China

Text-based person search (TBPS) enables the retrieval of person images from large-scale databases using natural language descriptions, offering critical value in surveillance applications. However, a major challenge lies in the labor-intensive process of obtaining high-quality textual annotations, which limits scalability and practical deployment. To address this, we introduce two complementary modules: Multi-Turn Text Generation (MTG) and Multi-Turn Text Interaction (MTI). MTG generates rich pseudo-labels through simulated dialogues with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), producing fine-grained and diverse visual descriptions without manual supervision. MTI refines user queries at inference time through dynamic, dialogue-based reasoning, enabling the system to interpret and resolve vague, incomplete, or ambiguous descriptions—characteristics often seen in real-world search scenarios. Together, MTG and MTI form a unified and annotation-free framework that significantly improves retrieval accuracy, robustness, and usability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves competitive or superior results while eliminating the need for manual captions, paving the way for scalable and practical deployment of TBPS systems.

EMNLP 2025

Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval

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.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has become a cornerstone in multimodal intelligence. However, recent studies discovered that CLIP can only encode one aspect of the feature space, leading to substantial information loss and indistinctive features. To mitigate this issue, this paper introduces a novel strategy that fine-tunes a series of complementary CLIP models and transforms them into a CLIP-MoE. Specifically, we propose a model-agnostic Diversified Multiplet Upcycling (DMU) framework for CLIP. Instead of training multiple CLIP models from scratch, DMU leverages a pre-trained CLIP and fine-tunes it into a diverse set with highly cost-effective multistage contrastive learning, thus capturing distinct feature subspaces efficiently. To fully exploit these fine-tuned models while minimizing computational overhead, we transform them into a CLIP-MoE, which dynamically activates a subset of CLIP experts, achieving an effective balance between model capacity and computational cost. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of CLIP-MoE across various zero-shot retrieval, zero-shot image classification tasks, and downstream Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) benchmarks when used as a vision encoder.

CLIP-MoE: Towards Building Mixture of Experts for CLIP with Diversified Multiplet Upcycling

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely heavily on large-scale reasoning data, but as such data becomes increasingly scarce, model self-improvement offers a promising alternative. However, this process can lead to model collapse, as the model’s output becomes overly deterministic with reduced diversity. In this work, we identify a new risk beyond model collapse, which we term the Superficial Self-Improved Reasoners phenomenon. This phenomenon indicates that while self-improvement enhances in-domain (ID) reasoning accuracy, it degrades the model’s generalized reasoning capability on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets, as the model tends to memorize the training data. Our analyses of layer importance and parameter changes reveal that reasoning-critical layers receive fewer updates compared to less relevant layers during self-improvement. To address this, we propose Iterative Model Merging (IMM), which balances reasoning improvements and generalization by merging the weights of the original and self-improved models. IMM effectively mitigates model collapse and improves generalized reasoning capability.

Superficial Self-Improved Reasoners Benefit from Model Merging

The rapid growth of text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models has raised concerns about privacy, copyright, and safety due to their potential misuse in generating harmful or misleading content. These models are often trained on numerous datasets, including unauthorized personal identities, artistic creations, and harmful materials, which can lead to uncontrolled production and distribution of such content. To address this, we propose VideoEraser, a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts, even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. Designed as a plug-and-play module, VideoEraser can seamlessly integrate with representative T2V diffusion models via a two-stage process: Selective Prompt Embedding Adjustment (SPEA) and Adversarial-Resilient Noise Guidance (ARNG). We conduct extensive evaluations across four tasks, including object erasure, artistic style erasure, celebrity erasure, and explicit content erasure. Experimental results show that VideoEraser consistently outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. Notably, VideoEraser achieves state-of-the-art performance in suppressing undesirable content during T2V generation, reducing it by 46% on average across four tasks compared to baselines.

VideoEraser: Concept Erasure in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

Visual Question Generation (VQG) research focuses predominantly on natural images while neglecting the diagram, which is a critical component in educational materials. To meet the needs of pedagogical assessment, we propose the Diagram-Driven Course Questions Generation (DDCQG) task and construct DiagramQG, a comprehensive dataset with 15,720 diagrams and 25,798 questions across 37 subjects and 371 courses. Our approach employs \textit{course} and \textit{input} text constraints to generate course-relevant questions about specific diagram elements. We reveal three challenges of DDCQG: domain-specific knowledge requirements across courses, long-tail distribution in course coverage, and high information density in diagrams. To address these, we propose the Hierarchical Knowledge Integration framework (HKI-DDCQG), which utilizes trainable CLIP for identifying relevant diagram patches, leverages frozen vision-language models for knowledge extraction, and generates questions with trainable T5. Experiments demonstrate that HKI-DDCQG outperforms existing models on DiagramQG while maintaining strong generalizability across natural image datasets, establishing a strong baseline for DDCQG.

