China

Current research on long-form context in Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focuses on the understanding of long-contexts, the **Open-ended Long Text Generation** (Open-LTG) remains insufficiently explored. Training a long text generation model requires curation of gold-standard reference data, which is typically nonexistent for informative Open-LTG tasks. However, previous methods only utilize general assessments as reward signals, which limits accuracy. To bridge this gap, we introduce **ProxyReward**, an innovative reinforcement learning (RL) based framework, which includes a data synthesis method and a novel reward signal. Firstly, **ProxyReward Dataset** synthesis is accomplished through simple prompts that enables the model to create automatically, obviating extensive labeled data or significant manual effort. Secondly, **ProxyReward Signal** offers a targeted evaluation of information comprehensiveness and accuracy for specific questions. The experimental results indicate that our method ProxyReward **surpasses even GPT-4-Turbo**. It can significantly enhance performance by 20% on the Open-LTG task when training widely used open-source models, while also surpassing the LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Our work presents effective methods to enhance the ability of LLMs to address complex open-ended questions posed by humans.

EMNLP 2025

From General Reward to Targeted Reward: Improving Open-ended Long-context Generation Models

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.

Selecting high-quality and diverse training samples from extensive datasets plays a crucial role in reducing training overhead and enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing studies fall short in assessing the overall value of selected data, focusing primarily on individual quality, and struggle to strike an effective balance between ensuring diversity and minimizing data point traversals. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel choice-based sample selection framework that shifts the focus from evaluating individual sample quality to comparing the contribution value of different samples when incorporated into the subset. Thanks to the advanced language understanding capabilities of LLMs, we utilize LLMs to evaluate the value of each option during the selection process. Furthermore, we design a greedy sampling process where samples are incrementally added to the subset, thereby improving efficiency by eliminating the need for exhaustive traversal of the entire dataset with the limited budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate that selected data from our method not only surpasses the performance of the full dataset but also achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art (SOTA) studies, while requiring fewer selections. Moreover, we validate our approach on a larger medical dataset, highlighting its practical applicability in real-world applications.

Add-One-In: Incremental Sample Selection for Large Language Models via a Choice-Based Greedy Paradigm

The reward model (RM) plays a crucial role in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning, where the Bradley-Terry (BT) objective has been recognized as simple yet powerful, specifically for pairwise preference comparison. However, BT-based RMs often struggle to effectively distinguish between similar preference responses, leading to insufficient separation between preferred and non-preferred outputs. Consequently, they may easily overfit easy samples and cannot generalize well to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) samples, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an effective enhancement to BT-based RMs through an adaptive margin mechanism. Specifically, we design to dynamically adjust the RM focus on more challenging samples through margins, based on both semantic similarity and model-predicted reward differences that is approached from a distributional perspective solvable with Optimal Transport (OT). By incorporating these factors into a principled OT cost matrix design, our adaptive margin enables the RM to better capture distributional differences between chosen and rejected responses, yielding significant improvements in performance, convergence speed, and generalization capabilities. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms several existing RM techniques, showcasing enhanced performance in both In-Distribution (ID) and OOD settings.

APLOT: Robust Reward Modeling via Adaptive Preference Learning with Optimal Transport

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, yet code generation remains a major challenge. Despite the abundant sources of code data, constructing high-quality training datasets at scale poses a significant challenge. Pre-training code data typically suffers from inconsistent data quality issues. Conversely, instruction-based methods which use a high-quality subset as seed samples suffer from limited task diversity. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{UnitCoder}, which directly supervises pre-training data quality through automatically generated unit tests, while ensuring the correctness via an iterative fix and refine flow. Code synthesized by UnitCoder benefits from both the diversity of pre-training corpora and the high quality ensured by unit test supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on our synthetic dataset exhibit consistent performance improvements. Our work presents a scalable approach that leverages model-generated unit tests to guide the synthesis of high-quality code data from pre-training corpora, demonstrating the potential for producing diverse and high-quality post-training data at scale. All code and data will be released.

UnitCoder: Scalable Code Synthesis from Pre-training Corpora

Current LLM evaluations often rely on single instruction templates, overlooking models' sensitivity to instruction style—a critical aspect for real-world deployments. We present RCScore, a multi-dimensional framework quantifying how instruction formulation affects model responses. By systematically transforming benchmark problems into multiple instruction styles, RCScore reveals performance variations undetected by conventional metrics. Our experiments across ten LLMs on four reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that instruction style can shift accuracy by up to 16.7% points. We introduce Cross-Response Similarity (CRS), a method applying RCScore metrics to measure stylistic self-consistency, and establish its strong correlation with task accuracy, suggesting consistency as a valuable proxy for model reliability. Additional findings show that deterministic decoding produces more stylistically stable outputs, and model scale correlates positively with cross-style consistency. RCScore offers a principled approach to assess instruction robustness, enabling more comprehensive model evaluation beyond traditional accuracy-focused metrics.

