China

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), natural language explanations (NLEs) have become increasingly important for understanding model predictions. However, these explanations often fail to faithfully represent the model&#39;s internal reasoning process. While existing work has demonstrated that LLMs can self-critique and refine their initial outputs for various tasks, this capability remains unexplored for improving explanation faithfulness. To address this gap, we introduce Self-critique and Refinement for Natural Language Explanations (SR-NLE), a framework that enables models to improve the faithfulness of their own explanations -- specifically, post-hoc NLEs -- through an iterative critique and refinement process without external supervision. Our framework leverages different feedback mechanisms to guide the refinement process, including natural language self-feedback and, notably, a novel feedback approach based on feature attribution that highlights important input words. Our experiments across three datasets and four state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that SR-NLE significantly reduces unfaithfulness rates, with our best method achieving an average unfaithfulness rate of 36.02%, compared to 54.81% for baseline -- an absolute reduction of 18.79%. These findings reveal that the investigated LLMs can indeed refine their explanations to better reflect their internal reasoning process, requiring only appropriate guidance through feedback without additional training or fine-tuning.

EMNLP 2025

Self-Critique and Refinement for Faithful Natural Language Explanations

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), natural language explanations (NLEs) have become increasingly important for understanding model predictions. However, these explanations often fail to faithfully represent the model's internal reasoning process. While existing work has demonstrated that LLMs can self-critique and refine their initial outputs for various tasks, this capability remains unexplored for improving explanation faithfulness. To address this gap, we introduce Self-critique and Refinement for Natural Language Explanations (SR-NLE), a framework that enables models to improve the faithfulness of their own explanations -- specifically, post-hoc NLEs -- through an iterative critique and refinement process without external supervision. Our framework leverages different feedback mechanisms to guide the refinement process, including natural language self-feedback and, notably, a novel feedback approach based on feature attribution that highlights important input words. Our experiments across three datasets and four state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that SR-NLE significantly reduces unfaithfulness rates, with our best method achieving an average unfaithfulness rate of 36.02%, compared to 54.81% for baseline -- an absolute reduction of 18.79%. These findings reveal that the investigated LLMs can indeed refine their explanations to better reflect their internal reasoning process, requiring only appropriate guidance through feedback without additional training or fine-tuning.

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.

When AI agents retrieve and reason over external documents, adversaries can manipulate the data they receive to subvert their behaviour. Previous research has studied indirect prompt injection, where the attacker injects malicious instructions. We argue that malicious instructions are not necessary to manipulate agents - attackers can accomplish the same by supplying biased, misleading, or false information. We term this attacks-by-persuasion. Existing defenses, which focus on detecting hidden commands, are ineffective against attacks-by-persuasion. To defend themselves and their users, agents must critically evaluate retrieved information, corroborating claims with external evidence and evaluating source trustworthiness. We argue that this is analogous to an existing NLP task, automated fact-checking, which we propose to repurpose as a cognitive self-defense tool for agents.

Attacks by Content: Automated Fact-checking is an AI Security Issue

Integrating large language models (LLMs) as action proposers in reinforcement learning (RL) significantly boosts performance in text-based environments but incurs prohibitive computational costs. We introduce a cache-efficient framework for Bayesian RL that leverages LLM-derived action suggestions, drastically reducing these costs while maintaining near-optimal performance. Our approach features an adaptive caching mechanism, optimized via meta-learning based on policy performance, to enable efficient inference across text-based games (e.g., TextWorld, ALFWorld) and robotic control tasks (e.g., MuJoCo, MetaWorld). This framework achieves a 3.8times–4.7times reduction in LLM queries and 4.0times–12.0times lower median latencies (85–93ms on consumer hardware), while retaining 96–98% of the uncached policy's performance. We provide theoretical guarantees on the reliability of cached decisions with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence bounds, which are validated empirically by high success rates (90.4–95.6%) in complex text environments. For offline RL, our proposed CQL-Prior variant improves performance by 14–29% and reduces training time by 38–40%. Evaluations across eight diverse tasks demonstrate the framework's generalizability and practicality for resource-constrained settings, making LLM-guided RL a viable and accessible approach for both text-based and robotic applications.

