China

Vision-language models demand watermarking solutions that protect intellectual property without compromising multimodal coherence. Existing text watermarking methods disrupt visual-textual alignment through biased token selection and static strategies, leaving semantic-critical concepts vulnerable. We propose VLA-Mark, a vision-aligned framework that embeds detectable watermarks while preserving semantic fidelity through cross-modal coordination. Our approach integrates multiscale visual-textual alignment metrics, combining localized patch affinity, global semantic coherence, and contextual attention patterns, to guide watermark injection without model retraining. An entropy-sensitive mechanism dynamically balances watermark strength and semantic preservation, prioritizing visual grounding during low-uncertainty generation phases. Experiments show 7.4% lower PPL and 26.6% higher BLEU than conventional methods, with near-perfect detection (98.8% AUC). The framework demonstrates 96.1% attack resilience against attacks such as paraphrasing and synonym substitution, while maintaining text-visual consistency, establishing new standards for quality-preserving multimodal watermarking.

EMNLP 2025

VLA-Mark: A cross modal watermark for large vision-language alignment models

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.

Dehumanization, i.e., denying human qualities to individuals or groups, is a particularly harmful form of hate speech that can normalize violence against marginalized communities. Despite advances in NLP for detecting general hate speech, approaches to identifying dehumanizing language remain limited due to scarce annotated data and the subtle nature of such expressions. In this work, we systematically evaluate four state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) — Claude, GPT, Mistral, and Qwen — for dehumanization detection. Our results show that only one model—Claude—achieves strong performance (over 80% F₁) under an optimized configuration, while others, despite their capabilities, perform only moderately. Performance drops further when distinguishing dehumanization from related hate types such as derogation. We also identify systematic disparities across target groups: models tend to over-predict dehumanization for some identities (e.g., Gay men), while under-identifying it for others (e.g., Refugees). These findings motivate the need for systematic, group-level evaluation when applying pretrained language models to dehumanization detection tasks.

Beyond Hate Speech: NLP’s Challenges and Opportunities in Uncovering Dehumanizing Language

Trustworthiness in healthcare question-answering (QA) systems is important for ensuring patient safety, clinical effectiveness, and user confidence. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into medical settings, the reliability of their responses directly influences clinical decision-making and patient outcomes. However, achieving comprehensive trustworthiness in medical QA poses significant challenges due to the inherent complexity of healthcare data, the critical nature of clinical scenarios, and the multifaceted dimensions of trustworthy AI. In this survey, we systematically examine six key dimensions of trustworthiness in medical QA, i.e., Factuality, Robustness, Fairness, Safety, Explainability, and Calibration. We review how each dimension is evaluated in existing LLM‐based medical QA systems. We compile and compare major benchmarks designed to assess these dimensions and analyze evaluation‐guided techniques that drive model improvements, such as retrieval‐augmented grounding, adversarial fine‐tuning, and safety alignment. Finally, we identify open challenges—such as scalable expert evaluation, integrated multi‐dimensional metrics, and real‐world deployment studies—and propose future research directions to advance the safe, reliable, and transparent deployment of LLM‐powered medical QA.

Trustworthy Medical Question Answering: An Evaluation-Centric Survey

Large language model (LLM)-driven multi-agent systems (MAS) are transforming how humans and AIs collaboratively generate ideas and artifacts. While existing surveys provide comprehensive overviews of MAS infrastructures, they largely overlook the dimension of \emph{creativity}, including how novel outputs are generated and evaluated, how creativity informs agent personas, and how creative workflows are coordinated. This is the first survey dedicated to creativity in MAS. We focus on text and image generation tasks, and present: (1) a taxonomy of agent proactivity and persona design; (2) an overview of generation techniques, including divergent exploration, iterative refinement, and collaborative synthesis, as well as relevant datasets and evaluation metrics; and (3) a discussion of key challenges, such as inconsistent evaluation standards, insufficient bias mitigation, coordination conflicts, and the lack of unified benchmarks. This survey offers a structured framework and roadmap for advancing the development, evaluation, and standardization of creative MAS.

Creativity in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems: A Survey

Numerous datasets have been proposed to evaluate social bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. However, assessing bias within specific application domains remains challenging, as existing approaches often face limitations in scalability and domain adaptability. In this work, we introduce a domain-adaptive framework that utilizes prompting with Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically transform template-based bias datasets into domain-specific variants. We apply our method to two widely used benchmarks—\textit{Equity Evaluation Corpus} (EEC) and \textit{Identity Phrase Templates Test Set} (IPTTS)—adapting them to the Twitter and Wikipedia Talk data. Our results show that the adapted datasets yield bias estimates more closely aligned with real-world data. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based prompting as a domain-sensitive approach for bias evaluation in NLP systems. \footnote{Our code and data are \href{https://tinyurl.com/EMNLPBiasDomainAdaptAnonym}{available online}.}

Adapting Bias Evaluation to Domain Contexts using Generative Models

Understanding user intentions in multi-turn dialogues is critical for conversational AI, yet existing approaches—relying on rigid slot-value structures or unstructured free-text—fail to fully capture conversational complexity. In this paper, we propose IntentionFrame, a semi-structured framework inspired by psychological and cognitive intention theories, which organizes conversational intents into four interrelated aspects: situation, emotion, action, and knowledge. This design not only retains interpretability but also provides LLMs with a rich context to accurately parse and respond to nuanced user inputs. To efficiently scale IntentionFrame annotations, we introduce a Weakly-supervised Reinforced Generation (WeRG) method that leverages a small set of high-quality human annotations in conjunction with abundant coarsely labeled data. By applying reinforcement learning to balance these diverse signals, WeRG aims to effectively generate reliable IntentionFrame annotations, which serve as essential grounding for downstream tasks—leading to substantial improvements in response generation and task completion. Our experiments, supported by both automatic metrics and human evaluations, show that integrating IntentionFrame with WeRG significantly improves LLMs’ conversational understanding and sets a new benchmark for intent analysis.

