China

Recent work has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in test-time scaling. By making the models think before answering, they are able to achieve much higher accuracy with extra inference computation. However, in many real-world scenarios, models are used under time constraints, where an answer should be given to the user within a certain output length. It is unclear whether and how the reasoning abilities of LLMs remain effective under such constraints. We take a first look at this problem by conducting an in-depth empirical study. Specifically, we test more than 25 LLMs on common reasoning datasets under a wide range of output length budgets, and we analyze the correlation between the inference accuracy and various properties including model type, model size, prompt style, etc. We also consider the mappings between the token budgets and the actual on-device latency budgets. The results have demonstrated several interesting findings regarding the budget-aware LLM reasoning that differ from the unconstrained situation, e.g. the optimal choices of model sizes and prompts change under different budgets. These findings offer practical guidance for users to deploy LLMs under real-world latency constraints.

EMNLP 2025

An Empirical Study of LLM Reasoning Ability Under Strict Output Length Constraint

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.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now generate discourse-level, multi-sentence visual descriptions, challenging text scene graph parsers originally designed for single-sentence caption-to-graph mapping. Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, often missing phenomena like cross-sentence coreference, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream VLM task performance. To address this, we introduce textbfDiscourse-level text textbfScene textbfGraph parsing (DiscoSG), supported by our dataset DiscoSG-DS, which comprises 400 expert-annotated and 8,430 synthesized multi-sentence caption–graph pairs for images. Each graph contains sim15times more objects and relations per caption than prior datasets. While fine-tuning large PLMs (i.e., GPT-4o) on DiscoSG-DS improves SPICE by sim 48% over the best sentence-merging baseline, high inference cost and restrictive licensing hinder its open-source use, and smaller fine-tuned PLMs struggle with complex graphs. We propose DiscoSG-Refiner, which drafts a base graph using one small PLM, then employs a second PLM to iteratively propose graph edits, reducing full-graph generation overhead. Using two Flan-T5-BASE models, DiscoSG-Refiner still improves SPICE by sim 30% over the best baseline while achieving 86times faster inference than GPT-4o. It also consistently improves downstream VLM tasks like discourse-level caption evaluation and hallucination detection. Code and data are available at~\url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DiscoSG/}.

DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful yet computationally intensive for widespread practical deployments. To address such challenge without costly re-training, post-training acceleration techniques like quantization and token reduction are extensively explored. However, current acceleration evaluations primarily target minimal overall performance degradation, overlooking a crucial question: does the accelerated model still give the same answers to the same questions as it did before acceleration? This is vital for stability-centered industrial applications where consistently correct answers for specific, known situations are paramount, such as in AI-based disease diagnosis. We systematically investigate this for accelerated VLMs, testing four leading models (LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-Next, Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL) with eight acceleration methods on ten multi-modal benchmarks. Our findings are stark: despite minimal aggregate performance drops, accelerated models changed original answers up to 20% of the time. Critically, up to 6.5% of these changes converted correct answers to incorrect. Input perturbations magnified these inconsistencies, and the trend is confirmed by case studies with the medical VLM LLaVA-Med. This research reveals a significant oversight in VLM acceleration, stressing an urgent need for instance-level stability checks to ensure trustworthy real-world deployment.

Does Acceleration Cause Hidden Instability in Vision Language Models? Uncovering Instance-Level Divergence Through a Large-Scale Empirical Study

In this study, we focus on the automatic evaluation of long and detailed image captions generated by multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Most existing automatic evaluation metrics for image captioning are primarily designed for short captions and are not suitable for evaluating long captions. Moreover, recent LLM-as-a-Judge approaches suffer from slow inference due to their reliance on autoregressive inference and early fusion of visual information. To address these limitations, we propose VELA, an automatic evaluation metric for long captions developed within a novel LLM-Hybrid-as-a-Judge framework. Furthermore, we propose LongCap-Arena, a benchmark specifically designed for evaluating metrics for long captions. This benchmark comprises 7,805 images, the corresponding human-provided long reference captions and long candidate captions, and 32,246 human judgments from three distinct perspectives: Descriptiveness, Relevance, and Fluency. We demonstrated that VELA outperformed existing metrics and achieved superhuman performance on LongCap-Arena.

VELA: An LLM-Hybrid-as-a-Judge Approach for Evaluating Long Image Captions

High-order numerical methods enhance Transformer performance in tasks like NLP and CV, but introduce a performance-efficiency trade-off due to increased computational overhead. Our analysis reveals that conventional efficiency techniques, such as distillation, can be detrimental to the performance of these models, exemplified by PCformer. To explore more optimizable ODE-based Transformer architectures, we propose the Iterative Implicit Euler Transformer (IIET), which simplifies high-order methods using an iterative implicit Euler approach. This simplification not only leads to superior performance but also facilitates model compression compared to PCformer. To enhance inference efficiency, we introduce Iteration Influence-Aware Distillation (IIAD). Through a flexible threshold, IIAD allows users to effectively balance the performance-efficiency trade-off. On lm-evaluation-harness, IIET boosts average accuracy by 2.65% over vanilla Transformers and 0.8% over PCformer. Its efficient variant, E-IIET, significantly cuts inference overhead by 60% while retaining 99. 4% of the original task accuracy. Moreover, the most efficient IIET variant achieves an average performance gain exceeding 1.6% over vanilla Transformer with comparable speed.

