China

Step-by-step reasoning is widely used to enhance the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in complex problems. Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces is crucial for understanding and improving LLM reasoning. However, existing evaluation practices are highly inconsistent, resulting in fragmented progress across evaluator design and benchmark development. To address this gap, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of step-by-step reasoning evaluation, proposing a taxonomy of evaluation criteria with four top-level categories (factuality, validity, coherence, and utility). Based on the taxonomy, different evaluator implementations and recent findings are reviewed, leading to promising directions for future research.

EMNLP 2025

Evaluating Step-by-step Reasoning Traces: A Survey

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 advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened the door to culture-aware language tasks. We introduce the novel problem of adapting wine reviews across Chinese and English, which goes beyond literal translation by incorporating regional taste preferences and culture-specific flavor descriptors. In a case study on cross-cultural wine review adaptation, we compile the \textbf{first} parallel corpus of professional reviews, containing 8k Chinese and 16k Anglophone reviews. We benchmark both neural-machine-translation baselines and state-of-the-art LLMs with automatic metrics and human evaluation. For the latter, we propose three culture-oriented criteria—Cultural Proximity, Cultural Neutrality, and Cultural Genuineness—to assess how naturally a translated review resonates with target-culture readers. Our analysis shows that current models struggle to capture cultural nuances, especially in translating wine descriptions across different cultures. This highlights the challenges and limitations of translation models in handling cultural content.

Do LLMs Understand Wine Descriptors Across Cultures? A Benchmark for Cultural Adaptations of Wine Reviews

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in zero-shot reasoning and generalization to new tasks. However, the zero-shot performance of general LLMs on complex tasks, such as multi-hop reasoning, remains suboptimal, while reasoning LLMs suffer from hallucinations and unfaithfulness. In this paper, to handle these limitations, we introduce a novel structure analysis method that helps LLMs better understand the question structure and guide the problem-solving process. We demonstrate that existing reasoning strategies, such as Chain-of-Thought and ReAct, significantly benefit from the LLM’s inherent understanding of semantic structure. We further ground our method in the theory of probabilistic graphical models to support its effectiveness. To enhance the reasoning process, we augment the structure analysis with refinement and retrieval capabilities, forming a multi-agent reasoning system called Structure-oriented Autonomous Reasoning Agents (SARA). Extensive experiments show that SARA significantly improves zero-shot performance on knowledge-intensive and mathematical tasks. Remarkably, our approach makes a general LLM competitive with dedicated reasoning models in several benchmarks and demonstrates strong robustness against corrupted reasoning paths.

Advancing Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf LLMs: A Semantic Structure Perspective

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with visualization tasks like plotting diagrams, charts, where success depends on both code correctness and visual semantics. Existing instruction-tuning datasets lack execution-grounded supervision and offer limited support for iterative code correction, resulting in fragile and unreliable plot generation. We present **VisCode-200K**, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset for Python-based visualization and self-correction. It contains over 200K examples from two sources: (1) validated plotting code from open-source repositories, paired with natural language instructions and rendered plots; and (2) 45K multi-turn correction dialogues from Code-Feedback, enabling models to revise faulty code using runtime feedback. We fine-tune Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct on VisCode-200K to create **VisCoder**, and evaluate it on PandasPlotBench. VisCoder significantly outperforms strong open-source baselines and approaches the performance of proprietary models like GPT-4o-mini. We further adopt a self-debug evaluation protocol to assess iterative repair, demonstrating the benefits of feedback-driven learning for executable, visually accurate code generation.

VisCoder: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Executable Python Visualization Code Generation

The self-attention mechanism is key to the success of transformers in recent large language models (LLMs). However, the quadratic computational cost, O(n²), with respect to the input sequence length n poses a significant obstacle to further improvement and scalability in longer contexts. In this work, we leverage the convolution-like structure of attention matrices to develop an efficient approximation method for attention computation using convolution matrices. We propose a mathsfconv basis system, analogous to the rank basis, and show that any lower triangular matrix can be decomposed as a sum of structured convolution matrices in this basis. We then design a fast algorithm to approximate the attention matrix using a sum of k convolution matrices. This enables us to compute attention during \emph{inference} via Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) in O(knd log n) time, where d is the hidden dimension, achieving nearly linear time complexity, n¹⁺o⁽¹⁾, in practical scenarios where kd = no⁽¹⁾. Furthermore, both \emph{training forward} and \emph{backward gradient} computations can be performed in n¹⁺o⁽¹⁾ time as well. We provide theoretical guarantees on runtime and approximation error and conduct preliminary experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. We hope this new paradigm for accelerating attention computation in transformer models facilitates their application to longer contexts.

Conv-Basis: A New Paradigm for Efficient Attention Inference and Gradient Computation in Transformers

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities but are expensive to run at inference time, limiting their practical deployment. We propose Offloaded Reasoning (OR), a modular strategy where a lightweight model generates intermediate reasoning traces that are then used by a larger model to produce the final answer. We further introduce Offloaded Reasoning with Refinement (ORR), where the large model first edits or improves the reasoning trace before answering. Unlike token-level acceleration methods, OR and ORR operate at the reasoning level and require no retraining of the large model. Experiments on GSM8K and Math500 show that OR achieves up to 8x faster inference than full large-model reasoning with minimal accuracy loss, while ORR recovers or exceeds full accuracy at substantially lower cost. Our results highlight the potential of modular, delegation-based reasoning for building more efficient and adaptable LLM systems.

