China

Large Vision–Language Models (LVLMs) have garnered substantial interest owing to their impressive ability to interpret visual inputs and converse with users.Nevertheless, LVLMs still suffer from object hallucination – generating descriptions for objects that are absent from the image, which undermines reliability and hinders real-world deployment. We propose DAPE-BR, a positional-alignment scheme that (i) preserves the pretrained weight order while globally---- visual–text distances, (ii) embeds an isotropic fused patch-distance metric, and (iii) applies a patch-distance causal mask to enforce spatial causality. Extensive experiments on POPE, MMStar and SQA show that DAPE-BR consistently reduces hallucinations and boosts.

EMNLP 2025

DAPE-BR: Distance-Aware Positional Encoding for Mitigating Object Hallucination in LVLMs

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.

News writing empowered by large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a prevalent trend due to their efficiency and scalability. This paradigm necessitates dynamic information acquisition, knowledge structuring, and precise viewpoint articulation. However, current approaches often rely on superficially retrieved information and oversimplified knowledge enumeration, resulting in shallow, repetitive, and unordered outputs. Additionally, the lack of controllability over narrative viewpoints fails to align with user-defined preferences (e.g., stance or tone). To address these limitations, we propose an LLM-based multi-agent controllable news writing framework termed CtrlNews. The framework simulates expert questioning through automated role assignment and question generation followed by a three-layer hierarchical gravitational graph iteratively refined via expansion-reflection cycles. Beside, we elaborate a fine-grained viewpoint control mechanism to precisely regulate bias, emotion, and exaggeration attributes. When composing long-from news articles, the controlled viewpoints are extended via emotion-preserving composition and self-reflection refinement to ensure the consistency of viewpoint control and prevent the dilution of the control effect. Experiments on quality and control effect evaluation, news dissemination effect assessment, and human evaluation demonstrate significant the improvements across multiple metrics compared to existing methods.

CtrlNews: LLM-based Multi-Agent Controllable News Writing via Knowledge Gravitational Field

Prior benchmarks for evaluating the domain-specific knowledge of large language models (LLMs) lack the scalability to handle complex academic tasks. To address this, we introduce ScholarBench, a benchmark centered on deep expert knowledge and complex academic problem-solving, which evaluates the academic reasoning ability of LLMs and is constructed through a three-step process. ScholarBench targets more specialized and logically complex contexts derived from academic literature, encompassing five distinct problem types. Unlike prior benchmarks, ScholarBench evaluates the abstraction, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities of LLMs across eight distinct research domains. To ensure high-quality evaluation data, we define category-specific example attributes and design questions that are aligned with the characteristic research methodologies and discourse structures of each domain. Additionally, this benchmark operates as an English-Korean bilingual dataset, facilitating simultaneous evaluation for linguistic capabilities of LLMs in both languages. The benchmark comprises 5,031 examples in Korean and 5,309 in English, with even state-of-the-art models like o3-mini achieving an average evaluation score of only 0.543, demonstrating the challenging nature of this benchmark.

ScholarBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Abstraction, Comprehension, and Reasoning Evaluation in Academic Contexts

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, as the model size and the input sequence's length increase, the linearly increasing key-value (KV) cache significantly degrades inference throughput. Therefore, grouped-query attention (GQA), as an alternative to multi-head attention (MHA), has been widely introduced into LLMs. In this work, we propose a cost-effective method for converting MHA into GQA with any compression ratio of KV heads. The key point of our method lies in the application of Procrustes analysis to the attention heads, which enhances the similarity among attention heads while preserving computational invariance, thereby improving the model's post-training performance. Subsequently, we employ L₀ regularization to prune redundant parameters. The model after pruning can be adapted to the standard GQA framework. Experimental results show that our strategy can compress up to 87.5\% KV heads of LLaMA2-7B model and 75\% KV heads of Sheared-LLaMA-1.3B with acceptable performance degradation. Our code is released at https://github.com/fpcsong/mha2gqa.

Align Attention Heads Before Merging Them: An Effective Way for Converting MHA to GQA

The widespread use of cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns over user privacy, as sensitive information may be inadvertently exposed during interactions with these services. To protect privacy before sending sensitive data to those models, we suggest sanitizing sensitive text using two common strategies used by humans: i) deleting sensitive expressions, and ii) obscuring sensitive details by abstracting them. To explore the issues and develop a tool for text rewriting, we curate the first corpus, coined \ourBenchmark, through both crowdsourcing and the use of large language models (LLMs). Compared to the prior works based on differential privacy, which lead to a sharp drop in information utility and unnatural texts, the human-inspired approaches result in more natural rewrites and offer an improved balance between privacy protection and data utility, as demonstrated by our extensive experiments.

NAP^2: A Benchmark for Naturalness and Privacy-Preserving Text Rewriting by Learning from Human

Research ideation is crucial for scientific progress, but the exponential increase in scientific literature makes it challenging to stay updated and identify impactful directions. Recent developments in large language models(LLMs) offer a promising avenue to automate this process. However, existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLMs to extensive literature without indicating useful information. Inspired by human research processes, we propose a Chain-of-Ideas~(CoI) agent, an LLM-based agent that organizes relevant literature in a chain structure to effectively mirror the progressive development in a research domain. This organization helps LLMs better grasp current advancements, thereby improving ideation capabilities. Further, we present Idea Arena, a protocol for evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives, which aligns closely with the preferences of human researchers. Experiments show that CoI agent consistently outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. Moreover, CoI agent is budget-friendly, requiring only $0.50 to generate a candidate idea and its experimental design.

Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents

Understanding event relationships is critical for tasks such as narrative comprehension, information extraction, and reasoning in natural language processing. Despite the remarkable advancements of large language models (LLMs) across diverse NLP tasks, current studies have not systematically evaluated their ability to capture the complex of event relations. To this end, we aim to assess LLMs on event relationship extraction (ERE) by designing the benchmark EventRelBench. EventRelBench comprises 35K diverse event relation questions covering four key categories—coreference, temporal, causal, and supersub relations. These questions are provided at two levels of granularity: document‐level and sentence‐level. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of LLMs show that existing LLMs still fall short in accurately extracting and understanding event relationships. To address this gap, we introduce EventRelInst, a 48K instruction fine‑tuning dataset in the event relation extraction domain. Experimental results not only highlight the shortcomings of current general-purpose LLMs in extracting event relationships but also demonstrate the effectiveness of EventRelInst. Both EventRelBench and EventRelBench will be publicly available.

EventRelBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Event Relation Understanding in Large Language Models

The performance of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is often sensitive to nuances in prompt templates, requiring careful prompt engineering, adding costs in terms of computing and human effort. In this study, we present experiments encompassing multiple LLMs variants of varying sizes aimed at probing their preference with different prompts. Through experiments on Question Answering, we show prompt preference consistency across LLMs of different sizes. We also show that this consistency extends to other tasks, such as Natural Language Inference. Utilizing this consistency, we propose a method to use a smaller model to select effective prompt templates for a larger model. We show that our method substantially reduces the cost of prompt engineering while consistently matching performance with optimal prompts among candidates. More importantly, our experiment shows the efficacy of our strategy across fourteen LLMs and its applicability to a broad range of NLP tasks, highlighting its robustness.

S2LPP: Small-to-Large Prompt Prediction across LLMs

Medical domain automated text generation is an active area of research and development; however, evaluating the clinical quality of generated reports remains a challenge, especially in instances where domain-specific metrics are lacking, e.g. histopathology. We propose HARE (Histopathology Automated Report Evaluation), a novel entity and relation centric framework, composed of a benchmark dataset, a named entity recognition (NER) model, a relation extraction (RE) model, and a novel metric, which prioritizes clinically relevant content by aligning critical histopathology entities and relations between reference and generated reports. To develop the HARE benchmark, we annotated 854 de-identified diagnostic histopathology reports from a hospital and 652 reports from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) with domain-specific entities and relations. We fine-tuned GatorTronS, a domain-adapted language model to develop HARE-NER and HARE-RE which achieved the highest NER F1-score (0.865) and highest RE F1-score (0.988) among the tested models. The proposed HARE metric outperformed traditional metrics including ROUGE and Meteor, as well as radiology metrics such as RadGraph-XL, with the highest correlation and the best regression to expert evaluations (higher than the second best method, GREEN, a large language model based radiology report evaluator, by Pearson r = 0.212, Spearman ρ = 0.189, Kendall τ = 0.151, R² = 0.23, RMSE = 0.024). We will release HARE, datasets, and the models to foster advancements in histopathology report generation, providing a robust framework for improving the quality of reports.

HARE: an entity and relation centric evaluation framework for histopathology reports

Metrics like FactScore and VeriScore that evaluate long-form factuality operate by decomposing an input response into atomic claims and then individually verifying each claim. While effective and interpretable, these methods incur numerous LLM calls and can take upwards of 100s to evaluate a single response, limiting their practicality in large-scale evaluation and training scenarios. To address this, we propose VeriFastScore, which leverages synthetic data to fine-tune Llama3.1 8B for simultaneously extracting and verifying all verifiable claims within a given text based on evidence from Google Search. We show that this task cannot be solved via few-shot prompting with closed LLMs due to its complexity: the model receives sim4K tokens of evidence on average and needs to concurrently decompose claims, judge their verifiability, and verify them against noisy evidence. However, our fine-tuned VeriFastScore model demonstrates strong correlation with the original VeriScore pipeline at both the example level (r=0.80) and system level (r=0.94) while achieving an overall speedup of 6.6times (9.9 times excluding evidence retrieval) over VeriScore. To facilitate future factuality research, we publicly release our VeriFastScore model and synthetic datasets.

VeriFastScore: Speeding up long-form factuality evaluation

Ensuring consistent safety across multiple languages remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). We introduce Soteria, a lightweight yet powerful strategy that locates and minimally adjusts the “functional heads” most responsible for harmful content generation in each language. By altering only a fraction of parameters, Soteria drastically reduces policy violations without sacrificing overall model performance, even in low-resource settings. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we also present XThreatBench, a specialized multilingual dataset capturing fine-grained harmful behaviors drawn from real policy guidelines. Experiments with leading open-source LLMs (e.g., Llama, Qwen, Mistral) show that Soteria consistently improves safety metrics across high-, mid-, and low-resource languages. These findings highlight a promising path toward scalable, linguistically attuned, and ethically aligned LLMs worldwide. We will make the dataset and source code publicly available upon acceptance.

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CtrlNews: LLM-based Multi-Agent Controllable News Writing via Knowledge Gravitational Field

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