China

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.

EMNLP 2025

Soteria: Language-Specific Functional Parameter Steering for Multilingual Safety Alignment

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.

Mental health issues are worsening in today's competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. Traditional healings like counseling and chatbots fail to engage effectively, they often provide generic responses lacking emotional depth. Although large language models (LLMs) have the potential to create more human-like interactions, they still struggle to capture subtle emotions. This requires LLMs to be equipped with human-like adaptability and warmth. To fill this gap, we propose the MIND (Multi-agent INner Dialogue), a novel paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. Considering the strong generative and role-playing ability of LLM agents, we predefine an interactive healing framework and assign LLM agents different roles within the framework to engage in interactive inner dialogues with users, thereby providing an immersive healing experience. We conduct extensive human experiments in various real-world healing dimensions, and find that MIND provides a more user-friendly experience than traditional paradigms. This demonstrates that MIND effectively leverages the significant potential of LLMs in psychological healing.

MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue

The rapid development of advanced large language models (LLMs) has made AI-generated text indistinguishable from human-written text. Previous work on detecting AI-generated text has made effective progress, but has not involved modern Chinese poetry. Due to the distinctive characteristics of modern Chinese poetry, it is difficult to identify whether a poem originated from humans or AI. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to develop reliable poetry source identification technology. Yet, there is currently no research on the detection of modern Chinese poetry. Based on the urgency of identifying AI-generated poetry in the real Chinese world, this paper proposes a novel benchmark for detecting LLMs-generated modern Chinese poetry. We first construct a high-quality dataset comprising poems written by professional poets and those generated by multiple mainstream LLMs. Subsequently, we conduct systematic performance assessments of six detectors on this dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that current detectors cannot be used as reliable tools to detect modern Chinese poems generated by LLMs. The most difficult poetic features to detect are intrinsic qualities, especially style. The detection results verify the effectiveness and necessity of our proposed benchmark. Our work lays a foundation for future tasks of detecting AI-generated poems.

Benchmarking the Detection of LLMs-Generated Modern Chinese Poetry

LLM-as-a-Judge employs large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, to evaluate the quality of LLM-generated responses, gaining popularity for its cost-effectiveness and strong alignment with human evaluations. However, training proxy judge models using evaluation data generated by powerful teacher models introduces a critical yet previously overlooked issue: teacher preference bias, where the proxy judge model learns a biased preference for responses from the teacher model. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel setting that incorporates an additional assistant model, which is not biased toward the teacher model's responses, to complement the training data. Building on this setup, we introduce AGDe-Judge, a three-stage framework designed to debias from both the labels and feedbacks in the training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AGDe-Judge effectively reduces teacher preference bias while maintaining strong performance across six evaluation benchmarks. \footnote{Code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AGDe-Judge-E352 }.}.

Assistant-Guided Mitigation of Teacher Preference Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge

The Key-Value (KV) cache reading latency increases significantly with context lengths, hindering the efficiency of long-context LLM inference. To address this, previous works propose retaining a small fraction of KV cache based on token importance. For example, KV eviction uses static heuristics to retain tokens, while KV retrieval dynamically selects query-relevant tokens for more adaptive cache management. However, we observe that important tokens are often sparsely distributed across the long context. This sparsity makes existing page-level KV retrieval inaccurate, as each page may include irrelevant tokens and miss critical ones. In this work, we propose Fier, a **Fi**ne-Grained and **E**fficient KV cache **R**etrieval method. Fier uses 1-bit quantized keys to estimate the importance of each token, resulting in efficient and precise retrieval. Experiments show that Fier matches full KV performance using only 11\% of the cache budget across various long-context tasks, reducing decoding latency by 1.2times to 1.5times.

FIER: Fine-Grained and Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long-context LLM Inference

Figure captions are crucial for helping readers understand and remember a figure's key message. Many models have been developed to generate these captions, helping authors compose better quality captions more easily. Yet, authors almost always need to revise generic AI-generated captions to match their writing style and the domain's style, highlighting the need for personalization. Despite language models' personalization (LaMP) advances, these technologies often focus on text-only settings and rarely address scenarios where both inputs and profiles are multimodal. This paper introduces LaMP-Cap, a dataset for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles. For each target figure, LaMP-Cap provides not only the needed inputs, such as figure images, but also up to three other figures from the same document—each with its image, caption, and figure-mentioning paragraphs—as a profile to characterize the context. Experiments with four LLMs show that using profile information consistently helps generate captions closer to the original author-written ones. Ablation studies reveal that images in the profile are more helpful than figure-mentioning paragraphs, highlighting the advantage of using multimodal profiles over text-only ones.

LaMP-Cap: Personalized Figure Caption Generation With Multimodal Figure Profiles

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for knowledge injection during large language model (LLM) inference in recent years. However, due to their limited ability to exploit fine-grained inter-document relationships, current RAG implementations face challenges in effectively addressing the retrieved noise and redundancy content, which may cause error in the generation results. To address these limitations, we propose an **E**fficient **D**ynamic **C**lustering-based document **C**ompression framework (**EDC²-RAG**) that utilizes latent inter-document relationships while simultaneously removing irrelevant information and redundant content. We validate our approach, built upon GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o-mini, on widely used knowledge-QA and Hallucination-Detection datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent performance improvements across various scenarios and experimental settings, demonstrating strong robustness and applicability. Our code and datasets are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EDC-2-RAG-5F54}.

Efficient Dynamic Clustering-Based Document Compression for Retrieval-Augmented-Generation

This paper introduces a cross-lingual dubbing system that translates speech from one language to another while preserving key characteristics such as duration, speaker identity, and speaking speed. Despite the strong translation quality of existing speech translation approaches, they often overlook the transfer of speech patterns, leading to mismatches with source speech and limiting their suitability for dubbing applications. To address this, we propose a discrete diffusion-based speech-to-unit translation model with explicit duration control, enabling time-aligned translation. We then synthesize speech based on the predicted units and source identity with a conditional flow matching model. Additionally, we introduce a unit-based speed adaptation mechanism that guides the translation model to produce speech at a rate consistent with the source, without relying on any text. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates natural and fluent translations that align with the original speech's duration and speaking pace, while achieving competitive translation performance.

Dub-S2ST: Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation for Seamless Dubbing

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for data generation. However, creating evaluation benchmarks raises the bar for this emerging paradigm. Benchmarks must target specific phenomena, penalize exploiting shortcuts, and be challenging. Through two case studies, we ask whether LLMs are ready to meet these demands---by generating reasoning-over-text benchmarks and comparing them to those that were created through careful crowdsourcing. Specifically, we evaluate both the *validity* and *difficulty* of LLM-generated versions of two high-quality reading comprehension datasets: CondaQA, which evaluates reasoning about negation, and DROP, which targets reasoning about quantities. We find that prompting LLMs can produce variants of these datasets that are often valid according to the annotation guidelines, at a fraction of the cost of the original crowdsourcing effort. However, we show that they are *less challenging for LLMs* than their human-authored counterparts. This finding sheds light on what may have been lost by generating evaluation data with LLMs, and calls for critically reassessing the immediate use of this increasingly prevalent approach to benchmark creation.

What Has Been Lost with Synthetic Evaluation?

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into personal writing tools, a critical question arises: Can they faithfully imitate an individual’s writing style from just a few examples? Personal style is often subtle and implicit, making it difficult to specify through prompts yet essential for user-aligned generation. This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs’ ability to mimic personal writing styles via in-context learning from a small number of user-authored samples. We introduce an ensemble of complementary metrics—including authorship attribution, style matching, and AI detection—to robustly assess style imitation. Our evaluation spans over 40,000 generations per model across domains such as news, email, forums, and blogs, covering writing samples from more than 400 real-world authors. Results show that while LLMs can approximate user style in structured formats like news and email, they struggle with nuanced, informal writing in blogs and forums. Further analysis on various prompting strategies such as number of demonstrations reveal key limitations in effective personalization. Our findings highlight a fundamental gap in personalized LLM adaptation and the need for improved techniques to support implicit, style-consistent generation.

Catch Me If You Can? Not Yet: LLMs Still Struggle to Imitate the Implicit Writing Styles of Everyday Authors

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in math reasoning, the accuracy of models on existing math benchmarks has gradually approached 90\% or even higher. More challenging math benchmarks are hence urgently in need to satisfy the increasing evaluation demands. To bridge this gap, we propose HighMATH. Problems in HighMATH are collected according to 3 criteria: problem complexity, knowledge domain diversity and fine-grained annotations. We collect 5,293 problems from Chinese senior high school mathematics exams published in 2024, covering 8 subjects and 7 levels of difficulty, with each problem involving an average of more than 2.4 knowledge points. We conduct a thorough evaluation of latest LLMs on the curated HighMATH, including o1-like models. Evaluation results demonstrate that the accuracy of advanced LLMs on HighMATH is significantly lower than that on previous math reasoning benchmarks. This gap even exceeds 30\%. Our results also suggest that properly trained smaller LLMs may have great potential in math reasoning. Our data is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/data-VSDDDGvs/.

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