Beong-woo Kwak


2025

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LLM Meets Scene Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand and Generate Scene Graphs? A Benchmark and Empirical Study
Dongil Yang | Minjin Kim | Sunghwan Kim | Beong-woo Kwak | Minjun Park | Jinseok Hong | Woontack Woo | Jinyoung Yeo
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The remarkable reasoning and generalization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for their expanding applications in embodied AI, robotics, and other real-world tasks. To effectively support these applications, grounding in spatial and temporal understanding in multimodal environments is essential. To this end, recent works have leveraged scene graphs, a structured representation that encodes entities, attributes, and their relationships in a scene. However, a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs’ ability to utilize scene graphs remains limited. In this work, we introduce Text-Scene Graph (TSG) Bench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess LLMs’ ability to (1) understand scene graphs and (2) generate them from textual narratives. With TSG Bench we evaluate 11 LLMs and reveal that, while models perform well on scene graph understanding, they struggle with scene graph generation, particularly for complex narratives. Our analysis indicates that these models fail to effectively decompose discrete scenes from a complex narrative, leading to a bottleneck when generating scene graphs. These findings underscore the need for improved methodologies in scene graph generation and provide valuable insights for future research. The demonstration of our benchmark is available at https://tsg-bench.netlify.app. Additionally, our code and evaluation data are publicly available at https://github.com/docworlds/tsg-bench.

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One Missing Piece for Open-Source Reasoning Models: A Dataset to Mitigate Cold-Starting Short CoT LLMs in RL
Hyungjoo Chae | Dongjin Kang | Jihyuk Kim | Beong-woo Kwak | Sunghyun Park | Haeju Park | Jinyoung Yeo | Moontae Lee | Kyungjae Lee
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)

With the release of R1, a publicly available large reasoning model (LRM), researchers commonly train new LRMs by training language models on R1’s long chain-of-thought (CoT) inferences. While prior works show that LRMs’ capabilities can be reproduced through direct distillation, the continued reliance on the existing models (e.g., R1) remains a critical limitation in advancing the field.As a first step toward independent LRM development, this paper explores the possibility of constructing a long CoT dataset with LLMs that are not trained for inference-time scaling.To this end, we present the Long CoT Collection, a dataset of 100K CoT rationales annotated using existing short CoT LLMs. We develop a pipeline that induces o1’s novel reasoning strategies into short CoT LLMs, enabling them to think longer and introducing controllability over the thought budget to better manage the overthinking problem.Our extensive analyses validate that our dataset achieves quality comparable to—or slightly below—R1. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that training on our dataset not only strengthens general reasoning skills, but also provides a strong foundation for reinforcement learning—models initialized on our data achieve 2-3x larger gains with RLVR. We make the codes, datasets, and models publicly available at LINK.

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Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics
Seungbeen Lee | Seungwon Lim | Seungju Han | Giyeong Oh | Hyungjoo Chae | Jiwan Chung | Minju Kim | Beong-woo Kwak | Yeonsoo Lee | Dongha Lee | Jinyoung Yeo | Youngjae Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adaptation in various domains as conversational agents. We wonder: can personality tests be applied to these agents to analyze their behavior, similar to humans? We introduce TRAIT, a new benchmark consisting of 8K multi-choice questions designed to assess the personality of LLMs. TRAIT is built on two psychometrically validated small human questionnaires, Big Five Inventory (BFI) and Short Dark Triad (SD-3), enhanced with the ATOMIC-10X knowledge graph to a variety of real-world scenarios. TRAIT also outperforms existing personality tests for LLMs in terms of reliability and validity, achieving the highest scores across four key metrics: Content Validity, Internal Validity, Refusal Rate, and Reliability. Using TRAIT, we reveal two notable insights into personalities of LLMs: 1) LLMs exhibit distinct and consistent personality, which is highly influenced by their training data (e.g., data used for alignment tuning), and 2) current prompting techniques have limited effectiveness in eliciting certain traits, such as high psychopathy or low conscientiousness, suggesting the need for further research in this direction.

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Can You Share Your Story? Modeling Clients’ Metacognition and Openness for LLM Therapist Evaluation
Minju Kim | Dongje Yoo | Yeonjun Hwang | Minseok Kang | Namyoung Kim | Minju Gwak | Beong-woo Kwak | Hyungjoo Chae | Harim Kim | Yunjoong Lee | Min Hee Kim | Dayi Jung | Kyong-Mee Chung | Jinyoung Yeo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Understanding clients’ thoughts and beliefs is fundamental in counseling, yet current evaluations of LLM therapists often fail to assess this ability. Existing evaluation methods rely on client simulators that clearly disclose internal states to the therapist, making it difficult to determine whether an LLM therapist can uncover unexpressed perspectives. To address this limitation, we introduce MindVoyager, a novel evaluation framework featuring a controllable and realistic client simulator which dynamically adapts itself based on the ongoing counseling session, offering a more realistic and challenging evaluation environment. We further introduce evaluation metrics that assess the exploration ability of LLM therapists by measuring their thorough understanding of client’s beliefs and thoughts.