Cache-Efficient Posterior Sampling for Reinforcement Learning with LLM-Derived Priors Across Discrete and Continuous Domains

Characterizing the expressive power of the Transformer architecture is critical to understanding its capacity limits and scaling law. Recent works provide the circuit complexity bounds to Transformer-like architecture. On the other hand, Rotary Position Embedding (mathsfRoPE) has emerged as a crucial technique in modern large language models, offering superior performance in capturing positional information compared to traditional position embeddings, which shows great potential in application prospects, particularly for the long context scenario. Empirical evidence also suggests that mathsfRoPE-based Transformer architectures demonstrate greater generalization capabilities compared to conventional Transformer models. In this work, we establish a circuit complexity bound for Transformers with mathsfRoPE attention. Our key contribution is that we show that unless mathsfTC⁰ = mathsfNC¹, a mathsfRoPE-based Transformer with poly(n)-precision, O(1) layers, hidden dimension d leq O(n) cannot solve the arithmetic formula evaluation problem or the Boolean formula value problem. This result significantly demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the expressivity of mathsfRoPE-based Transformers, although they achieve giant empirical success. Our theoretical result not only establishes the complexity bound but also gives insights into designing novel Transformer architectures.

Circuit Complexity Bounds for RoPE-based Transformer Architecture

Prompting and context-based fine-tuning methods, which we call Prefix Learning, have been proposed to enhance the performance of language models on various downstream tasks. They are empirically efficient and effective, matching the performance of full parameter fine-tuning, but the theoretical understandings are limited. In this paper, we aim to address this limitation by studying their ability from the perspective of prefix length. In particular, we provide a convergence guarantee for training an ultra-long prefix in a stylized setting using the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) framework. Based on this strong theoretical guarantee, we design and implement an algorithm that only needs to introduce and fine-tune a few extra trainable parameters instead of an infinite-long prefix in each layer of a transformer, and can approximate the prefix attention to a guaranteed polynomial-small error. Preliminary experimental results on vision, natural language, and math data show that our method achieves superior or competitive performance compared to existing methods like full parameters fine-tuning, P-Tuning V2, and LoRA. This demonstrates our method is promising for parameter-efficient fine-tuning.

Towards Infinite-Long Prefix in Transformer

This paper presents AlphaOne (α1), a universal framework for modulating reasoning progress in large reasoning models (LRMs) at test time. α1 first introduces α moment, which represents the scaled thinking phase with a universal parameter α. Within this scaled pre-α moment phase, it dynamically schedules slow thinking transitions by modeling the insertion of reasoning transition tokens as a Bernoulli stochastic process. After the α moment, α1 deterministically terminates slow thinking with the end-of-thinking token, thereby fostering fast reasoning and efficient answer generation. This approach unifies and generalizes existing monotonic scaling methods by enabling flexible and dense slow-to-fast reasoning modulation. Extensive empirical studies on various challenging benchmarks across mathematical, coding, and scientific domains demonstrate α1's superior reasoning capability and efficiency. Anonymous project page: https://alphaone-paper.github.io/.

AlphaOne: Reasoning Models Thinking Slow and Fast at Test Time

Video large language models (Vid-LLMs), which excel in diverse video-language tasks, can be effectively constructed by adapting image-pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). However, this adaptation remains challenging, as it requires processing dense and temporally extended visual inputs that exceed the capacity of image-based models. This paper identifies the perception bottleneck and token overload as key challenges in extending image-based VLMs to the video domain. To address these issues, we propose D-CoDe, a training-free adaptation framework that incorporates dynamic compression and question decomposition. Specifically, dynamic compression alleviates the perception bottleneck through adaptive selection of representative frames and content-aware aggregation of spatial tokens, thereby reducing redundancy while preserving informative content. In parallel, question decomposition mitigates token overload by reformulating the original query into sub-questions, guiding the model to focus on distinct aspects of the video and enabling more comprehensive understanding. Experiments demonstrate that D-CoDe effectively improves video understanding across various benchmarks. Furthermore, strong performance on the challenging long-video benchmark highlights the potential of D-CoDe in handling complex video-language tasks.