IntentionFrame: A Semi-Structured, Multi-Aspect Framework for Fine-Grained Conversational Intention Understanding

Controllable Dialogue Generation (CDG) enables chatbots to generate responses with desired attributes, and weighted decoding methods have achieved significant success in the CDG task. However, using a fixed constant value to manage the bias of attribute probabilities makes it challenging to find an ideal control strength that satisfies both controllability and fluency. To address this issue, we propose ECO decoding Entropy-based COntrol, which dynamically adjusts the control strength at each generation step according to the model’s entropy in both the language model and attribute classifier probability distributions. Experimental results on DailyDialog and MultiWOZ datasets show that our method achieves improved control accuracy while maintaining fluency and grammar, outperforming previous decoding methods across various models and settings. Furthermore, ECO decoding alleviates probability interpolation issues in multi-attribute generation, demonstrating its robust performance in both single and multi-attribute scenarios.

ECO Decoding: Entropy-Based Control for Controllability and Fluency in Controllable Dialogue Generation

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to elicit user preferences via natural dialogue to provide suitable item recommendations. However, current CRSs often deviate from realistic human interactions by rapidly recommending items in brief sessions. This work addresses this gap by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate dialogue summaries from dialogue history and item recommendation information from item description. This approach enables the extraction of both explicit user statements and implicit preferences inferred from the dialogue context. We introduce a method using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to ensure dialogue summary and item recommendation information are rich in information crucial for effective recommendations. Experiments on two public datasets validate our method's effectiveness in fostering more natural and realistic conversational recommendation processes.

Refining Text Generation for Realistic Conversational Recommendation via Direct Preference Optimization

We introduce VoiceBBQ, a spoken extension of the BBQ benchmark that disentangles bias along two orthogonal axes: content and acoustic. The dataset converts every BBQ context into controlled voice conditions, enabling per-axis accuracy, bias, and consistency scores that remain comparable to the original text benchmark. Using Voice BBQ, we evaluate two SLMs—LLaMA-Omni and Qwen2-Audio—and observe sharp architectural contrasts: LLaMA-Omni retains strong acoustic sensitivity, amplifying gender and accent bias, whereas Qwen2-Audio substantially dampens these cues while preserving content fidelity. Voice BBQ thus provides a compact, drop-in testbed for jointly diagnosing textual and acoustic bias across spoken language models.

VoiceBBQ: Investigating Effect of Content and Acoustics in Social Bias of Spoken Language Model

Extensive research on LLM-based spoken dialogue systems has significantly advanced the development of intelligent voice assistants. However, the integration of role information within speech remains an underexplored area, limiting its application in real-world scenarios, particularly in multi-party dialogue settings. With the growing demand for personalization, voice assistants that can recognize and remember users establish a deeper connection with them. We focus on enabling LLMs with speaker-awareness capabilities and enhancing their understanding of character settings through synthetic data to generate contextually appropriate responses. We introduce Persona-Dialogue, the first large-scale multi-party spoken dialogue dataset that incorporates speaker profiles. Based on this dataset, we propose PAChat, an architecture that simultaneously models both linguistic content and speaker features, allowing LLMs to map character settings to speaker identities in speech. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PAChat successfully achieves speaker-specific responses, character understanding, and the generation of targeted replies in multi-party dialogue scenarios, surpassing existing spoken dialogue systems.

PACHAT: Persona-Aware Speech Assistant for Multi-party Dialogue

Considering the importance of detecting hateful language, labeled hate speech data is expensive and time-consuming to collect, particularly for low-resource languages. Prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning and data augmentation in improving performance on tasks with limited labeled data. To develop an efficient and scalable cross-lingual transfer learning approach, we leverage nearest-neighbor retrieval to augment minimal labeled data in the target language, thereby enhancing detection performance. Specifically, we assume access to a small set of labeled training instances in the target language and use these to retrieve the most relevant labeled examples from a large multilingual hate speech detection pool. We evaluate our approach on eight languages and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms models trained solely on the target language data. Furthermore, in most cases, our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art. Notably, our approach is highly data-efficient, retrieving as small as 200 instances in some cases while maintaining superior performance. Moreover, it is scalable, as the retrieval pool can be easily expanded, and the method can be readily adapted to new languages and tasks. We also apply maximum marginal relevance to mitigate redundancy and filter out highly similar retrieved instances, resulting in improvements in some languages.

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Beyond Hate Speech: NLP’s Challenges and Opportunities in Uncovering Dehumanizing Language

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