China

Despite strong performance in visual understanding and language-based reasoning, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with tasks requiring integrated perception and symbolic computation. We study this limitation through visual equation solving, where mathematical equations are embedded in images, variables are represented by object icons, and coefficients must be inferred by counting. While VLMs perform well on textual equations, they fail on visually grounded counterparts. To understand this gap, we decompose the task into coefficient counting and variable recognition, and find that counting is the primary bottleneck, even when recognition is accurate. We also observe that composing recognition and reasoning introduces additional errors, highlighting challenges in multistep visual reasoning. Finally, as equation complexity increases, symbolic reasoning itself becomes a limiting factor. These findings reveal key weaknesses in current VLMs and point toward future improvements in visually grounded mathematical reasoning.

EMNLP 2025

Can Vision-Language Models Solve Visual Math Equations?

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.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a cost-effective approach to mitigate the hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating the retrieved external knowledge into the generation process. However, external knowledge may conflict with the parametric knowledge of LLMs. Furthermore, current LLMs lack inherent mechanisms for resolving such knowledge conflicts, making traditional RAG methods suffer from degraded performance and stability. Thus, we propose a Dual-Stream Knowledge-Augmented Framework for Shared-Private Semantic Synergy (DSSP-RAG). Central to the framework is a novel approach that refines self-attention into a mixed-attention, distinguishing shared and private semantics for a controlled internal-external knowledge integration. To effectively facilitate DSSP in RAG, we further introduce an unsupervised hallucination detection method based on cognitive uncertainty, ensuring the necessity of introducing knowledge, and an Energy Quotient (EQ) based on attention difference matrices to reduce noise in the retrieved external knowledge. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that DSSP-RAG can effectively resolve conflicts and enhance the complementarity of dual-stream knowledge, leading to superior performance over strong baselines.

Bridging External and Parametric Knowledge: Mitigating Hallucination of LLMs with Shared-Private Semantic Synergy in Dual-Stream Knowledge

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) is the task of understanding human emotions by analyzing a combination of different data sources, such as text, audio, and visual inputs. Although recent advances have improved emotion modeling across modalities, existing methods still struggle with two fundamental challenges: balancing global and fine-grained sentiment contributions, and over-reliance on the text modality. To address these issues, we propose DPDF-LQ (Dual-Path Dynamic Fusion with Learnable Query), an architecture that processes inputs through two complementary paths: global and local. The global path is responsible for establishing cross-modal dependencies, while the local path captures fine-grained representations. Additionally, we introduce the key module Dynamic Global Learnable Query Attention (DGLQA) in the global path, which dynamically allocates weights to each modality to capture their relevant features and learn global representations. Extensive experiments on the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI benchmarks demonstrate that DPDF-LQ achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in fine-grained sentiment prediction, by effectively combining global and local features.

Dual-Path Dynamic Fusion with Learnable Query for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Complex multi-step reasoning remains challenging for large language models (LLMs). While parallel inference-time scaling methods, such as step-level beam search, offer a promising solution, existing approaches typically depend on either domain-specific external verifiers, or self-evaluation which is brittle and prompt-sensitive. To address these issues, we propose Collaborative Beam Search (CBS), an iterative framework that harnesses the collective intelligence of multiple LLMs across both generation and verification stages. For generation, CBS leverages multiple LLMs to explore a broader search space, resulting in more diverse candidate steps. For verifications, CBS employs a perplexity-based collective consensus among these models, eliminating reliance on an external verifier or complex prompts. Between iterations, CBS leverages a dynamic quota allocation strategy that reassigns generation budget based on each model’s past consensus performance, striking a balance between candidate diversity and quality. Experimental results on six tasks across arithmetic, logical, and commonsense reasoning show that CBS outperforms single‑model scaling and multi-model ensemble baselines by over 4 percentage points in average accuracy, demonstrating its effectiveness and broad applicability.

Collaborative Beam Search: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Collective Consensus

Instruction tuning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generally involves cooperative learning between a backbone LLM and a feature encoder of non-text input modalities. The major challenge is how to efficiently find the synergy between the two modules so that LLMs can adapt their reasoning abilities to downstream tasks while feature encoders can adjust to provide more task-specific information about its modality. In this paper, we analyze the MLLM instruction tuning from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, where we find the unbalanced learning between the feature encoder and the LLM can cause problems of oscillation and biased learning that lead to sub-optimal convergence. Inspired by our findings, we propose a Multimodal Balance Coefficient that enables quantitative measurement of the balance of learning. Based on this, we further design a dynamic learning scheduler that better coordinates the learning between the LLM and feature encoder, alleviating the problems of oscillation and biased learning. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary regularization on the gradient to promote updating with larger step sizes, which potentially allows for a more accurate estimation of the proposed MultiModal Balance Coefficient and further improves the training sufficiency. Our proposed approach is agnostic to the architecture of LLM and feature encoder, so it can be generically integrated with various MLLMs. We conduct experiments on multiple downstream tasks with various MLLMs, demonstrating that the proposed method is more effective than the baselines in MLLM instruction tuning.

