China

Large Language Models (LLMs) with web search capabilities show significant potential for deep research, yet current methods—brittle prompt engineering or RAG-based reinforcement learning in controlled environments—fail to capture real-world complexities. In this paper, we introduce DeepResearcher, the first comprehensive framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents through scaling reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments with authentic web search interactions. Unlike RAG approaches reliant on fixed corpora, DeepResearcher trains agents to navigate the noisy, dynamic open web. We implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures and overcoming significant technical challenges. Extensive experiments on open-domain research tasks demonstrate that DeepResearcher achieves substantial improvements of up to 28.9 points over prompt engineering-based baselines and up to 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. Our qualitative analysis reveals emergent cognitive behaviors from end-to-end RL training, such as planning, cross-validation, self-reflection for research redirection, and maintain honesty when unable to find definitive answers. Our results highlight that end-to-end training in real-world web environments is fundamental for developing robust research capabilities aligned with real-world applications. The source code for DeepResearcher is released and has been included as an attachment.

EMNLP 2025

DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments

poster

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

[**Link to Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1johU5QqVVYO4RfH7QcIORr7qrVBdzdwC/view?usp=sharing)





<br>

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pre-training, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, the impact of SFT on a model’s knowledge remains underexplored, limiting our ability to control knowledge behavior in fine-tuned models. To address this gap, we evaluate closed-book question answering (CBQA) performance across five LLMs from the LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 families. Surprisingly, models fine-tuned on 1,920 samples perform up to 14% worse than those fine-tuned on only 240 samples. Furthermore, varying the level of knowledge mastery in the fine-tuning data leads to performance fluctuations of over 12%. To investigate these effects, we analyze model behavior at both the token and parameter levels. Our analysis reveals that up to 90% of parameter updates during SFT do not contribute to knowledge enhancement. Restoring these updates can improve performance on the CBQA task, depending on the characteristics of the fine-tuning data. These insights offer practical guidance for developing fine-tuning strategies that more effectively strengthen model knowledge.

Analyzing the Effects of Supervised Fine-Tuning on Model Knowledge from Token and Parameter Levels

The table reasoning task, crucial for efficient data acquisition, aims to answer questions based on the given table. Recently, reasoning large language models (RLLMs) with Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) significantly enhance reasoning capabilities, leading to brilliant performance on table reasoning. However, Long CoT suffers from high cost for training and exhibits low reliability due to table content hallucinations. Therefore, we propose Row-of-Thought (RoT), which performs iteratively row-wise table traversal, allowing for reasoning extension and reflection-based refinement at each traversal. Scaling reasoning length by row-wise traversal and leveraging reflection capabilities of LLMs, RoT is training-free. The sequential traversal encourages greater attention to the table, thus reducing hallucinations. Experiments show that RoT, using non-reasoning models, outperforms RLLMs by an average of 4.3%, and achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TableBench with comparable models, proving its effectiveness. Also, RoT outperforms Long CoT with fewer reasoning tokens, indicating higher efficiency.

RoT: Enhancing Table Reasoning with Iterative Row-Wise Traversals

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) face limitations in geometric reasoning due to insufficient Chain of Thought (CoT) image-text training data. While existing approaches leverage template-based or LLM-assisted methods for geometric CoT data creation, they often face challenges in achieving both diversity and precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce a two-stage Theorem-Validated Reverse Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Synthesis (TR-CoT) framework. The first stage, TR-Engine, synthesizes theorem-grounded geometric diagrams with structured descriptions and properties. The second stage, TR-Reasoner, employs reverse reasoning to iteratively refine question-answer pairs by cross-validating geometric properties and description fragments. Our approach expands theorem-type coverage, corrects long-standing misunderstandings, and enhances geometric reasoning. Fine-grained CoT improves theorem understanding and increases logical consistency by 24.5%. Our best models surpass the baselines in MathVista and GeoQA by 10.1% and 4.7%, outperforming advanced closed-source models like GPT-4o.

Theorem-Validated Reverse Chain-of-Thought Problem Generation for Geometric Reasoning

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a key mechanism for harnessing the capabilities of large vision–language models (LVLMs). However, its effectiveness remains highly sensitive to the quality of input in-context sequences, particularly for tasks involving complex reasoning or open-ended generation. A major limitation is our limited understanding of how LVLMs actually exploit these sequences during inference. To bridge this gap, we systematically interpret multimodal ICL through the lens of \textbf{task mapping}, which reveals how local and global relationships within and among demonstrations guide model reasoning. Building on this insight, we present \textbf{TACO}, a lightweight transformer-based model equipped with task-aware attention that dynamically configures in-context sequences. By injecting task-mapping signals into the autoregressive decoding process, TACO creates a bidirectional synergy between sequence construction and task reasoning. Experiments on five LVLMs and nine datasets demonstrate that TACO consistently surpasses baselines across diverse ICL tasks. These results position task mapping as a valuable perspective for interpreting and improving multimodal ICL.

TACO: Enhancing Multimodal In-context Learning via Task Mapping-Guided Sequence Configuration

Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks often segment documents into larger chunks to preserve contextual coherence, inadvertently introducing redundant noise. Recent advanced RAG frameworks have shifted toward finer-grained chunking to improve precision. However, in long-document scenarios, such chunking methods lead to fragmented contexts, isolated chunk semantics, and broken inter-chunk relationships, making cross-paragraph retrieval particularly challenging. To address this challenge, maintaining granular chunks while recovering their intrinsic semantic connections, we propose **SAKI-RAG** (Sentence-level Attention Knowledge Integration Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Our framework introduces two core components: (1) the **SentenceAttnLinker**, which constructs a semantically enriched knowledge repository by modeling inter-sentence attention relationships, and (2) the **Dual-Axis Retriever**, which is designed to expand and filter the candidate chunks from the dual dimensions of semantic similarity and contextual relevance. Experimental results across four datasets—Dragonball, SQUAD, NFCORPUS, and SCI-DOCS demonstrate that SAKI-RAG achieves better recall and precision compared to other RAG frameworks in long-document retrieval scenarios, while also exhibiting higher information efficiency.

