China

We revisit hierarchical bracketing encodings from a practical perspective in the context of dependency graph parsing. The approach encodes graphs as sequences, enabling linear-time parsing with n tagging actions, and still representing reentrancies, cycles, and empty nodes. Compared to existing graph linearizations, this representation substantially reduces the label space while preserving structural information. We evaluate it on a multilingual and multi-formalism benchmark, showing competitive results and consistent improvements over other methods in exact match accuracy.

EMNLP 2025

Hierarchical Bracketing Encodings Work for Dependency Graphs

technical paper

## 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.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems, while advancing through vision transformers, remain largely black-boxes in critical applications. Current prototype-based interpretability methods struggle with multimodal reasoning, rigid feature representations, and a lack of fine-grained explanations. We present ProtoVQA, introducing adaptable prototypes for cross-modal tasks, spatially-constrained matching for geometric variations, and systematic evaluation of visual-linguistic alignment. Our model achieves competitive accuracy on Visual7W while providing comprehensive explainability through explicit visual evidence. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ARR-Submission-107.

ProtoVQA: An Adaptable Prototypical Framework for Explainable Fine-Grained Visual Question Answering

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have gained substantial attention due to their impressive capabilities to complete tasks through multiple interactions within GUI environments. However, existing agents primarily focus on enhancing the accuracy of individual actions and often lack effective mechanisms for detecting and recovering from errors. To address these shortcomings, we propose the BacktrackAgent, a robust framework that incorporates a backtracking mechanism to improve task completion efficiency. BacktrackAgent includes verifier, judger, and reflector components as modules for error detection and recovery, while also applying judgment rewards to further enhance the agent's performance. Additionally, we develop a training dataset specifically designed for the backtracking mechanism, which considers the outcome pages after action executions. Experimental results show that BacktrackAgent has achieved performance improvements in both task success rate and step accuracy on Mobile3M and Auto-UI benchmarks. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.

BacktrackAgent: Enhancing GUI Agent with Error Detection and Backtracking Mechanism

The full-size MLPs and the projection layers in attention introduce tremendous model sizes of large language models (LLMs), imposing extremely demanding needs of computational resources in the pre-training stage. However, we empirically observe that the activations of pre-trained LLMs exhibit low-rank property. Motivated by such observations, we propose **CoLA** and its memory-efficient implementation, **CoLA-M**, to replace these full-size layers with compute-efficient auto-encoders that naturally enforce low-rank activations throughout training. This fundamental architectural change eliminates the activation redundancy and significantly boosts model capacity and training efficiency. Experiments on LLaMA models with 60 million to 7 billion parameters show that CoLA reduces the computing cost by bf 2pmbtimes and improves training throughput by bf 1.86pmbtimes while maintaining full-rank level performance. CoLA-M further squeezes memory cost without sacrificing throughput, offering a pre-training approach with collectively superior parameter, computing, and memory efficiency. The LLMs produced are also bf 2pmbtimes smaller, enabling faster inference with lower memory cost on resource-constrained platforms.

CoLA: Compute-Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs via Low-Rank Activation

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) has demonstrated broad application potential, yet their safety and reliability remain critical concerns that require systematic exploration. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic safety evaluation of 11 MLRMs across 5 benchmarks and unveil prevalent safety degradation phenomena in most advanced models. Moreover, our analysis reveals distinct safety patterns across different benchmarks: significant safety degradation is observed across jailbreak robustness benchmarks, whereas safety-awareness benchmarks demonstrate less pronounced degradation. In particular, a long thought process in some scenarios even enhances safety performance. Therefore, it is a potential approach to address safety issues in MLRMs by leveraging the intrinsic reasoning capabilities of the model to detect unsafe intent. To operationalize this insight, we construct a multimodal tuning dataset that incorporates a safety-oriented thought process. Experimental results from fine-tuning existing MLRMs with this dataset effectively enhances the safety on both jailbreak robustness and safety-awareness benchmarks. This study provides a new perspective for developing safe MLRMs. Our dataset is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/safety-70A4}.

Think in Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Safety Alignment Collapse in Multimodal Large Reasoning Model

Counter-arguments (CAs) are a good means to improve the critical-thinking skills of learners, especially given that one has to thoroughly consider the logic of initial arguments (IA) when composing their CA. Although several tasks have been created for identifying the logical structure of CAs, no prior work has focused on capturing multiple interpretations of logical structures due to their complexity. In this work, we create CALSA+, a dataset consisting of 134 CAs annotated with 13 logical predicate questions. CALSA+ contains 1,742 instances annotated by 3 expert annotators (5,226 total annotations) with good agreement (Krippendorff α=0.46). Using CALSA+, we train a model with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to identify multiple logical interpretations and show that models trained with RLVR can perform on par with much bigger proprietary models. Our work is the first to attempt to annotate all the interpretations of logical structure on top of CAs. We publicly release our dataset to facilitate research in CA logical structure detection.