CoMMIT: Coordinated Multimodal Instruction Tuning

We introduce CEMTM, a context-enhanced multimodal topic model designed to infer coherent and interpretable topic structures from both short and long documents containing text and images. CEMTM builds on fine-tuned large vision language models (LVLMs) to obtain contextualized embeddings, and employs a distributional attention mechanism to weight token-level contributions to topic inference. A reconstruction objective aligns topic-based representations with the document embedding, encouraging semantic consistency across modalities. Unlike existing approaches, CEMTM can process multiple images per document without repeated encoding and maintains interpretability through explicit word-topic and document-topic distributions. Extensive experiments on six multimodal benchmarks show that CEMTM consistently outperforms unimodal and multimodal baselines, achieving a remarkable average LLM score of 2.61. Further analysis shows its effectiveness in downstream few-shot retrieval and its ability to capture visually grounded semantics in complex domains such as scientific articles.

CEMTM: Contextual Embedding-based Multimodal Topic Modeling

Automatically generated radiology reports often receive high scores from existing evaluation metrics but fail to earn clinicians’ trust. This gap reveals fundamental flaws in how current metrics assess the quality of generated reports. We rethink the design and evaluation of these metrics and propose a clinically grounded Meta-Evaluation Framework. We define clinically grounded criteria spanning clinical alignment and key metric capabilities, including discrimination, robustness, and monotonicity. Using a fine-grained dataset of ground truth and rewritten report pairs annotated with error types and clinical significance labels, we systematically evaluate widely used metrics and uncover their limitations, such as failing to distinguish clinically significant errors, over-penalizing harmless variations, or lacking consistency across error severity levels. Our framework and dataset offer guidance for building more clinically reliable evaluation methods.

ReEvalMed: Rethinking Medical Report Evaluation by Aligning Metrics with Real-World Clinical Judgment

Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is powerful, but its effectiveness hinges on which retrievers we use and how. Different retrievers offer distinct, often complementary signals: BM25 captures lexical matches; dense retrievers, semantic similarity. Yet in practice, we typically fix a single retriever based on heuristics, which fails to generalize across diverse information needs. Can we dynamically select and integrate multiple retrievers for each individual query, without the need for manual selection? In our work, we validate this intuition with quantitative analysis and introduce a mixture of retrievers: a zero-shot, weighted combination of heterogeneous retrievers. Extensive experiments show that such mixtures are effective and efficient: Despite totaling just 0.8B parameters, this mixture outperforms every individual retriever and even larger 7B models—by +10.8% and +3.9% on average, respectively. Further analysis also shows that this mixture framework can help incorporate specialized non-oracle human information sources as retrievers to achieve good collaboration, with a 58.9% relative performance improvement over simulated humans alone.

MoR: Better Handling Diverse Queries with a Mixture of Sparse, Dense, and Human Retrievers

Charts are a crucial visual medium for communicating and representing information. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made progress on chart question answering (CQA), the task remains challenging, particularly when models attend to irrelevant regions of the chart. In this work, we present ChartGaze, a new eye-tracking dataset that captures human gaze patterns during chart reasoning tasks. Through a systematic comparison of human and model attention, we find that LVLMs often diverge from human gaze, leading to reduced interpretability and accuracy. To address this, we propose a gaze-guided attention refinement that aligns image-text attention with human fixations. Our approach improves both answer accuracy and attention alignment, yielding gains of up to 2.56 percentage points across multiple models. These results demonstrate the promise of incorporating human gaze to enhance both the reasoning quality and interpretability of chart-focused LVLMs.

ChartGaze: Enhancing Chart Understanding in LVLMs with Eye-Tracking Guided Attention Refinement

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit remarkable multi-tasking ability by learning mixed instruction datasets. However, novel tasks would be encountered sequentially in dynamic world, which urges for equipping LMMs with multimodal continual instruction learning (MCIT) ability especially for diverse and challenging generative tasks. However, existing MCIT methods do not fully exploit the unique attribute of LMMs and often gain performance at the expense of efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt learning framework for MCIT to effectively alleviate forgetting of previous knowledge while managing computational complexity with natural image-text supervision. Concretely, we learn prompts for each task and exploit efficient prompt fusion for knowledge transfer and prompt selection for complexity management with dual-modality guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial +14.26% performance gain on MCIT benchmarks with remarkable x1.42 inference speed free from surging computation.

ModalPrompt: Towards Efficient Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning with Dual-Modality Guided Prompt

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) have opened new possibilities for AI-generated content. Yet, personalized cover image generation remains underexplored, despite its critical role in boosting user engagement on digital platforms. We propose ICG, a novel framework that integrates MLLM-based prompting with personalized preference alignment to generate high-quality, contextually relevant covers. ICG extracts semantic features from item titles and reference images via meta tokens, refines them with user embeddings, and injects the resulting personalized context into the diffusion model. To address the lack of labeled supervision, we adopt a multi-reward learning strategy that combines public aesthetic and relevance rewards with a personalized preference model trained from user behavior. Unlike prior pipelines relying on handcrafted prompts and disjointed modules, ICG employs an adapter to bridge MLLMs and diffusion models for end-to-end training. Experiments demonstrate that ICG significantly improves image quality, personalization, user appeal, and downstream recommendation accuracy, providing a scalable solution for real-world content platforms.

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Bridging External and Parametric Knowledge: Mitigating Hallucination of LLMs with Shared-Private Semantic Synergy in Dual-Stream Knowledge

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