China

Large language models (LLMs) are applied to reasoning and (automated) planning across diverse domains, from travel itineraries to embodied AI tasks. However, concerns have been raised about their suitability for long-horizon tasks involving multiple constraints, as they are prone to hallucinations, particularly in adversarial scenarios. Safety reasoning also becomes critical for embodied AI agents, which interact with their physical environments to complete tasks on behalf of humans. However, existing (safety) benchmarks fail to represent a diverse range of multi-constraint tasks that require long-horizon planning with a focus on safety. To address this, we propose VestaBench, a benchmark curated using VirtualHome and BEHAVIOR-100. Our VestaBench includes (1) tasks that can be achieved safely under adversarial and multi-constraint settings, as well as (2) adversarial instructions that the agent must avoid. Our experiments with state-of-the-art LLM-based baselines reveal that they perform poorly against our tasks, not only achieving low success rates but also suffering significantly compromised safety outcomes. This observation reinforces the limitations of LLMs in generating safe plans when faced with adversarial settings or instructions. Finally, we believe that our VestaBench provides a valuable set of embodied tasks and challenges to the research and industry communities.

EMNLP 2025

VestaBench: An Embodied Benchmark for Safe Long-Horizon Planning Under Multi-Constraint and Adversarial Settings

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.

This paper introduces ECHO-LLaMA, an efficient LLaMA architecture designed to improve both the training speed and inference throughput of LLaMA architectures while maintaining its learning capacity. ECHO-LLaMA transforms LLaMA models into shared KV caching across certain layers, significantly reducing KV computational complexity while maintaining or improving language performance. Experimental results demonstrate that ECHO-LLaMA achieves up to 77\% higher token-per-second throughput during training, up to 16\% higher Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU), and up to 14\% lower loss when trained on an equal number of tokens. Furthermore, on the 1.1B model, ECHO-LLaMA delivers approximately 7\% higher test-time throughput compared to the baseline. By introducing a computationally efficient adaptation mechanism, ECHO-LLaMA offers a scalable and cost-effective solution for pretraining and finetuning large language models, enabling faster and more resource-efficient training without compromising performance.

ECHO-LLaMA: Efficient Caching for High-Performance LLaMA Training

In clinical science, biomarkers are crucial indicators for early cancer detection, prognosis, and guiding personalized treatment decisions. Although critical, extracting biomarkers and their levels from clinical texts remains a complex and underexplored problem in natural language processing research. In this paper, we present BIOPSY, an end-to-end pipeline that integrates a domain-adapted biomarker entity recognition model, a relation extraction model to link biomarkers to their respective mutations, a biomarker-type classifier, and finally, a tailored algorithm to capture biomarker expression levels. Evaluated on 5,000 real-world clinical texts, our system achieved an overall F1 score of 0.86 for oncology and 0.87 for neuroscience domains. This reveals the ability of the pipeline to adapt across various clinical sources, including trial records, research papers, and medical notes, offering the first comprehensive solution for end-to-end, context-aware biomarker extraction and interpretation in clinical research.

BIOPSY - Biomarkers In Oncology: Pipeline for Structured Yielding

Inference optimizations such as quantization, pruning, format and datatype conversion, model export, and serialization can lead to functional degradations in language model task performance. While most efforts on performance recovery for deployment focus on robust quantization techniques, we focus on recovering model accuracies from any sources that degrade model weights, such as improper model serialization. In this work, we propose Recover-LoRA, a lightweight and dataset agnostic method to recover accuracy in degraded models. Recover-LoRA uses synthetic data and logit distillation to learn LoRA adapters on selective layers that facilitate aligning the degraded model to its full precision model. We investigate the utility of Recover-LoRA across a diverse set of small language models (SLMs), including models with varying attention architectures, multi-head attention (MHA) and group-query attention (GQA), as well as several evaluation datasets. Our results show that Recover-LoRA recovers model accuracies by 5-17\% on MHA and GQA SLMs.

Recover-LoRA: Data-Free Accuracy Recovery of Degraded Language Models via Low-Rank Adaptation

As a primary medium for modern information dissemination, social networking services (SNS) have experienced rapid growth, which has proposed significant challenges for platform content management and interaction quality improvement. Recently, the development of large language models (LLMs) has offered potential solutions but existing studies focus on isolated tasks, which not only encounter diminishing benefit from the data scaling within individual scenarios but also fail to flexibly adapt to diverse real-world context. To address these challenges, we introduce RedOne, a domain-specific LLM designed to break the performance bottleneck of single-task baselines and establish a comprehensive foundation for the SNS. RedOne was developed through a three-stage training strategy consisting of continue pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization, using a large-scale real-world dataset. Through extensive experiments, RedOne maintains strong general capabilities, and achieves an average improvement up to 14.02% across 8 major SNS tasks and 7.56% in SNS bilingual evaluation benchmark, compared with base models. Furthermore, through online testing, RedOne reduced the exposure rate in harmful content detection by 11.23% and improved the click page rate in post-view search by 14.95% compared with single-tasks baseline models. These results establish RedOne as a robust domain-specific LLM for SNS, demonstrating excellent generalization across various tasks and promising applicability in real-world scenarios.

RedOne: Revealing Domain-specific LLM Post-Training in Social Networking Services

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at complex
reasoning tasks, yet their performance hinges on the quality of their prompts and pipeline structures. Manual prompt
design, as used in frameworks like DSPy, poses significant
limitations: it is time-intensive, demands substantial expertise,
and lacks scalability, restricting the widespread use of LLMs
across diverse applications. To overcome these challenges, we
introduce AutoDSPy, the first framework to fully automate
DSPy pipeline construction using reinforcement learning (RL).
AutoDSPy leverages an RL-tuned policy network to dynamically
select optimal reasoning modules—such as Chain-of-Thought for
logical tasks or ReAct for tool integration—along with inputoutput signatures and execution strategies, entirely eliminating
the need for manual configuration. Experimental results on the
GSM8K and HotPotQA benchmarks demonstrate that AutoDSPy
outperforms traditional DSPy baselines, achieving accuracy gains
of up to 4.3% while reducing inference time, even with smaller
models like GPT-2 (127M). By integrating RL-based automation,
AutoDSPy enhances both efficiency and accessibility, simplifying
the development of structured, high-performing LLM solutions
and enabling scalability across a wide range of tasks

AutoDSPy: Automating Modular Prompt Design with Reinforcement Learning for Small and Large Language Models

We investigate how large language models (LLMs) can produce personalized dialogue responses, specifically focusing on whether they reflect linguistic styles pertaining to different generations: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z. We create P-MultiWoZ, a personalized, generation-specific version of MultiWOZ 2.2, by prompting LLMs, and validate its alignment with the original dataset through automatic and human evaluations. To validate the appropriateness of generational linguistic traits, we introduce GeMoSC, a corpus of generation-annotated movie dialogues. Linguistic analysis and perplexity test suggest that P-MultiWoZ reflects patterns consistent with GeMoSC. Finally, a human evaluation reveals that annotators were able to mostly correctly identify the generation behind P-MultiWoZ dialogues, based only on a single query-reply pair.

Can Large Language Models Personalize Dialogues to Generational Styles?

Prompt privacy is crucial, especially when using online large language models (LLMs), due to the sensitive information often contained within prompts. While LLMs can enhance prompt privacy through text rewriting, existing methods primarily focus on document-level rewriting, neglecting the rich, multi-granular representations of text. This limitation restricts LLM utilization to specific tasks, overlooking their generalization and in-context learning capabilities, thus hindering practical application. To address this gap, we introduce DP-GTR, a novel three-stage framework that leverages local differential privacy (DP) and the composition theorem via group text rewriting. DP-GTR is the first framework to integrate both document-level and word-level information while exploiting in-context learning to simultaneously improve privacy and utility, effectively bridging local and global DP mechanisms at the individual data point level. Experiments on CommonSense QA and DocVQA demonstrate that DP-GTR outperforms existing approaches, achieving a superior privacy-utility trade-off. Furthermore, our framework is compatible with existing rewriting techniques, serving as a plug-in to enhance privacy protection. Our code is publicly available at anonymous.4open.science for reproducibility.

DP-GTR: Differentially Private Prompt Protection via Group Text Rewriting

Recent advancements in self-improvement for Large Language Models (LLMs) have efficiently enhanced model capabilities without significantly increasing costs, particularly in terms of human effort. While this area is still relatively young, its extension to the multimodal domain holds immense potential for leveraging diverse data sources and developing more general self-improving models. This survey is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of self-improvement in Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). We provide a structured overview of the current literature and discuss methods from three perspectives: 1) data collection, 2) data organization, and 3) model optimization, to facilitate the further development of self-improvement in MLLMs. We also include commonly used evaluations and downstream applications. Finally, we conclude by outlining open challenges and future research directions.

Self-Improvement in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey

Intent detection, a core component of natural language understanding, has considerably evolved as a crucial mechanism in safeguarding large language models (LLMs). While prior work has applied intent detection to enhance LLMs' moderation guardrails, showing a significant success against content-level jailbreaks, the robustness of these intent-aware guardrails under malicious manipulations remains under-explored. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of intent-aware guardrails and demonstrate that LLMs exhibit implicit intent detection capabilities. We propose a two-stage intent-based prompt-refinement framework, IntentPrompt, that first transforms harmful inquiries into structured outlines and further reframes them into declarative-style narratives by iteratively optimizing prompts via feedback loops to enhance jailbreak success for red-teaming purposes. Extensive experiments across four public benchmarks and various black-box LLMs indicate that our framework consistently outperforms several cutting-edge jailbreak methods and evades even advanced Intent Analysis (IA) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based defenses. Specifically, our "FSTR+SPIN" variant achieves attack success rates ranging from 88.25% to 96.54% against CoT-based defenses on the o1 model, and from 86.75% to 97.12% on the GPT-4o model under IA-based defenses. These findings highlight a critical weakness in LLMs' safety mechanisms and suggest that intent manipulation poses a growing challenge to content moderation guardrails.

Exploring the Vulnerability of the Content Moderation Guardrail in Large Language Models via Intent Manipulation

In response to the urgent need for effective communication with crisis-affected populations, automated responses driven by language models have been proposed to assist in crisis communications. A critical yet often overlooked factor is the consistency of response style, which could affect the trust of affected individuals in responders. Despite its importance, few studies have explored methods for maintaining stylistic consistency across generated responses. To address this gap, we propose a novel metric for evaluating style consistency and introduce a fusion-based generation approach grounded in this metric. Our method employs a two-stage process: it first assesses the style of candidate responses and then optimizes and integrates them at the instance level through a fusion process. This enables the generation of high-quality responses while significantly reducing stylistic variation between instances. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baselines in both response quality and stylistic uniformity.

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