China

As automatic metrics become increasingly stronger and widely adopted, the risk of unintentionally &quot;gaming the metric&#39;&#39; during model development rises. This issue is caused by metric interference (MINT), i.e., the use of the same or related metrics for both model tuning and evaluation. MINT can misguide practitioners into being overoptimistic about the performance of their systems: as system outputs become a function of the interfering metric, their estimated quality loses correlation with human judgments. In this work, we analyze two common cases of MINT in machine translation-related tasks: filtering of training data, and decoding with quality signals. Importantly, we find that MINT strongly distorts instance-level metric scores, even when metrics are not directly optimized for—questioning the common strategy of leveraging a different, yet related metric for evaluation that is not used for tuning. To address this problem, we propose MINTAdjust, a method for more reliable evaluation under MINT. MINTAdjust takes as input scores of other metrics on outputs from models not subject to interference, and produces adjusted scores for the interfering metric. On the WMT24 MT shared task test set, MINTAdjust ranks translations and systems more accurately than state-of-the-art-metrics across a majority of language pairs, especially for high-quality systems. Furthermore, MINTAdjust outperforms AutoRank, the ensembling method used by the organizers.

EMNLP 2025

Adding Chocolate to MINT: Mitigating Metric Interference in Machine Translation

metric interference

self-preference bias

bias

automatic evaluation

machine translation

As automatic metrics become increasingly stronger and widely adopted, the risk of unintentionally "gaming the metric'' during model development rises. This issue is caused by metric interference (MINT), i.e., the use of the same or related metrics for both model tuning and evaluation. MINT can misguide practitioners into being overoptimistic about the performance of their systems: as system outputs become a function of the interfering metric, their estimated quality loses correlation with human judgments. In this work, we analyze two common cases of MINT in machine translation-related tasks: filtering of training data, and decoding with quality signals. Importantly, we find that MINT strongly distorts instance-level metric scores, even when metrics are not directly optimized for—questioning the common strategy of leveraging a different, yet related metric for evaluation that is not used for tuning. To address this problem, we propose MINTAdjust, a method for more reliable evaluation under MINT. MINTAdjust takes as input scores of other metrics on outputs from models not subject to interference, and produces adjusted scores for the interfering metric. On the WMT24 MT shared task test set, MINTAdjust ranks translations and systems more accurately than state-of-the-art-metrics across a majority of language pairs, especially for high-quality systems. Furthermore, MINTAdjust outperforms AutoRank, the ensembling method used by the organizers.

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*





<br>

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

We present BenCzechMark (BCM), the first comprehensive Czech language benchmark designed for large language models, offering diverse tasks, multiple task formats, and multiple evaluation metrics. Its duel scoring system is grounded in statistical significance theory and uses aggregation across tasks inspired by social preference theory. Our benchmark encompasses 50 challenging tasks, with corresponding test datasets, primarily in native Czech, with 14 newly collected ones. These tasks span 8 categories and cover diverse domains, including historical Czech news, essays from pupils or language learners, and spoken word.

Furthermore, we collect and clean BUT-Large Czech Collection, the largest publicly available clean Czech language corpus, and use it for (i) contamination analysis and (ii) continuous pretraining of the first Czech-centric 7B language model with Czech-specific tokenization. We use our model as a baseline for comparison with publicly available multilingual models. Lastly, we release and maintain a leaderboard with existing 50 model submissions, where new model submissions can be made at https://huggingface.co/spaces/CZLC/BenCzechMark.

A Czech-centric Multitask and Multimetric Benchmark for Large Language Models with Duel Scoring Mechanism

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enhances adaptability while reducing computational costs. However, fine-tuning can compromise safety alignment, even with benign data, increasing susceptibility to harmful outputs. Existing safety alignment methods struggle to capture complex parameter shifts, leading to suboptimal safety-utility trade-offs. To address this issue, we propose Safe Pruning LoRA (SPLoRA), a novel pruning-based approach that selectively removes LoRA layers that weaken safety alignment, improving safety while preserving performance. At its core, we introduce Empirical-DIEM (E-DIEM), a dimension-insensitive similarity metric that effectively detects safety misalignment in LoRA-adapted models. We conduct extensive experiments on LLMs fine-tuned with mixed of benign and malicious data, and purely benign datasets, evaluating SPLoRA across utility, safety, and reliability metrics. Results demonstrate that SPLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art safety alignment techniques, significantly reducing safety risks while maintaining or improving model performance and reliability. Additionally, SPLoRA reduces inference overhead, making it a scalable and efficient solution for deploying safer and more reliable LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/AoShuang92/SPLoRA.

