In this paper, we present our submission to SemEval-2025 Task 8: Question Answering over Tabular Data. This task, evaluated on the DataBench dataset, assesses Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to answer natural language questions over structured data while addressing topic diversity and table size limitations in previous benchmarks. We propose a system that employs effective LLM prompting to translate natural language queries into executable code, enabling accurate responses, error correction, and interpretability. Our approach ranks first in both subtasks of the competition in the proprietary model category, significantly outperforming the organizer's baseline.

Machine Translation (MT) systems frequently encounter ambiguous scenarios where they must assign gender to certain occupations when translating without explicit guidance or contextual cues. While individual translations in such cases may not be inherently biased, systematic patterns-such as the repeated association of certain professions with specific genders-can emerge, reflecting and perpetuating societal stereotypes. This ambiguity challenges traditional instance-level single-answer evaluation approaches, as no single gold standard translation exists. To address this, we propose an approach that evaluates gender bias through aggregated model responses. Specifically, we introduce a methodology to detect gender imbalances between source texts and translations, a benchmarking dataset with ambiguous English inputs, and probability-based metrics to quantify a model's divergence from normative standards or reference distributions.

As deep learning models grow in complexity, achieving model-agnostic interpretability becomes increasingly vital. In this work, we employ post-hoc conceptual contrastive edits to expose noteworthy patterns and biases imprinted in representations of retrieval models. We systematically design optimal and controllable contrastive interventions targeting various parts of speech, and effectively apply them to explain both linguistic and visiolinguistic pre-trained models in a black-box manner. Additionally, we introduce a novel metric to assess the per-word impact of contrastive interventions on model outcomes, providing a comprehensive evaluation of each intervention's effectiveness.

In the dynamic landscape of artificial intelligence, the exploration of hallucinations within vision-language (VL) models emerges as a critical frontier. This work delves into the intricacies of hallucinatory phenomena exhibited by widely used image captioners, unraveling interesting patterns. Specifically, we step upon previously introduced techniques of conceptual counterfactual explanations to address VL hallucinations. The deterministic and efficient nature of the employed conceptual counterfactuals backbone is able to suggest semantically minimal edits driven by hierarchical knowledge, so that the transition from a hallucinated caption to a non-hallucinated one is performed in a black-box manner. HalCECE, our proposed hallucination detection framework is highly interpretable, by providing semantically meaningful edits apart from standalone numbers, while the hierarchical decomposition of hallucinated concepts leads to a thorough hallucination analysis. Another novelty tied to the current work is the investigation of role hallucinations, being one of the first works to involve interconnections between visual concepts in hallucination detection. Overall, HalCECE recommends an explainable direction to the crucial field of VL hallucination detection, thus fostering trustworthy evaluation of current and future VL systems.

Inverse tasks can uncover potential reasoning gaps as Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up. In this work, we explore the redefinition task, in which we assign alternative values to well-known physical constants and units of measure, prompting LLMs to respond accordingly. Our findings show that not only does model performance degrade with scale, but its false confidence also rises. Moreover, while factors such as prompting strategies or response formatting are influential, they do not preclude LLMs from anchoring to memorized values.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized product recommendation systems, yet their susceptibility to adversarial manipulation poses critical challenges, particularly in real-world commercial applications. Our approach is the first one to tap into human psychological principles, seamlessly modifying product descriptions, making these adversarial manipulations hard to detect. In this work, we investigate cognitive biases as black-box adversarial strategies, drawing parallels between their effects on LLMs and human purchasing behavior. Through extensive experiments on LLMs of varying scales, we reveal significant vulnerabilities in their use as recommenders, providing critical insights into safeguarding these systems.

Riddle-solving requires advanced reasoning skills, pushing LLMs to engage in abstract thinking and creative problem-solving, often revealing limitations in their cognitive abilities. In this paper, we examine the riddle-solving capabilities of LLMs using a multiple-choice format, exploring how different prompting techniques impact performance on riddles that demand diverse reasoning skills. To enhance results, we introduce RISCORE (RIddle Solving with COntext REcontruciton) a novel fully automated prompting method that generates and utilizes contextually reconstructed sentence-based puzzles in conjunction with the original examples to create few-shot exemplars. Our experiments demonstrate that RISCORE significantly improves the performance of language models in both vertical and lateral thinking tasks, surpassing traditional exemplar selection strategies across a variety of few-shot settings.

Chord progressions encapsulate important information about music, pertaining to its structure and conveyed emotions. They serve as the backbone of musical composition, and in many cases, they are the sole information required for a musician to play along and follow the music. Despite their importance, chord progressions as a data domain remain underexplored. There is a lack of large-scale datasets suitable for deep learning applications, and limited research exploring chord progressions as an input modality. In this work, we present Chordonomicon, a dataset of over 666,000 songs and their chord progressions, annotated with structural parts, genre, and release date - created by scraping various sources of user-generated progressions and associated metadata. We demonstrate the practical utility of the Chordonomicon dataset for classification and generation tasks, and discuss its potential to provide valuable insights to the research community. Chord progressions are unique in their ability to be represented in multiple formats (e.g. text, graph) and the wealth of information chords convey in given contexts, such as their harmonic function . These characteristics make the Chordonomicon an ideal testbed for exploring advanced machine learning techniques, including transformers, graph machine learning, and hybrid systems that combine knowledge representation and machine learning.

We describe our contribution to the Strict and Strict-Small tracks of the 2nd iteration of the BabyLM Challenge. The shared task is centered around efficient pre-training given data constraints motivated by human development. In response, we study the effect of synthetic story data in language pre-training using TinyStories: a recently introduced dataset of short stories. Initially, we train GPT-Neo models on subsets of TinyStories, while varying the amount of available data. We find that, even with access to less than 100M words, the models are able to generate high-quality, original completions to a given story, and acquire substantial linguistic knowledge. To measure the effect of synthetic story data, we train LTG-BERT encoder models on a combined dataset of: a subset of TinyStories, story completions generated by GPT-Neo, and a subset of the BabyLM dataset. Our experimentation reveals that synthetic data can occasionally offer modest gains, but overall have a negative influence on linguistic understanding. Our work offers an initial study on synthesizing story data in low resource settings and underscores their potential for augmentation in data-constrained language modeling. We publicly release our models and implementation on our GitHub.

Large language models have evolved to process multiple modalities beyond text, such as images and audio, which motivates us to explore how to effectively leverage them for graph machine learning tasks. The key question, therefore, is how to transform graphs into linear sequences of tokens, a process we term graph linearization, so that LLMs can handle graphs naturally. We consider that graphs should be linearized meaningfully to reflect certain properties of natural language text, such as local dependency and global alignment, in order to ease contemporary LLMs, trained on trillions of textual tokens, better understand graphs. To achieve this, we developed several graph linearization methods based on graph centrality, degeneracy, and node relabeling schemes. We then investigated their effect on LLM performance in graph reasoning tasks. Experimental results on synthetic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods compared to random linearization baselines. Our work introduces novel graph representations suitable for LLMs, contributing to the potential integration of graph machine learning with the trend of multi-modal processing using a unified transformer model.