IIET: Efficient Numerical Transformer via Implicit Iterative Euler Method

Recent work on reasoning‐oriented language models, exemplified by \textit{o1-like} systems, suggests that reinforcement-learning (RL) finetuning does not create new capabilities but instead strengthens reasoning patterns already latent in the pretrained network. We test this claim by training \emph{steering vectors}: layer-wise biases that additively amplify selected hidden features while leaving all original weights unchanged. Experiments on four base models across the GSM8K and MATH benchmarks show that steering vectors recover, and in several cases exceed, the accuracy of fully-tuned counterparts. This result supports the view that the required reasoning skills pre-exist in the base model. Further, logit-lens analysis reveals that the trained vectors consistently boost token groups linked to structured languages and logical connectors, providing an interpretable account that aligns with the demands of quantitative reasoning tasks.

Steering LLM Reasoning Through Bias-Only Adaptation

Human feedback is crucial in the interactions between humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing research primarily focuses on benchmarking LLMs in single-turn dialogues. Even in benchmarks designed for multi-turn dialogues, the user utterances are often independent, neglecting the nuanced and complex nature of human feedback within real-world usage scenarios. To fill this research gap, we introduce FB-Bench, a fine-grained, multi-task benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' responsiveness to human feedback under real-world usage scenarios in Chinese. Drawing from the two main interaction scenarios, FB-Bench comprises 591 meticulously curated samples, encompassing eight task types, five deficiency types of response, and nine feedback types. We extensively evaluate a broad array of popular LLMs, revealing significant variations in their performance across different interaction scenarios. Further analysis indicates that task, human feedback, and deficiencies of previous responses can also significantly impact LLMs' responsiveness. Our findings underscore both the strengths and limitations of current models, providing valuable insights and directions for future research.

FB-Bench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs' Responsiveness to Human Feedback

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit human-like capabilities, a fundamental question emerges: How can we enable LLMs to learn the underlying patterns from limited examples in entirely novel environments and apply them effectively? This question is central to the ability of LLMs in inductive reasoning. Existing research on LLM-based inductive reasoning can be broadly categorized based on whether the underlying rules are expressible via explicit mathematical equations. However, many recent studies in the beyond-equations category have emphasized rule design without grounding them in specific scenarios. Inspired by the parallels between inductive reasoning and human scientific discovery, we propose the task of LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations and introduce a new benchmark, SIRBench-V1, to evaluate the inductive reasoning abilities of LLMs in scientific settings. Our experimental results show that current LLMs still struggle with this task, underscoring its difficulty and the need for further advancement in this area.

On LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations

As interest grows in generating long, detailed image captions, existing automatic evaluation metrics are increasingly strained. N-gram-based metrics though efficient, fail to capture semantic correctness, especially for longer outputs. Representational Similarity (RS) metrics, designed to address this, initially saw limited use due to high computational costs, while today, despite advances in hardware, they remain unpopular as they fall short even of weak baselines such as BLEU. Meanwhile, metrics based on large language models (LLMs) show strong correlation with human judgments, but remain too expensive for use in model development. We introduce SPECS (Specificity-Enhanced CLIP-Score), a reference-free RS metric tailored for long image captioning. SPECS modifies CLIP with a new objective that emphasizes specificity: rewarding correct details and penalizing errors. We show that SPECS matches the performance of leading LLM-based metrics in correlating with human judgments, while being far more efficient. This makes it a practical alternative for iterative checkpoint evaluation during image captioning model development.

SPECS: Specificity-Enhanced CLIP-Score for Long Image Caption Evaluation

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, existing LLM-driven NAS approaches rely heavily on prompt engineering and domain-specific tuning, limiting their practicality and scalability across diverse tasks. In this work, we propose LM-Searcher, a novel framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without the need for extensive domain-specific adaptation. Central to our approach is NCode, a universal numerical string representation for neural architectures, which enables cross-domain architecture encoding and search. We also reformulate the NAS problem as a ranking task, training LLMs to select high-performing architectures from candidate pools using instruction-tuning samples derived from a novel pruning-based subspace sampling strategy. Our curated dataset, encompassing a wide range of architecture-performance pairs, encourages robust and transferable learning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LM-Searcher achieves competitive performance in both in-domain (e.g., CNNs for image classification) and out-of-domain (e.g., LoRA configurations for segmentation and generation) tasks, establishing a new paradigm for flexible and generalizable LLM-based architecture search.

LM-Searcher: Cross-domain Neural Architecture Search with LLMs via Unified Numerical Encoding

Large language models (LLMs) now support context windows exceeding 128K tokens, but this comes with significant memory requirements and high inference latency. Quantization can mitigate these costs, but may degrade performance. We present the first large-scale evaluation of quantized LLMs on tasks with long-inputs (>64K tokens) and long-form outputs. Our evaluation spans 9.7K examples, five quantization methods (FP8, GPTQ-int8, AWQ-int4, GPTQ-int4, BNB-nf4), and five models (Llama-3.1 8B and 70B; Qwen-2.5 7B, 32B, and 72B). Results show that, on average, 8-bit quantization preserves accuracy (<0.8% drop), whereas 4-bit methods incur substantial losses up to 59% on long context tasks. Performance degradation from quantization is more pronounced in long-input tasks than in long-form generations. These drops are further amplified in a multilingual setup. Furthermore, the impact of quantization varies across models. While Qwen-2.5 72B remains robust under BNB-nf4, Llama-3.1 70B suffers a 32% performance drop. These findings underscore the importance of rigorous evaluation before deploying quantized LLMs, especially in long‑context and multilingual settings.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2025

DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES