China

The rapid advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced capabilities in Document Understanding. However, prevailing benchmarks like DocVQA and ChartQA predominantly comprise scanned or digital documents, inadequately reflecting the intricate challenges posed by diverse real-world scenarios such as variable illumination and physical distortions. This paper introduces WildDoc, the inaugural benchmark designed specifically for assessing document understanding in natural environments. WildDoc incorporates a diverse set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions and leverages document sources from established benchmarks to facilitate comprehensive comparisons with digital or scanned documents. Further, to rigorously evaluate model robustness, each document is captured four times under different conditions. Evaluations of state-of-the-art MLLMs on WildDoc expose substantial performance declines and underscore the models’ inadequate robustness compared to traditional benchmarks, highlighting the unique challenges posed by real-world document understanding.

EMNLP 2025

WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild?

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.

Recent work has identified retrieval heads (Wu et al., 2025), a subset of attention heads responsible for retrieving salient information in long-context language models (LMs), as measured by their copy-paste behavior in Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks. In this paper, we introduce QRHead (Query-Focused Retrieval Head), an improved set of attention heads that significantly enhance retrieval from long contexts. We identify QRHead by aggregating attention scores with respect to the input query, using real-world tasks such as long-context QA. We further introduce QRRetriever, an efficient and effective retriever that uses the accumulated attention mass of QRHead as retrieval scores. We evaluate QRRetriever as a re-ranker on the BEIR benchmark and find that it achieves strong zero-shot performance, outperforming other LLM-based re-rankers such as RankGPT. We also use QRRetriever for long-context reasoning by selecting the most relevant parts with the highest retrieval scores. On long-context, multi-hop reasoning tasks LongMemEval and CLIPPER, this yields over 10% performance gains over full context and outperforms strong dense retrievers. Further analysis shows that both the query-context attention scoring and task difficulty are crucial for identifying QRHead with strong downstream utility. Overall, our work contributes a general purpose retriever and offers interpretability insights into the long-context capabilities of LMs.

Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking

Aligned instruction following models can better fulfill user requests than their unaligned counterparts. However, it has been shown that there is a length bias in evaluation of such models, and that training algorithms tend to exploit this bias by learning longer responses. In this work we show how to train models that can be controlled at inference time with instructions containing desired length constraints. Such models are superior in length instructed evaluations, outperforming standard instruction following models such as GPT4, Llama 3 and Mixtral.

Following Length Constraints in Instructions

Real-world decision-making often begins with identifying which modality contains the most relevant information for a given query. While recent multimodal models have made impressive progress in processing diverse inputs, it remains unclear whether they can reason contrastively across multiple modalities to select the one that best satisfies a natural language prompt. We argue this capability is foundational, especially in retrieval-augmented and decision-time contexts, where systems must evaluate multiple signals and identify which one conveys the relevant information. To evaluate this skill, we introduce Contra4, a dataset for contrastive cross-modal reasoning across four modalities: image, audio, video, and 3D. Each example presents a natural language question alongside multiple candidate modality instances, and the model must select the one that semantically aligns with the prompt. Contra4 combines human-annotated captions with a mixture-of-models round-trip-consistency filter to ensure high-quality supervision, resulting in 174k training examples and a manually verified test set of 2.3k samples. While task-specific fine-tuning improves performance by 56% relative to baseline, state-of-the-art models still achieve only 56% accuracy overall and 42% in four-modality settings, underscoring a significant limitation in current multimodal models.

Contra4: Evaluating Contrastive Cross-Modal Reasoning in Audio, Video, Image, and 3D

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing. However, they often suffer from knowledge gaps and hallucinations. Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) enhances LLM reasoning by integrating structured knowledge from external graphs. However, we identify two key challenges that plague GraphRAG: (1) Retrieving noisy and irrelevant information can degrade performance and (2) Excessive reliance on external knowledge suppresses the model’s intrinsic reasoning. To address these issues, we propose GraphRAG-FI (Filtering & Integration), consisting of GraphRAG-Filtering and GraphRAG-Integration. GraphRAG-Filtering employs a two-stage filtering mechanism to refine retrieved information. GraphRAG-Integration employs a logits-based selection strategy to balance external knowledge from GraphRAG with the LLM’s intrinsic reasoning, reducing over-reliance on retrievals. Experiments on knowledge graph QA tasks demonstrate that GraphRAG-FI significantly improves reasoning performance across multiple backbone models, establishing a more reliable and effective GraphRAG framework.

Empowering GraphRAG with Knowledge Filtering and Integration

Conventional transformer models typically compress the information from all tokens in a sequence into a single texttt[CLS] token to represent global context— an approach that can lead to information loss in tasks requiring localized or hierarchical cues. In this work, we introduce textitInceptive Transformer, a modular and lightweight architecture that enriches transformer-based token representations by integrating a multi-scale feature extraction module inspired by inception networks. Our model is designed to balance local and global dependencies by dynamically weighting tokens based on their relevance to a particular task. Evaluation across a diverse range of tasks including emotion recognition (both English and Bangla), irony detection, disease identification, and anti-COVID vaccine tweets classification shows that our models consistently outperform the baselines by 1% to 14% while maintaining efficiency. These findings highlight the versatility and cross-lingual applicability of our method for enriching transformer-based representations across diverse domains.

