatial reasoning; we clearly disentangle different abilities (e.g., recognizing particular objects versus understanding their relative positions). We introduce the TopViewRS (Top-View Reasoning in Space) dataset, consisting of 11,384 multiple-choice questions with either realistic or semantic top-view map as visual input. We then use it to study and evaluate VLMs across 4 perception and reasoning tasks with different levels of complexity. Evaluation of 10 representative open- and closed-source VLMs reveals the gap of more than 50% compared to average human performance, and it is even lower than the random baseline in some cases. Although additional experiments show that Chain-of-Thought reasoning can boost model capabilities by 5.82% on average, the overall performance of VLMs remains limited. Our findings underscore the critical need for enhanced model capability in top-view spatial reasoning and set a foundation for further research towards human-level proficiency of VLMs in real-world multimodal tasks.

TopViewRS: Vision-Language Models as Top-View Spatial Reasoners

Understanding how Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) learn and recall information is a key goal of the deep learning community. Recent interpretability methods project weights and hidden states obtained from the forward pass to the models' vocabularies, helping to uncover how information flows within LMs. In this work, we extend this methodology to LMs’ backward pass and gradients. We first prove that a gradient matrix can be cast as a low-rank linear combination of its forward and backward passes' inputs. We then develop methods to project these gradients into vocabulary items and explore the mechanics of how new information is stored in the LMs' neurons.

Backward Lens: Projecting Language Model Gradients into the Vocabulary Space

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLM) have led to substantial interest in their application to commonsense reasoning tasks. Despite their potential, LLMs are susceptible to reasoning errors and hallucinations that may be harmful in use cases where accurate reasoning is critical. This challenge underscores the need for verifiable, debuggable, and repairable LLM reasoning. Recent works have made progress toward verifiable reasoning with LLMs by using them as either (i) a reasoner over an axiomatic knowledge base, or (ii) a semantic parser for use in existing logical inference systems. However, both settings are unable to extract commonsense axioms from the LLM that are not already formalized in the knowledge base, and also lack a reliable method to repair missed commonsense inferences. In this work, we present LLM-TRes, a logical reasoning framework based on the notion of "theory resolution" that allows for seamless integration of the commonsense knowledge from LLMs with a verifiable logical reasoning framework that mitigates hallucinations and facilitates debugging of the reasoning procedure as well as repair. We crucially prove that repaired axioms are theoretically guaranteed to be given precedence over flawed ones in our theory resolution inference process. We conclude by evaluating on three diverse language-based reasoning tasks—preference reasoning, deductive reasoning, and causal commonsense reasoning—and demonstrate the superior performance of LLM-TRes vs. state-of-the-art LLM-based reasoning methods in terms of both accuracy and reasoning correctness.

Verifiable, Debuggable, and Repairable Commonsense Logical Reasoning via LLM-based Theory Resolution

Large language models (LLMs) usually fall short on information extraction (IE) tasks and struggle to follow the complex instructions of IE tasks. This primarily arises from LLMs not being aligned with humans, as mainstream alignment datasets typically do not include IE data. In this paper, we introduce **ADELIE** (**A**ligning large language mo**DEL**s on **I**nformation **E**xtraction), an aligned LLM that effectively solves various IE tasks, including closed IE, open IE, and on-demand IE. We first collect and construct a high-quality alignment corpus IEInstruct for IE. Then we train $ADELIE_{SFT}$ using instruction tuning on IEInstruct. We further train $ADELIE_{SFT}$
with direct preference optimization (DPO) objective, resulting in $ADELIE_{DPO}$. Extensive experiments on various held-out IE datasets demonstrate that our models ($ADELIE_{SFT}$ and $ADELIE_{DPO}$) achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance among open-source models. We further explore the general capabilities of ADELIE, and experimental results reveal that their general capabilities do not exhibit a noticeable decline. We have released the code, data, and models to facilitate further research.

ADELIE: Aligning Large Language Models on Information Extraction

Given the rise of multimedia content, human translators increasingly focus on culturally adapting not only words but also other modalities such as images to convey the same meaning. While several applications stand to benefit from this, machine translation systems remain confined to dealing with language in speech and text. In this work, we introduce a new task of translating images to make them culturally relevant. First, we build three pipelines comprising state-of-the-art generative models to do the task. Next, we build a two-part evaluation dataset -- (i) concept: comprising 600 images that are cross-culturally coherent, focusing on a single concept per image; and (ii) application: comprising 100 images curated from real-world applications. We conduct a multi-faceted human evaluation of translated images to assess for cultural relevance and meaning preservation. We find that as of today, image-editing models fail at this task, but can be improved by leveraging LLMs and retrievers in the loop. Best pipelines can only translate 5% of images for some countries in the easier concept dataset and no translation is successful for some countries in the application dataset, highlighting the challenging nature of the task. Our project webpage is here: https://machine-transcreation.github.io/image-transcreation and our code, data and model outputs can be found here: https://github.com/simran-khanuja/image-transcreation.