Identification of Multiple Logical Interpretations in Counter-Arguments

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, a fundamental question remains: Can LLMs effectively utilize causal knowledge for prediction and generation? Through empirical studies, we find that LLMs trained directly on large-scale data often capture spurious correlations rather than true causal relationships, leading to suboptimal performance, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose Causal Attention Tuning (CAT), a novel approach that injects fine-grained causal knowledge into the attention mechanism. We propose an automated pipeline that leverages human priors to automatically generate token-level causal signals and introduce the Re-Attention mechanism to guide training, helping the model focus on causal structures while mitigating noise and biases in attention scores. Experimental results on our proposed Spurious Token Game (STG) benchmark and multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively leverages causal knowledge for prediction and remains robust in OOD scenarios. Implementation details can be found in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CAT-C6C6.

CAT: Causal Attention Tuning For Injecting Fine-grained Causal Knowledge into Large Language Models

When prompted to think step-by-step, language models (LMs) produce a chain of thought (CoT), a sequence of reasoning steps that the model supposedly used to produce its prediction. Despite much work on CoT prompting, it is unclear if reasoning verbalized in a CoT is faithful to the models’ parametric beliefs. We introduce a framework for measuring parametric faithfulness of generated reasoning and propose Faithfulness by Unlearning Reasoning steps (FUR), an instance of this framework. FUR erases information contained in reasoning steps from model parameters and measures faithfulness as the resulting effect on the model’s prediction. Our experiments with four LMs and five multi-choice question answering (MCQA) datasets show that FUR is frequently able to precisely change the underlying models’ prediction for a given instance by unlearning key steps, indicating when a CoT is parametrically faithful. Further analysis shows that CoTs generated by models post-unlearning support different answers, hinting at a deeper effect of unlearning.

Measuring Chain of Thought Faithfulness by Unlearning Reasoning Steps

Misleading visualizations, which manipulate chart representations to support specific claims, can distort perception and lead to incorrect conclusions. Despite decades of research, they remain a widespread issue—posing risks to public understanding and raising safety concerns for AI systems involved in data-driven communication. While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show strong chart comprehension abilities, their capacity to detect and interpret misleading charts remains unexplored. We introduce Misleading ChartQA benchmark, a large-scale multimodal dataset designed to evaluate MLLMs on misleading chart reasoning. It contains 3,026 curated examples spanning 21 misleader types and 10 chart types, each with standardized chart code, CSV data, multiple-choice questions, and labeled explanations, validated through iterative MLLM checks and exhausted expert human review. We benchmark 24 state-of-the-art MLLMs, analyze their performance across misleader types and chart formats, and propose a novel region-aware reasoning pipeline that enhances model accuracy. Our work lays the foundation for developing MLLMs that are robust, trustworthy, and aligned with the demands of responsible visual communication. Code and dataset will be publicly released.

Unmasking Deceptive Visuals: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models on Misleading Chart Question Answering

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to reduce hallucinations by grounding responses in external context, yet LLMs still frequently introduce unsupported information or contradictions even when provided with relevant context. In this paper, we present two complementary efforts at CompanyX to measure and benchmark LLM faithfulness in RAG. First, we describe our public LeaderboardX, which has tracked hallucination rates for over 140 LLMs since 2023 using our ModelX hallucination-detection model. Motivated by limitations observed in current detection methods, we introduce JudgeX, an LLM-as-a-judge framework that leverages a pool of diverse human-annotated hallucination examples to substantially improve the automated hallucination evaluation of LLMs. We introduce an enhanced hallucination leaderboard centered on JudgeX that benchmarks LLMs on RAG faithfulness in summarization, question-answering, and data-to-text generation tasks, alongside our current hallucination leaderboard. Together, these resources enable a more reliable benchmarking of LLM hallucinations in RAG and support the development of more trustworthy generative AI systems.

Benchmarking LLM Faithfulness in RAG with Evolving Leaderboards

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Agentic RAG) enhances the processing capability for complex tasks through dynamic retrieval and adaptive workflows. Recent advances (e.g., Search-R1) have shown that outcome-supervised reinforcement learning demonstrate strong performance. However, this approach still suffers from inefficient exploration, sparse reward signals, and ambiguous global reward feedback.
To address these challenges, we propose DecEx-RAG, which models RAG as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) incorporating decision-making and execution, while introducing an efficient pruning strategy to optimize data expansion. Through comprehensive process-level policy optimization, DecEx-RAG significantly enhances the autonomous task decomposition, dynamic retrieval, and high-quality answer generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Experiments show that DecEx-RAG achieves an average absolute performance improvement of 6.2\% across six datasets, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Moreover, the pruning strategy improves data construction efficiency by nearly 6 times, providing an efficient solution for process-supervised RAG training. Our model and code will be publicly released soon.

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ProtoVQA: An Adaptable Prototypical Framework for Explainable Fine-Grained Visual Question Answering

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