SAKI-RAG: Mitigating Context Fragmentation in Long-Document RAG via Sentence-level Attention Knowledge Integration

High-quality labeled data is essential for training accurate document conversion models, particularly in domains with complex formats such as tables, formulas, and multi-column text. However, manual annotation is both costly and time-consuming, while automatic labeling using existing models often lacks accuracy in handling such challenging scenarios. Consequently, training student models by distilling outputs from teacher models can significantly limit their performance in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a fully automated, distillation-free framework comprising two stages for constructing high-quality document extraction datasets and models capable of handling diverse document formats and layouts. In the first stage, we introduce a method for generating large-scale, diverse synthetic data, which enables a model to extract key elements in a unified format with strong initial performance. In the second stage, we present a self-improvement approach that further adapts the model, initially trained on synthetic data, to real-world documents. Specifically, we first use the fine-tuned model to annotate real documents, then apply a suite of filtering strategies to verify annotation quality, and finally retrain the model on the verified dataset. By iteratively repeating this process, we progressively enhance both the model’s conversion capabilities and the quality of the generated data. We train a public POINTS-1.5 model to obtain \textit{POINTS-Reader}, which surpasses many existing public and proprietary models of comparable or larger size. Our model will be made publicly available.

POINTS-Reader: Distillation-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Document Conversion

This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for annotating document utility in training retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, aiming to reduce dependence on costly human annotations. We address the gap between retrieval relevance and generative utility by employing LLMs to annotate document utility. To effectively utilize multiple positive samples per query, we introduce a novel loss that maximizes their summed marginal likelihood. Using the Qwen-2.5-32B model, we annotate utility on the MS MARCO dataset and conduct retrieval experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR, as well as RAG experiments on MS MARCO QA, NQ, and HotpotQA. Our results show that LLM-generated annotations enhance out-of-domain retrieval performance and improve RAG outcomes compared to models trained solely on human annotations or downstream QA metrics. Furthermore, combining LLM annotations with just 20% of human labels achieves performance comparable to using full human annotations. Our study offers a comprehensive approach to utilizing LLM annotations for initializing QA systems on new corpora.

Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Local citation recommendation (LCR) suggests a set of papers for a citation placeholder within a given context. This paper introduces CiteBART, citation-specific pre-training within an encoder-decoder architecture, where author-date citation tokens are masked to learn to reconstruct them to fulfill LCR. The global version (CiteBART-Global) extends the local context with the citing paper's title and abstract to enrich the learning signal. CiteBART-Global achieves state-of-the-art performance on LCR benchmarks except for the FullTextPeerRead dataset, which is quite small to see the advantage of generative pre-training. The effect is significant in the larger benchmarks, e.g., Refseer and ArXiv., with the Refseer pre-trained model emerging as the best-performing model. We perform comprehensive experiments, including an ablation study, a qualitative analysis, and a taxonomy of hallucinations with detailed statistics. Our analyses confirm that CiteBART-Global has a cross-dataset generalization capability; the macro hallucination rate (MaHR) at the top-3 predictions is 4%, and when the ground-truth is in the top-k prediction list, the hallucination tendency in the other predictions drops significantly. We publicly share our code to support reproducibility.

CiteBART: Learning to Generate Citations for Local Citation Recommendation

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of vision applications of increasing complexity and scales, yet choosing the right VLM model size involves a trade-off between response quality and cost. While smaller VLMs are cheaper to run, they typically produce responses only marginally better than random guessing on benchmarks such as MMMU. In this paper, we propose Cache of Thought (CoT), a master–apprentice framework for collaborative inference between large and small VLMs. CoT manages high-quality query results from large VLMs (master) in a cache, which are then selected via a novel multi-modal retrieval and in-context learning to aid the performance of small VLMs (apprentice). We extensively evaluate CoT on various widely-recognized and challenging general VQA benchmarks, and show that CoT increases overall VQA performance by up to 7.7% under the same budget, and specifically boosts the performance of apprentice VLMs by up to 36.6%.

Cache-of-Thought: Master-Apprentice Framework for Cost-Effective Vision Language Model Reasoning

Video large language models (VideoLLM) excel at video understanding, but face efficiency challenges due to the quadratic complexity of abundant visual tokens. Our systematic analysis of token compression methods for VideoLLMs reveals two critical issues: \textbf{(i)} overlooking distinctive visual signals across frames, leading to information loss; \textbf{(ii)} suffering from implementation constraints, causing incompatibility with modern architectures or efficient operators. To address these challenges, we distill three design principles for VideoLLM token compression and propose a plug-and-play inference acceleration framework ``\textbf{Vid}eo \textbf{Com}pression \textbf{Com}mander'' (\textbf{VidCom²}). By quantifying each frame’s uniqueness, VidCom² adaptively adjusts compression intensity across frames, effectively preserving essential information while reducing redundancy in video sequences. Extensive experiments across various VideoLLMs and benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our VidCom². With only \textbf{25\%} visual tokens, VidCom² achieves \textbf{99.6\%} of the original performance on LLaVA-OV while reducing \textbf{70.8\%} of the LLM generation latency. Notably, our Frame Compression Adjustment strategy is compatible with other token compression methods to further improve their performance. \emph{Codes are available in the supplementary materials and will be released on GitHub. }

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Analyzing the Effects of Supervised Fine-Tuning on Model Knowledge from Token and Parameter Levels

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