Offloaded Reasoning: Efficient Inference for Large Language Models via Modular Reasoning and Refinement

Preference optimization methods like DPO have achieved remarkable performance in LLM alignment. However, the evaluation for these methods relies on a single response and overlooks other potential outputs, which could also be generated in real-world applications within this hypothetical space. To address this issue, this paper presents a Hypothesis-based PrEference-aware AnaLysis Framework (HEAL), a novel evaluation paradigm that formulates preference alignment as a re-ranking process within hypothesis spaces. The framework incorporates two complementary metrics: ranking accuracy for evaluating ordinal consistency and preference strength correlation for assessing continuous alignment. To facilitate this framework, we develop UniHypoBench, a unified hypothesis benchmark constructed from diverse instruction-response pairs. Through extensive experiments based on HEAL, with a particular focus on the intrinsic mechanisms of preference learning, we demonstrate that current preference learning methods can effectively capture preferences provided by proxy models while simultaneously suppressing negative samples. These findings contribute to preference learning research through two significant avenues. Theoretically, we introduce hypothesis space analysis as an innovative paradigm for understanding preference alignment. Practically, HEAL offers researchers robust diagnostic tools for refining preference optimization methods, while our empirical results identify promising directions for developing more advanced alignment algorithms capable of comprehensive preference capture.

HEAL: A Hypothesis-Based Preference-Aware Analysis Framework

While reasoning and multilingual capabilities in Language Models (LMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, their integration into a unified paradigm—multilingual reasoning—is at a nascent stage. Multilingual reasoning requires language models to handle logical reasoning across languages while addressing misalignment, biases, and challenges in low-resource settings. This survey provides the first in-depth review of multilingual reasoning in LMs. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of existing methods that leverage LMs for multilingual reasoning, specifically outlining the challenges, motivations, and foundational aspects of applying language models to reason across diverse languages. We provide an overview of the standard data resources used for training multilingual reasoning in LMs and the evaluation benchmarks employed to assess their multilingual capabilities. Next, we analyze various state-of-the-art methods and their performance on these benchmarks. Finally, we explore future research opportunities to improve multilingual reasoning in LMs, focusing on enhancing their ability to handle diverse languages and complex reasoning tasks.

A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relied upon for solving complex reasoning tasks in domains such as mathematics, logic, and multi-step question answering. A growing line of work seeks to improve reasoning quality by scaling inference time compute particularly through Process Reward Models (PRMs), used to reward the reasoning at intermediate steps. While effective, these methods introduce substantial computational overhead, especially when generating large numbers of solutions in parallel. In this paper, we investigate whether PRMs can be used mid-generation to provide early signals that enable the rejection of suboptimal candidates before full generation of step is complete. We introduce the hypothesis that PRMs are also Partial Reward Models, meaning that the scores they assign to partially completed reasoning step are predictive of final output quality. This allows for principled early rejection based on intermediate token-level signals. We support this hypothesis both theoretically, by proving that the risk of discarding optimal beams decreases exponentially with generation length and empirically, by demonstrating a strong correlation between partial and final rewards across multiple reward models. On math reasoning benchmarks, our method achieves up to 1.4 times – 9 times reduction in inference FLOPs without degrading final performance. These results suggest that early rejection is a powerful mechanism for improving the compute-efficiency of reasoning in LLMs.

Accelerating LLM Reasoning via Early Rejection with Partial Reward Modeling

Testing is essential to modern software engineering for building reliable software. Given the high costs of manually creating test cases, automated test case generation, particularly methods utilizing large language models, has become increasingly popular. These neural approaches generate semantically meaningful tests that are more maintainable compared with traditional automatic testing methods like fuzzing. However, the diversity and volume of unit tests in current datasets are limited, especially for newer but important languages. In this paper, we present a novel data augmentation technique, FuzzAug, that introduces the benefits of fuzzing to large language models by introducing valid testing semantics and providing diverse coverage-guided inputs. Doubling the size of training datasets, FuzzAug improves the performance from the baselines significantly. This technique demonstrates the potential of introducing prior knowledge from dynamic software analysis to improve neural test generation, offering significant enhancements in neural test generation.

FuzzAug: Data Augmentation by Coverage-guided Fuzzing for Neural Test Generation

Downstream scaling laws aim to predict task performance at larger scales from pretraining losses at smaller scales. Whether this prediction should be possible is unclear: some works demonstrate that task performance follows clear linear scaling trends under transformation, whereas others point out fundamental challenges to downstream scaling laws, such as emergence and inverse scaling. In this work, we conduct a meta-analysis of existing data on downstream scaling laws, finding that close fit to linear scaling laws only occurs in a minority of cases: 39% of the time. Furthermore, seemingly benign changes to the experimental setting can completely change the scaling trend. Our analysis underscores the need to understand the conditions under which scaling laws succeed. To fully model the relationship between pretraining loss and downstream task performance, we must embrace the cases in which scaling behavior deviates from linear trends.

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Do LLMs Understand Wine Descriptors Across Cultures? A Benchmark for Cultural Adaptations of Wine Reviews

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