D-CoDe: Scaling Image-Pretrained VLMs to Video via Dynamic Compression and Question Decomposition

While significant progress has been made with dual- and bi-encoder dense retrievers, they often struggle on queries with logical connectives, a use case that is often overlooked yet important in downstream applications. Current dense retrievers struggle with such queries, such that the retrieved results do not respect the logical constraints implied in the queries. To address this challenge, we introduce LogiCoL, a logically-informed contrastive learning objective for dense retrievers. LogiCoL builds upon in-batch supervised contrastive learning, and learns dense retrievers to respect the subset and mutually-exclusive set relation between query results via two sets of soft constraints expressed via t-norm in the learning objective. We evaluate the effectiveness of LogiCoL on the task of entity retrieval, where the model is expected to retrieve a set of entities in Wikipedia that satisfy the implicit logical constraints in the query. We show that models trained with LogiCoL yield improvement both in terms of retrieval performance and logical consistency in the results. We provide detailed analysis and insights to uncover why queries with logical connectives are challenging for dense retrievers and why LogiCoL is most effective.

LogiCoL: Logically-Informed Contrastive Learning for Set-based Dense Retrieval

The evolution of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has significantly transformed natural language processing. However, these advancements pose challenges, particularly the unintended memorization of training data, which raises ethical and privacy concerns. While prior research has largely focused on mitigating memorization or extracting memorized information, the deliberate control of memorization has been underexplored. This study addresses this gap by introducing a novel and unified gradient-based weight pruning framework to freely control memorization rates in LLMs. Our method enables fine-grained control over pruning parameters, allowing models to suppress or enhance memorization based on application-specific requirements. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively balances the trade-offs between memorization and generalization, with an increase of up to 89.3% in Fractional ER suppression and 40.9% in Exact ER amplification compared to the original models.

Controllable Memorization in LLMs via Weight Pruning

Faithful free-text explanations are important to ensure transparency in high-stakes AI decision-making contexts, but they are challenging to generate by language models and assess by humans. In this paper, we present a measure for Prediction-EXplanation (PEX) consistency, by extending the concept of weight of evidence. This measure quantifies how much a free-text explanation supports or opposes a prediction, serving as an important aspect of explanation faithfulness. Our analysis reveals that more than 62% explanations generated by large language models lack this consistency. We show that applying direct preference optimization improves the consistency of generated explanations across three model families, with improvement ranging from 43.1% to 292.3%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that optimizing this consistency measure can improve explanation faithfulness by up to 9.7%.

A Necessary Step toward Faithfulness: Measuring and Improving Consistency in Free-Text Explanations

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant documents from external sources to improve factual accuracy and verifiability. However, this reliance introduces new attack surfaces within the retrieval pipeline, beyond the LLM itself. While prior RAG attacks have exposed such vulnerabilities, they largely rely on manipulating user queries, which is often infeasible in practice due to fixed or protected user inputs. This narrow focus overlooks a more realistic and stealthy vector: instructional prompts, which are widely reused, publicly shared, and rarely audited. Their implicit trust makes them a compelling target for adversaries to manipulate RAG behavior covertly. We introduce a novel attack for Adversarial Instructional Prompt (AIP) that exploits adversarial instructional prompts to manipulate RAG outputs by subtly altering retrieval behavior. By shifting the attack surface to the instructional prompts, AIP reveals how trusted yet seemingly benign interface components can be weaponized to degrade system integrity. The attack is crafted to achieve three goals: (1) naturalness, to evade user detection; (2) utility, to encourage use of prompts; and (3) robustness, to remain effective across diverse query variations. We propose a diverse query generation strategy that simulates realistic linguistic variation in user queries, enabling the discovery of prompts that generalize across paraphrases and rephrasings. Building on this, a genetic algorithm-based joint optimization is developed to evolve adversarial prompts by balancing attack success, clean-task utility, and stealthiness. Experimental results show that AIP achieves up to 95.23% attack success rate while preserving benign functionality. These findings uncover a critical and previously overlooked vulnerability in RAG systems, emphasizing the need to reassess the shared instructional prompts.

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Attacks by Content: Automated Fact-checking is an AI Security Issue

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