China

In this paper, we introduce EmoGist, a training-free, in-context learning method for performing visual emotion classification with LVLMs. The key intuition of our approach is that context-dependent definition of emotion labels could allow more accurate predictions of emotions, as the ways in which emotions manifest within images are highly context dependent and nuanced. EmoGist pre-generates multiple explanations of emotion labels, by analyzing the clusters of example images belonging to each category. At test time, we retrieve a version of explanation based on embedding similarity, and feed it to a fast VLM for classification. Through our experiments, we show that EmoGist allows up to 13 points improvement in micro F1 scores with the multi-label Memotion dataset, and up to 8 points in macro F1 in the multi-class FI dataset.

EMNLP 2025

EmoGist: Efficient In-Context Learning for Visual Emotion Understanding

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.

Accurate analysis of pathological images is essential for automated tumor diagnosis but remains challenging due to high structural similarity and subtle morphological variations in tissue images. Current vision-language (VL) models often struggle to capture the complex reasoning required for interpreting structured pathological reports. To address these limitations, we propose PathoHR-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate VL models’ abilities in hierarchical semantic understanding and compositional reasoning within the pathology domain. Results of this benchmark reveal that existing VL models fail to effectively model intricate cross-modal relationships, hence limiting their applicability in clinical setting. To overcome this, we further introduce a pathology-specific VL training scheme that generates enhanced and perturbed samples for multimodal contrastive learning. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on PathoHR-Bench and six additional pathology datasets, highlighting its effectiveness in fine-grained pathology representation.

PathoHR: Hierarchical Reasoning for Vision-Language Models in Pathology

This paper presents a unified framework for extracting n-ary property information from materials science literature, addressing the critical challenge of capturing complex relationships that often span multiple sentences. We introduce three complementary approaches: RE-Composition, which transforms binary relations into n-ary structures; Direct EAE, which models polymer properties as events with multiple arguments; and LLM-Guided Assembly, which leverages high-confidence entity and relation outputs to guide structured extraction. Our framework is built upon two novel resources: MatSciNERE, a comprehensive corpus for materials science entities and relations, and PolyEE, a specialized corpus for polymer property events. Through strategic synthetic data generation for both NER and EAE tasks, we achieve significant performance improvements (up to 5.34 F1 points). Experiments demonstrate that our combined approaches outperform any single method, with the LLM-guided approach achieving the highest F1 score (71.53%). The framework enables more comprehensive knowledge extraction from scientific literature, supporting materials discovery and database curation applications. Our code, resources and trained models will be released at: https://github.com/***.

A Unified Framework for N-ary Property Information Extraction in Materials Science

As machine translation (MT) rapidly advances in bridging global communication gaps, there is growing interest in variety-targeted translation for fine-grained language variants and specific translation styles. This translation variant aims to generate target outputs that are not only contextually accurate but also culturally sensitive. However, the lack of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks has hindered progress in this field. To bridge this gap, this work focuses on the translation across styles and language variants, aiming to establish a robust foundation for the automatic evaluation of fine-grained cultural and stylistic nuances, thereby fostering innovation in culturally sensitive translations. Specifically, we evaluate translations across four key dimensions: semantic preservation, cultural and regional specificity, expression style, and fluency at both the word and sentence levels. Through detailed human evaluations, we validate the high reliability of the proposed evaluation framework. On this basis, we thoroughly assess translations of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) for this task, highlighting their strengths and identifying areas for future improvement.

A Benchmark for Translations Across Styles and Language Variants

We propose a novel automatic evaluation metric for open-ended text generation, which is a substantial improvement of the recently developed method, Fourier analysis of cross-entropy (FACE), hence, FACE-2. FACE-2 is a psycholinguistically inspired metric that extracts the dynamic patterns (spectrum) of text surprisal. Examined with open-ended text generation tasks, FACE-2 significantly outperforms a broad set of baseline metrics in revealing the model scaling effect, which scales up to models of 70B parameters, while many other existing metrics fail to capture this effect. We have also confirmed the advantage of FACE-2 in producing stronger agreement with human preferences from a large human-annotated dataset. We advocate for including metrics that mine the dynamics of likelihood in evaluating open-ended text generation, which covers broader aspects of human language than only using static likelihood-based or semantic-based metrics.

Evaluating Text Generation Quality Using Spectral Distances of Surprisal

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced virtual educators and learners, bridging NLP with AI4Education. Existing work often lacks scalability and fails to leverage diverse, large-scale course content, with limited frameworks for assessing pedagogic quality. To this end, we propose WikiHowAgent, a multi-agent workflow leveraging LLMs to simulate interactive teaching-learning conversations. It integrates teacher and learner agents, an interaction manager, and an evaluator to facilitate procedural learning and assess pedagogic quality. We introduce a dataset of 114,296 teacher-learner conversations grounded in 14,287 tutorials across 17 domains and 727 topics. Our evaluation protocol combines computational and rubric-based metrics with human judgment alignment. Results demonstrate the workflow's effectiveness in diverse setups, offering insights into LLM capabilities across domains. Our datasets and implementations are fully open-sourced.

Conversational Education at Scale: A Multi-LLM Agent Workflow for Procedural Learning and Pedagogic Quality Assessment

Large language models (LLMs) possess strong multilingual capabilities, and combining Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with translation tasks has shown great potential. However, we observe that this paradigm performs unexpectedly poorly when applied to colloquial subtitle translation tasks. In this work, we investigate this issue and find that the offline reward model (RM) gradually diverges from the online LLM due to distributional shift, ultimately leading to undesirable training outcomes. To address this, we propose RIVAL, an adversarial training framework that formulates the process as a min–max game between the RM and the LLM. RIVAL iteratively updates the both models, with the RM trained to distinguish strong from weak translations (qualitative preference reward), and the LLM trained to enhance its translation for closing this gap. To stabilize training and improve generalizability, we also incorporate quantitative preference reward (e.g., BLEU) into the RM, enabling reference-free quality modeling aligned with human evaluation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed adversarial training framework significantly improves upon translation baselines.

RIVAL: Reinforcement Learning with Iterative and Adversarial Optimization for Machine Translation

Solving complex chart Q&A tasks requires advanced visual reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including recognizing key information from visual inputs and conducting reasoning over it. While fine-tuning MLLMs for reasoning is critical, collecting and annotating charts and questions is expensive, hard to scale, and often results in low-quality annotations. To address this, we propose Code-as-Intermediary Translation (CIT), a cost-effective, efficient and scalable data synthesis method for distilling visual reasoning abilities from LLMs to MLLMs. The code serves as an intermediary that translates visual chart representations into textual representations, enabling language models to understand cross-modal information and generate reasoning chains accordingly. In this way, we can employ text-based synthesizing techniques to expand chart-plotting code and generate high-quality Q&A pairs for training models. This produces ReachQA, a dataset containing 3k reasoning-intensive charts and 20k Q&A pairs to enhance both recognition and reasoning abilities of MLLMs. Experiments show that models fine-tuned with ReachQA not only perform well on chart-related tasks but also show performance gains on general reasoning benchmarks.

Distill Visual Chart Reasoning Ability from LLMs to MLLMs

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have achieved remarkable results in video understanding tasks. However, they often suffer from heavy computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens generated from multiple video frames. Existing visual token compression methods often rely on attention scores from language models as guidance. However, these scores exhibit inherent biases: global bias reflects a tendency to focus on the two ends of the visual token sequence, while local bias leads to an over-concentration on the same spatial positions across different frames. To address the issue of attention bias, we propose Attention-Debiased Token Pruning for Video Large Language Models(AdaTP), a novel token pruning pipeline for Video LLMs. AdaTP integrates two dedicated debiasing modules into the pipeline, targeting global attention bias and local attention bias, respectively. Without the need for additional training, our method significantly reduces the computational overhead of Video LLMs while retaining the performance of vanilla models. Extensive evaluation shows that AdaTP achieves state-of-the-art performance in various commonly used video understanding benchmarks. In particular, on LLaVA-OneVision-7B, AdaTP maintains performance without degradation while using only up to 27.3% FLOPs compared to the vanilla model. Our code will be released soon.

AdaTP: Attention-Debiased Token Pruning for Video Large Language Models

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capabilities, highlighting the need for comprehensive evaluation frameworks that extend beyond task-specific benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks often focus on isolated abilities, lacking a holistic framework for assessing LLM capabilities. To address this gap, we propose the Cognition-Domain-Task (CDT) framework, which comprehensively measures a model's capabilities across three dimensions. We expand the scope of model capability definitions at the cognitive level by incorporating the Cattell-Horn-Carroll cognitive theory, refining the categorization of model capabilities. We apply CDT in two directions: dataset capability evaluation and data selection. Experiments show that our capability metrics correlate well with downstream performance and can support effective dataset analysis and construction. The experiments on data selection also show significant improvements in both general and specific benchmarks, achieving scores of 44.3 and 45.4, with an increase of 1.6 and 2.2 points over the baselines, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness and practicality of CDT. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/Alessa-mo/CDT.

CDT: A Comprehensive Capability Framework for Large Language Models Across Cognition, Domain, and Task

The robustness and security of Large Language Models (LLMs) face increasing threats, especially in multilingual settings. A notable vulnerability is “jailbreaking” via translating harmful queries into rare or underrepresented languages, which often bypasses existing safeguards. In this work, we propose Multilingual Collaborative Defense (MCD), a novel learning method that optimizes a continuous soft safety prompt automatically to facilitate multilingual safeguarding of LLMs. MCD organically leverages collaborative signals from multiple languages by rotating each as the training “center,” allowing auxiliary languages to reinforce safety prompt learning and ensuring cross‑lingual consistency. As a result, MCD improves defense performance across all languages, reduces false refusals, and mitigates safety misalignment caused by corpus imbalance. To evaluate MCD, we construct multilingual versions of jailbreak benchmarks such as MaliciousInstruct and AdvBench, including zero-shot languages, to assess language transferability. Experiments show that MCD outperforms prior approaches in multilingual jailbreak defense while exhibiting strong cross-lingual generalization. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCD-0519.

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PathoHR: Hierarchical Reasoning for Vision-Language Models in Pathology

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