Safe Pruning LoRA: Robust Distance-Guided Pruning for Safety Alignment in Adaptation of LLMs

Text anonymization is the process of removing or obfuscating information from textual data to protect the privacy of individuals. This process inherently involves a complex trade-off between privacy protection and information preservation, where stringent anonymization methods can significantly impact the text's utility for downstream applications. Evaluating the effectiveness of text anonymization proves challenging from both privacy and utility perspectives, as there is no universal benchmark that can comprehensively assess anonymization techniques across diverse, and sometimes contradictory contexts. We present Tau-Eval, an open-source framework for benchmarking text anonymization methods through the lens of privacy and utility task sensitivity. A Python library, code, documentation and tutorials are publicly available.

Tau-Eval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Useful and Private Text Anonymization

This work introduces UnityAI-Guard, a framework for binary toxicity classification targeting low-resource Indian languages. While existing systems predominantly cater to high-resource languages, UnityAI-Guard addresses this critical gap by developing state-of-the-art models for identifying toxic content across diverse Brahmic/Indic scripts. Our approach achieves an impressive average F1-score of 84.23% across seven languages, leveraging a dataset of 567k training instances and 30k manually verified test instances. By advancing multilingual content moderation for linguistically diverse regions, UnityAI-Guard also provides public API access to foster broader adoption and application.

UnityAI Guard: Pioneering Toxicity Detection Across Low-Resource Indian Languages

We present SynthTextEval, a toolkit for conducting comprehensive evaluations of synthetic text. The fluency of large language model (LLM) outputs has made synthetic text potentially viable for numerous applications, such as reducing the risks of privacy violations in the development and deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains. Realizing this potential, however, requires principled consistent evaluations of synthetic data across multiple dimensions: its utility in downstream systems, the fairness of these systems, the risk of privacy leakage, general distributional differences from the source text, and qualitative feedback from domain experts. SynthTextEval allows users to conduct evaluations along all of these dimensions over synthetic data that they upload or generate using the toolkit's generation module. While our toolkit can be run over any data, we highlight its functionality and effectiveness over datasets from two high-stakes domains: healthcare and law. By consolidating and standardizing evaluation metrics, we aim to improve the viability of synthetic text, and in-turn, privacy-preservation in AI development.

SynthTextEval: Synthetic Text Data Generation and Evaluation for High-Stakes Domains

Understanding when and how linguistic knowledge emerges during language model training remains a central challenge for interpretability. Most existing tools are post hoc, rely on scalar metrics, or require nontrivial integration effort, making comprehensive interpretability analysis difficult to deploy and maintain. We introduce TRACE, a modular toolkit for training and inference-time interpretability analysis of transformer models. It enables lightweight, in-training analysis of linguistic and representational signals, including features probing, intrinsic dimensionality, Hessian curvature, and output diagnostics. It integrates with ABSynth, a controllable synthetic corpus generator that provides structured annotations for precise evaluation of linguistic feature acquisition. Experiments with autoregressive transformers demonstrate that TRACE reveals developmental phenomena such as early syntactic emergence, delayed semantic acquisition, and representational compression, signals overlooked by traditional scalar metrics such as loss or accuracy. With minimal integration effort, the tool enables layer-wise diagnostics, convergence-based early stopping, and detection of structural errors, making transformer analysis interpretable, actionable, and reproducible.