2024

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Language Models as Compilers: Simulating Pseudocode Execution Improves Algorithmic Reasoning in Language Models
Hyungjoo Chae | Yeonghyeon Kim | Seungone Kim | Kai Tzu-iunn Ong | Beong-woo Kwak | Moohyeon Kim | Sunghwan Kim | Taeyoon Kwon | Jiwan Chung | Youngjae Yu | Jinyoung Yeo
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Algorithmic reasoning tasks that involve complex logical patterns, such as completing Dyck language, pose challenges for large language models (LLMs), despite their recent success. Prior work has used LLMs to generate programming language and applied external compilers for such tasks. Yet, when on the fly, it is hard to generate an executable code with the correct logic for the solution. Even so, code for one instance cannot be reused for others, although they might require the same logic to solve. We present Think-and-Execute, a novel framework that improves LLMs’ algorithmic reasoning: (1) In Think, we discover task-level logic shared across all instances, and express such logic with pseudocode; (2) In Execute, we tailor the task-level pseudocode to each instance and simulate the execution of it. Think-and-Execute outperforms several strong baselines (including CoT and PoT) in diverse algorithmic reasoning tasks. We manifest the advantage of using task-level pseudocode over generating instance-specific solutions one by one. Also, we show that pseudocode can better improve LMs’ reasoning than natural language (NL) guidance, even though they are trained with NL instructions.

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Coffee-Gym: An Environment for Evaluating and Improving Natural Language Feedback on Erroneous Code
Hyungjoo Chae | Taeyoon Kwon | Seungjun Moon | Yongho Song | Dongjin Kang | Kai Tzu-iunn Ong | Beong-woo Kwak | Seonghyeon Bae | Seung-won Hwang | Jinyoung Yeo
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper presents Coffee-Gym, a comprehensive RL environment for training models that provide feedback on code editing. Coffee-Gym includes two major components: (1) Coffee, a dataset containing humans’ code edit traces for coding questions and human-written feedback for editing erroneous code; (2) CoffeeEval, a reward function that faithfully reflects the helpfulness of feedback by assessing the performance of the revised code in unit tests. With them, Coffee-Gym addresses the unavailability of high-quality datasets for training feedback models with RL, and provides more accurate rewards than the SOTA reward model (i.e., GPT-4). By applying Coffee-Gym, we elicit feedback models that outperform baselines in enhancing open-source code LLMs’ code editing, making them comparable with closed-source LLMs. We make the dataset and the model checkpoint publicly available in https://huggingface.co/spaces/Coffee-Gym/Project-Coffee-Gym.

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Pearl: A Review-driven Persona-Knowledge Grounded Conversational Recommendation Dataset
Minjin Kim | Minju Kim | Hana Kim | Beong-woo Kwak | SeongKu Kang | Youngjae Yu | Jinyoung Yeo | Dongha Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Conversational recommender systems are an emerging area that has garnered increasing interest in the community, especially with the advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enable sophisticated handling of conversational input. Despite the progress, the field still has many aspects left to explore. The currently available public datasets for conversational recommendation lack specific user preferences and explanations for recommendations, hindering high-quality recommendations. To address such challenges, we present a novel conversational recommendation dataset named PEARL, synthesized with persona- and knowledge-augmented LLM simulators. We obtain detailed persona and knowledge from real-world reviews and construct a large-scale dataset with over 57k dialogues. Our experimental results demonstrate that PEARL contains more specific user preferences, show expertise in the target domain, and provides recommendations more relevant to the dialogue context than those in prior datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of PEARL by showing that our downstream models outperform baselines in both human and automatic evaluations. We release our dataset and code.

2022

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Modularized Transfer Learning with Multiple Knowledge Graphs for Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning
Yu Jin Kim | Beong-woo Kwak | Youngwook Kim | Reinald Kim Amplayo | Seung-won Hwang | Jinyoung Yeo
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Commonsense reasoning systems should be able to generalize to diverse reasoning cases. However, most state-of-the-art approaches depend on expensive data annotations and overfit to a specific benchmark without learning how to perform general semantic reasoning. To overcome these drawbacks, zero-shot QA systems have shown promise as a robust learning scheme by transforming a commonsense knowledge graph (KG) into synthetic QA-form samples for model training. Considering the increasing type of different commonsense KGs, this paper aims to extend the zero-shot transfer learning scenario into multiple-source settings, where different KGs can be utilized synergetically. Towards this goal, we propose to mitigate the loss of knowledge from the interference among the different knowledge sources, by developing a modular variant of the knowledge aggregation as a new zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework. Results on five commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, improving the performance with multiple KGs.