RCScore: Quantifying Response Consistency in Large Language Models

This paper introduces ThoughtProbe, a novel inference-time framework that leverages the hidden reasoning features of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve their reasoning performance. Unlike previous works that manipulate the hidden representations to steer LLM generation, we harness them as discriminative signals to guide the tree-structured response space exploration. In each node expansion, a classifier serves as a scoring and ranking mechanism that efficiently allocates computational resources by prioritizing higher score candidates for continuation. After completing the tree expansion, we collect answers from all branches to form a candidate answer pool. We then propose a branch-aggregation method that marginalizes over all supporting branches by aggregating their CoT scores, thereby identifying the optimal answer from the pool. Experimental results show that our framework's comprehensive exploration not only covers valid reasoning chains but also effectively identifies them, achieving significant improvements across multiple arithmetic reasoning benchmarks.

ThoughtProbe: Classifier-Guided LLM Thought Space Exploration via Probing Representations

Text-to-SQL, which maps natural language to SQL queries, has benefited greatly from recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs offer various paradigms for this task, including prompting and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), SFT approaches still face challenges such as complex multi-stage pipelines and poor robustness to noisy schema information. To address these limitations, we present JOLT-SQL, a streamlined single-stage SFT framework that jointly optimizes schema linking and SQL generation via a unified loss. JOLT-SQL employs discriminative schema linking, enhanced by local bidirectional attention, alongside a confusion-aware noisy schema sampling strategy with selective attention to improve robustness under noisy schema conditions. Experiments on the Spider and BIRD benchmarks demonstrate that JOLT-SQL achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy among comparable-size open-source models, while significantly improving both training and inference efficiency. Our codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JOLT-SQL-C52C/.

JOLT-SQL: Joint Loss Tuning of Text-to-SQL with Confusion-aware Noisy Schema Sampling

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard non-parametric approach for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date knowledge and mitigating catastrophic forgetting common in continual learning. However, standard RAG, relying on independent passage retrieval, fails to capture the interconnected nature of human memory crucial for complex reasoning (associativity) and contextual understanding (sense-making). While structured RAG methods like HippoRAG 2 utilize knowledge graphs built from triples, we argue that the inherent context loss of knowledge triples limits fidelity. We introduce PropRAG, leveraging context-rich propositions and a novel LLM-free online beam search over proposition paths to find multi-step reasoning chains. PropRAG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot Recall@5 and F1 scores on 2Wiki, HotpotQA, and MuSiQue, advancing non-parametric continual learning by improving evidence retrieval through richer representation and efficient reasoning path discovery.

PropRAG: Guiding Retrieval with Beam Search over Proposition Paths

Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems concatenate and process numerous retrieved document chunks for prefill which requires a large volume of computation, therefore leading to significant latency in time-to-first-token (TTFT). To reduce the computation overhead as well as TTFT, we introduce TurboRAG, a hybrid offline–online paradigm that (i) pre‑computes chunk‑level key-value (KV) caches, (ii) stitches them together at inference time using independent–attention and reordered‑RoPE techniques, and (iii) preserves answer quality without changing the model architecture. Hence, online computation of KV caches is eliminated during inference. Our approach is applicable to most existing large language models and their applications without any requirement in modification of models and inference systems. Experimental results across a suite of RAG benchmarks demonstrate that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by up to 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG systems (on an average of 8.6x), but reserving comparable performance to the standard RAG systems.

TurboRAG: Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Precomputed KV Caches for Chunked Text

When performing reasoning tasks with user-specific requirements, such as strict output formats, large language models (LLMs) often prioritize reasoning over adherence to detailed instructions. Fine-tuning LLMs on supervised datasets to address this is impractical due to high computational costs and limited parameter access. To tackle this, we propose DICE, a lightweight framework that guides small language models (SLMs) to refine LLMs' outputs through chain-of-thought (CoT) correction. DICE decouples the process by first prompting LLMs to generate natural language responses, then using trained SLMs to analyze and refine these outputs to meet structured output specifications. This framework preserves LLMs' broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities while ensuring the outputs conform to user demands. Specifically, DICE first constructs structured CoT adaptation datasets via a two-stage method and subsequently applies a dual-tuning strategy to fine-tune SLMs for generating structured outputs in an analyze-then-answer pattern. Experiments demonstrate that DICE improves the average format accuracy and content correctness of LLM outputs by 35.4\% and 29.4\%, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance over other competitive baselines.

DICE: Structured Reasoning in LLMs through SLM-Guided Chain-of-Thought Correction

The wide use of abbreviated column names (derived from English words or Chinese Pinyin) in database tables poses significant challenges for table-centric tasks in natural language processing and database management. Such a column name expansion task, referred to as the NameGuess task, has previously been addressed by fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on synthetically generated rule-based data. However, the current approaches yield suboptimal performance due to two fundamental limitations: 1) the rule-generated abbreviation data fails to reflect real-world distribution, and 2) the failure of LLMs to follow the rule-sensitive patterns in NameGuess persistently. For the data realism issue, we propose a novel approach that integrates a subsequence abbreviation generator trained on human-annotated data and collects non-subsequence abbreviations to improve the training set. For the rule violation issue, we propose a decoding system constrained on an automaton that represents the rules of abbreviation expansion. We extended the original English NameGuess test set to include non-subsequence and PinYin scenarios. Experimental results show that properly tuned 7/8B moderate-size LLMs with a refined decoding system can surpass the few-shot performance of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as the GPT-4 series. The code and data are presented in the supplementary material.

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Add-One-In: Incremental Sample Selection for Large Language Models via a Choice-Based Greedy Paradigm

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