TRACE: Training and Inference-Time Interpretability Analysis for Language Models

While machine translation has taken great strides in recent years, thanks in large part to transformer language models, machine translation tools are designed primarily for plain text, and thus not equipped to deal with complex markup documents. Not even Large Language Models can reliably handle LaTeX source files, as non-standard structures are not captured by any available training data. Previous attempts to create translation engines for LaTeX either work on compiled documents, rely on document pre-processors which may lose critical semantic elements, or cannot distinguish between text and non-text content. In this paper we present LaTeXMT, a software solution for structure-preserving, source-to-source translation of LaTeX documents. All of the source code to LaTeXMT is provided under the LGPL-3.0 open-source licence and a web version is publicly available.

LaTeXMT: Machine Translation for LaTeX Documents

Large language models (LLMs) are advancing at an unprecedented pace globally, with regions increasingly adopting these models for applications in their primary language. Evaluation of these models in diverse linguistic environments, especially in low-resource languages, has become a major challenge for academia and industry. Existing evaluation frameworks suffer from inconsistency across different benchmarks, being disproportionately focused on English and a handful of high-resource languages, thereby overlooking the realistic performance of LLMs in multilingual and lower-resource scenarios. To address this critical challenge of fragmented and inconsistent multilingual evaluation, we introduce GlotEval, a unified and lightweight framework that systematically integrates over 20 benchmarks under a standardized ISO 639-3 language identifier system, allowing for seamless incorporation of new benchmarks. Supporting nine key tasks (machine translation, text classification, summarization, open-ended generation, reading comprehension, sequence labeling, intrinsic evaluation, instruction following and reasoning), spanning over dozens to hundreds of languages, GlotEval uniquely enables language-specific, cross-benchmark analysis and non-English-centric evaluations at a scale previously less practical for many researchers. This enables a precise diagnosis of model strengths and weaknesses in diverse linguistic contexts. A multilingual translation case study demonstrates GlotEval's applicability for multilingual and language-specific evaluations.

GlotEval: A Test Suite for Massively Multilingual Evaluation of Large Language Models

Empathetic interaction is a cornerstone of human-machine communication, due to the need for understanding speech enriched with paralinguistic cues and generating emotional and expressive responses. However, the most powerful empathetic LSLMs are increasingly closed off, leaving the crucial details about the architecture, data and development opaque to researchers. Given the critical need for transparent research into the LSLMs and empathetic behavior, we present OpenS2S, a fully open-source, transparent and end-to-end LSLM designed to enable empathetic speech interactions. Based on our empathetic speech-to-text model BLSP-Emo, OpenS2S further employs a streaming interleaved decoding architecture to achieve low-latency speech generation. To facilitate end-to-end training, OpenS2S incorporates an automated data construction pipeline that synthesizes diverse, high-quality empathetic speech dialogues at low cost. By leveraging large language models to generate empathetic content and controllable text-to-speech systems to introduce speaker and emotional variation, we construct a scalable training corpus with rich paralinguistic diversity and minimal human supervision. We release the fully open-source OpenS2S model, including the dataset, model weights, pre-training and fine-tuning codes, to empower the broader research community and accelerate innovation in empathetic speech systems.

OpenS2S: Advancing Fully Open-Source End-to-End Empathetic Large Speech Language Model

Automatic research with Large Language Models (LLMs) is rapidly gaining importance, driving the development of increasingly complex workflows involving multi-agent systems, planning, tool usage, and human-agent interaction to accelerate research processes. However, as more researchers begin to use and build upon these tools and platforms, the complexity and difficulty of extending and maintaining such agentic workflows has become a significant challenge, particularly as algorithms and architectures continue to advance. To address this growing complexity, TinyScientist identifies the essential components of the automatic research workflow and proposes an interactive, extensible, and controllable framework that adapts easily to new tools and supports iterative growth. We have developed an interactive UI and a robust Python package to make state-of-the-art auto-research pipelines accessible to all researchers and developers. TinyScientist is publicly available and actively maintained at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/tiny-scientist, with over 100 stars and 10 forks on GitHub. Its Python package is released on PyPI at https://pypi.org/project/tiny-scientist/ and has been downloaded more than 700 times.

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A Czech-centric Multitask and Multimetric Benchmark for Large Language Models with Duel Scoring Mechanism

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