An image speaks a thousand words, but can everyone listen? On image transcreation for cultural relevance

Methods for mitigating toxic content through masking and infilling often overlook the decision-making process, leading to either insufficient or excessive modifications of toxic tokens. To address this challenge, we propose XDetox, a novel method that integrates token-level toxicity explanations with the masking and infilling detoxification process. We utilized this approach with two strategies to enhance the performance of detoxification. First, identifying toxic tokens to improve the quality of masking. Second, selecting the regenerated sentence by re-ranking the least toxic sentence among candidates. Our experimental results show state-of-the-art performance across four datasets compared to existing detoxification methods. Furthermore, human evaluations indicate that our method outperforms baselines in both fluency and toxicity reduction. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in text detoxification.

XDetox: Text Detoxification with Token-Level Toxicity Explanations

The rapid growth of evaluation methodologies and datasets for large language models (LLMs) has created a pressing need for their unified integration. Meanwhile, concerns about data contamination and bias compromise the trustworthiness of evaluation findings, while the efficiency of evaluation processes remains a bottleneck due to the significant computational costs associated with LLM inference. In response to these challenges, we introduce FreeEval, a modular framework not only for conducting trustworthy and efficient automatic evaluations of LLMs but also serving as a platform to develop and validate new evaluation methodologies. FreeEval addresses key challenges through: (1) unified abstractions that simplify the integration of diverse evaluation methods, including dynamic evaluations requiring complex LLM interactions; (2) built-in meta-evaluation techniques such as data contamination detection and human evaluation to enhance result fairness; (3) a high-performance infrastructure with distributed computation and caching strategies for efficient large-scale evaluations; and (4) an interactive Visualizer for result analysis and interpretation to support innovation of evaluation techniques. We open-source all our code at https://github.com/WisdomShell/FreeEval and our demostration video, live demo, installation guides are available at: https://freeeval.zhuohao.me/.

FreeEval: A Modular Framework for Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models

Recent large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of advanced agentic systems that can integrate various tools and APIs to fulfill user queries through function calling. However, the deployment of these LLMs on the edge has not been explored since they typically require cloud-based infrastructure due to their substantial model size and computational demands. To this end, we present TinyAgent, an end-to-end framework for training and deploying task-specific small language model agents capable of function calling for driving agentic systems at the edge. We first show how to enable accurate function calling for open-source models via the LLMCompiler framework. We then systematically curate a high-quality dataset for function calling, which we use to fine-tune two small language models, TinyAgent-1.1B and 7B. For efficient inference, we introduce a novel tool retrieval method to reduce the input prompt length and utilize quantization to further accelerate the inference speed. As a driving application, we demonstrate a local Siri-like system for Apple's MacBook that can execute user commands through text or voice input. Our results show that our models can achieve, and even surpass, the function-calling capabilities of larger models like GPT-4-Turbo, while being fully deployed at the edge. We open-source our [dataset, models, and installable package](https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/TinyAgent) and provide a [demo video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GvaGL9IDpQ) for our MacBook assistant agent.

TinyAgent: Function Calling at the Edge

Recently, there has been increasing interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct complex multi-agent systems to perform tasks such as compiling literature reviews, drafting consumer reports, and planning vacations. Many tools and libraries exist for helping create such systems, however none support *recursive* multi-agent systems---where the models themselves flexibly decide when to delegate tasks and how to organize their delegation structure. In this work, we introduce ReDel: a toolkit for recursive multi-agent systems that supports custom tool-use, delegation schemes, event-based logging, and interactive replay in an easy-to-use web interface. We show that, using ReDel, we are able to achieve significant performance gains on agentic benchmarks and easily identify potential areas of improvements through the visualization and debugging tools. Our code, documentation, and PyPI package are open-source at https://github.com/zhudotexe/redel, and free to use under the MIT license.

ReDel: A Toolkit for LLM-Powered Recursive Multi-Agent Systems

We deal with the problem of Question Answering (QA) over a long document, which poses a challenge for modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Although LLMs can handle increasingly longer context windows, they struggle to effectively utilize the long content. To address this issue, we introduce the concept of a virtual document (VDoc). A VDoc is created by selecting chunks from the original document that are most likely to contain the information needed to answer the user’s question, while ensuring they fit within the LLM’s context window. We hypothesize that providing a short and focused VDoc to the LLM is more effective than filling the entire context window with less relevant information. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis and demonstrate that using VDocs improves results on the QA task.

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TopViewRS: Vision-Language Models as Top-View Spatial Reasoners

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Broken Words, Broken Performance: Effect of Tokenization on Performance of LLMs