Inceptive Transformers: Enhancing Contextual Representations through Multi-Scale Feature Learning Across Domains and Languages

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to adversarial attacks such as jailbreaking, which can elicit harmful or unsafe behaviors. This vulnerability is exacerbated in multilingual settings, where multilingual safety-aligned data is often limited. Thus, developing a guardrail capable of detecting and filtering unsafe content across diverse languages is critical for deploying LLMs in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce a multilingual guardrail with reasoning for prompt classification. Our method consists of: (1) synthetic multilingual data generation incorporating culturally and linguistically nuanced variants, (2) supervised fine-tuning, and (3) a curriculum-based Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) framework that further improves performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our multilingual guardrail, MrGuard, consistently outperforms recent baselines across both in-domain and out-of-domain languages by more than 15%. We also evaluate MrGuard’s robustness to multilingual variations, such as code-switching and low-resource language distractors in the prompt, and demonstrate that it preserves safety judgments under these challenging conditions. The multilingual reasoning capability of our guardrail enables it to generate explanations, which are particularly useful for understanding language-specific risks and ambiguities in multilingual content moderation.

MrGuard: A Multilingual Reasoning Guardrail for Universal LLM Safety

Humans have a remarkable ability to acquire and understand grammatical phenomena that are seen rarely, if ever, during childhood. Recent evidence suggests that language models with human-scale pretraining data may possess a similar ability by generalizing from frequent to rare constructions. However, it remains an open question how widespread this generalization ability is, and to what extent this knowledge extends to meanings of rare constructions, as opposed to just their forms. We fill this gap by testing human-scale transformer language models on their knowledge of both the form and meaning of the (rare and quirky) English Let-Alone construction. To evaluate our LMs we construct a bespoke synthetic benchmark that targets syntactic and semantic properties of the construction. We find that human-scale LMs are sensitive to form, even when related constructions are filtered from the dataset. However, human-scale LMs do not make correct generalizations about Let-Alone's meaning. These results point to an asymmetry in the current architectures' sample efficiency between language form and meaning, something which is not present in human language learners.

Unpacking Let Alone: Human-Scale Models Generalize to a Rare Construction in Form but not Meaning

Querying tables with **unstructured data** is challenging due to the presence of *text* (or *image*), either embedded in the table or in external paragraphs, which traditional **SQL** struggles to process, especially for tasks requiring **semantic reasoning**. While **Large Language Models (LLMs)** excel at understanding context, they face limitations with **long input sequences**. Existing approaches that combine SQL and LLMs typically rely on **rigid, predefined workflows**, limiting their adaptability to **complex queries**. To address these issues, we introduce **Weaver**, a **modular pipeline** that dynamically integrates SQL and LLMs for *table-based question answering (TableQA)*. Weaver generates a **flexible, step-by-step plan** that combines SQL for **structured data retrieval** with LLMs for **semantic processing**. By decomposing complex queries into manageable subtasks, Weaver improves both **accuracy** and **generalization**. Our experiments show that Weaver consistently **outperforms state-of-the-art methods** across four TableQA datasets, reducing both **API calls** and **error rates**.

Weaver: Interweaving SQL and LLM for Table Reasoning

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) is a practical yet challenging task, which is to ask questions based on documents while referring to multiple pages and different modalities of information, e.g., images and tables. To handle multi-modality, recent methods follow a similar Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but utilize Visual Language Models (VLMs) based embedding model to embed and retrieve relevant pages as images, and generate answers with VLMs that can accept an image as input. In this paper, we introduce SimpleDoc, a lightweight yet powerful retrieval‑augmented framework for DocVQA. It boosts evidence page gathering by first retrieving candidates through embedding similarity and then filtering and re-ranking these candidates based on page summaries. A single VLM-based reasoner agent repeatedly invokes this dual-cue retriever, iteratively pulling fresh pages into a working memory until the question is confidently answered. SimpleDoc outperforms previous baselines by 3.2% on average on 4 DocVQA datasets with much fewer pages retrieved.

SimpleDoc: Multi‑Modal Document Understanding with Dual‑Cue Page Retrieval and Iterative Refinement

Temporal information extraction (IE) aims to extract structured temporal information from unstructured text, thereby uncovering the implicit timelines within. This technique is applied across domains such as healthcare, newswire, and intelligence analysis, aiding models in these areas to perform temporal reasoning and enabling human users to grasp the temporal structure of text. Transformer-based pre-trained language models have produced revolutionary advancements in natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional performance across a multitude of tasks. Despite the achievements garnered by Transformer-based approaches in temporal IE, there is a lack of comprehensive reviews on these endeavors. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by systematically summarizing and analyzing the body of work on temporal IE using Transformers while highlighting potential future research directions.

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Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking

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