Diagram-Driven Course Questions Generation

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER), which aims to extract textual entities, their types, and corresponding visual regions from image-text data, has become a critical task in multimodal information extraction. However, existing methods face two major challenges. First, they fail to address the semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and the long-tail distribution of datasets. Second, unlike visual grounding which provides descriptive phrases, entity grounding only offers brief entity names which carry less semantic information. Current methods lack sufficient semantic interaction between text and image, hindering accurate entity-visual region matching. To tackle these issues, we propose MAKAR, a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning, comprising three agents: Knowledge Enhancement, Entity Correction, and Entity Reasoning Grounding. Specifically, in the named entity recognition phase, the Knowledge Enhancement Agent leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as an implicit knowledge base to enhance ambiguous image-text content with its internal knowledge. For samples with low-confidence entity boundaries and types, the Entity Correction Agent uses web search tools to retrieve and summarize relevant web content, thereby correcting entities using both internal and external knowledge. In the entity grounding phase, the Entity Reasoning Grounding Agent utilizes multi-step Chain-of-Thought reasoning to perform grounding for each entity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MAKAR framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used benchmark datasets. The code will be publicly released.

MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Tactile perception is essential for human-environment interaction, and deriving tactile descriptions from multimodal data is a key challenge for embodied intelligence to understand human perception. Conventional approaches relying on extensive parameter learning for multimodal perception are rigid and computationally inefficient. To address this, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented Voting (RAV), a parameter-free method that constructs visual-tactile cross-modal knowledge directly. RAV retrieves similar visual-tactile data for given visual and tactile inputs and generates tactile descriptions through a voting mechanism. In experiments, we applied three voting strategies, SyncVote, DualVote and WeightVote, achieving performance comparable to large-scale cross-modal models without training. Comparative experiments across datasets of varying quality—defined by annotation accuracy and data diversity—demonstrate that RAV's performance improves with higher-quality data at no additional computational cost. Code, and model checkpoints are opensourced at https://github.com/xxx/xxx.

RAV: Retrieval-Augmented Voting for Tactile Descriptions Without Training

We present a novel, open-source social network simulation framework, MOSAIC, where generative language agents predict user behaviors such as liking, sharing, and flagging content. This simulation combines LLM agents with a directed social graph to analyze emergent deception behaviors and gain a better understanding of how users determine the veracity of online social content. By constructing user representations from diverse fine-grained personas, our system enables multi-agent simulations that model content dissemination and engagement dynamics at scale. Within this framework, we evaluate three different content moderation strategies with simulated misinformation dissemination, and we find that they not only mitigate the spread of non-factual content but also increase user engagement. In addition, we analyze the trajectories of popular content in our simulations, and explore whether simulation agents' articulated reasoning for their social interactions truly aligns with their collective engagement patterns.

MOSAIC: Modeling Social AI for Content Dissemination and Regulation in Multi-Agent Simulations

Audio often serves as an auxiliary modality in video understanding tasks of audio-visual large language models (LLMs), merely assisting in the comprehension of visual information. However, a thorough understanding of videos significantly depends on auditory information, as audio offers critical context, emotional cues, and semantic meaning that visual data alone often lacks. This paper proposes an audio-centric video understanding benchmark AVUT to evaluate the video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. AVUT introduces a suite of carefully designed audio-centric tasks, holistically testing the understanding of both audio content and audio-visual interactions in videos. Moreover, this work points out the text shortcut problem that largely exists in other benchmarks where the correct answer can be found from question text alone without needing videos. AVUT addresses this problem by proposing a answer permutation-based filtering mechanism. A thorough evaluation across a diverse range of open-source and proprietary multimodal LLMs is performed, followed by the analyses of deficiencies in audio-visual LLMs. Demos are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ACVUBench.

Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is vital for applications such as disaster response, logistics delivery, and urban inspection. However, existing methods often struggle with insufficient multimodal fusion, weak generalization, and poor interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose FlightGPT, a novel UAV VLN framework built upon Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with powerful multimodal perception capabilities. We design a two-stage training pipeline: first, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using high-quality demonstrations to improve initialization and structured reasoning; then, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, guided by a composite reward that considers goal accuracy, reasoning quality, and format compliance, to enhance generalization and adaptability. Furthermore, FlightGPT introduces a Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based reasoning mechanism to improve decision interpretability. Extensive experiments on the city-scale dataset CityNav demonstrate that FlightGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance across all scenarios, with a 9.22\% higher success rate than the strongest baseline in unseen environments. Our implementation is publicly available.

FlightGPT: Towards Generalizable and Interpretable UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation with Vision-Language Models

Text-to-image models frequently fail to achieve perfect alignment with textual prompts, particularly in maintaining proper semantic binding between semantic elements in the given prompt. Existing approaches typically require costly retraining or focus on only correctly generating the attributes of entities (entity-attribute binding), ignoring the cruciality of correctly generating the relations between entities (entity-relation-entity binding), resulting in unsatisfactory semantic binding performance. In this work, we propose a novel training-free method R-Bind that simultaneously improves both entity-attribute and entity-relation-entity binding. Our method introduces three inference-time optimization losses that adjust attention maps during generation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate our approach's effectiveness, validity, and flexibility in enhancing semantic binding without additional training.

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CLIP-MoE: Towards Building Mixture of Experts for CLIP with Diversified Multiplet Upcycling

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