China

Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance on a range of robotic tasks. These models rely on multimodal inputs, with language instructions playing a crucial role-not only in predicting actions, but also in robustly interpreting user intent, even when the requests are impossible to fulfill. In this work, we investigate how VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions-natural language commands that reference objects or conditions absent from the environment. We propose --- Instruct-Verify-and-Act (IVA) --- a unified framework that (i) detects when an instruction cannot be executed due to a false premise, (ii) engages in language-based clarification or correction, and (iii) grounds plausible alternatives in perception and action. Towards this end, we construct a large-scale instruction tuning setup with structured language prompts and train a VLA model capable of handling both accurate and erroneous requests. Our approach leverages a contextually augmented, semi-synthetic dataset containing paired positive and false-premise instructions, enabling robust detection and natural language correction. Our experiments show that IVA can improves false premise detection accuracy by 58.89% over baselines, while increasing successful responses in false-premise scenarios by 27.89%.

EMNLP 2025

Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible

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.

Sentence embeddings play an important role in tasks such as clustering, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation, yet they generally lack interpretability. We propose a framework for decomposing embeddings into interpretable components, which we define as semantic regions, i.e. connected subsets on the embedding hypersphere. These regions reveal both the internal semantic structure of individual embeddings and the set-theoretical relationships between them. We further show that these regions exhibit a hierarchical organization that reflects semantic inclusion, including hypernymy and hyponymy relations. Empirical results across both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the existence of these regions and demonstrate their utility for sentence embedding interpretability.

Semantic Geometry of Sentence Embeddings

Deploying language models on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones, wearables, and on-device AI assistants, demands compact, efficient models without sacrificing performance. Compressing Small Language Models (SLMs) is particularly suited for these scenarios, yet their compression dynamics remain underexplored compared to Large Language Models (LLMs). We systematically evaluate leading post-training pruning (SparseGPT, Wanda) and quantization (GPTQ, AWQ) methods across five SLMs, seven languages, and seven downstream tasks (710 evaluations in total). Our results show that quantization consistently outperforms pruning in preserving model fidelity, multilingual perplexity, and reasoning accuracy. Notably, trends observed in LLMs (e.g., Wanda’s superiority over SparseGPT) do not generalize to SLMs. For practitioners, we recommend prioritizing quantization (particularly AWQ) for SLM compression and caution against relying on single metrics is critical.

Revisiting Pruning vs Quantization for Small Language Models

Drawing real world social inferences usually requires taking into account information from multiple modalities. Language is a particularly powerful source of information in social settings, especially in novel situations where language can provide both abstract information about the environment dynamics and concrete specifics about an agent that cannot be easily visually observed. In this paper, we propose Language-Informed Rational Agent Synthesis (LIRAS), a framework for drawing context-specific social inferences that integrate linguistic and visual inputs. LIRAS frames multimodal social reasoning as a process of constructing structured but situation-specific agent and environment representations – leveraging multimodal language models to parse language and visual inputs into unified symbolic representations, over which a Bayesian inverse planning engine can be run to produce granular probabilistic judgments. On a range of existing and new social reasoning tasks derived from cognitive science experiments, we find that our model (instantiated with a comparatively lightweight VLM) outperforms ablations and state-of-the-art models in capturing human judgments across all domains.

Language-Informed Synthesis of Rational Agent Models for Grounded Theory-of-Mind Reasoning On-the-fly

A key challenge in Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) is effectively integrating information from multiple sources while maintaining coherence and topical relevance. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results in single-document summarization, their performance on MDS still leaves room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a topic-guided reinforcement learning approach to improve content selection in MDS. We first show that explicitly prompting models with topic labels enhances the informativeness. Building on this insight, we propose a novel topic reward within the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) framework to measure topic alignment between the generated summary and source documents. Experimental results on the Multi-News and Multi-XScience datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging topical cues in MDS.

Topic-Guided Reinforcement Learning with LLMs for Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in understanding visual information with human languages but also exhibit an imbalance in multilingual capabilities. In this work, we delve into the multilingual working pattern of LVLMs and identify a salient correlation between the multilingual understanding ability of LVLMs and language-specific neuron activations in shallow layers. Building on this insight, we introduce PLAST, a training recipe that achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by Precise LAnguage Specific layers fine-Tuning. PLAST first identifies layers involved in multilingual understanding by monitoring language-specific neuron activations. These layers are then precisely fine-tuned with question-translation pairs to achieve multilingual alignment. Our empirical results on MMBench and MMMB demonstrate that PLAST effectively improves the multilingual capabilities of LVLMs and achieves significant efficiency with only 14% of the parameters tuned. Further analysis reveals that PLAST facilitates the language-specific visual information engagement in shallow layers.

Language-Specific Layer Matters: Efficient Multilingual Enhancement for Large Vision-Language Models

Previous work has shown that simple mask-filling can provide useful information about the discourse informativeness of syntactic structures. Dong et al. (2024) first adopted this approach to investigating preposing constructions. The problem with single token mask fillers was that they were, by and large, ambiguous. We address the issue by adapting the approach of Kalinsky et al. (2023) to support the prediction of multi-token connectives in masked positions. Our first experiment demonstrates that this multi-token mask-filling approach substantially outperforms the previously considered single-token approach in recognizing implicit discourse relations. Our second experiment corroborates previous findings, providing additional empirical support for the role of preposed syntactic constituents in signaling discourse coherence. Overall, our study extends existing mask-filling methods to a new discourse-level task and reinforces the linguistic hypothesis concerning the discourse informativeness of preposed structures.

Multi-token Mask-filling and Implicit Discourse Relations

Researchers across many fields rely on web data to gain new insights and validate methods. However, assembling accurate and comprehensive datasets typically demands manual review of numerous web pages to identify and record only those data points relevant to specific research objectives. The vast and scattered nature of online information makes this process time-consuming and prone to human error. To address these challenges, we present a human-in-the-loop framework that automates web-scale data collection end-to-end using large language models (LLMs). Given a textual description of a target dataset, our framework (1) automatically formulates search engine queries, (2) navigates the web to identify relevant web pages, (3) extracts the data points of interest, and (4) performs quality control to produce a structured, research-ready dataset. Users remain in the loop throughout, able to inspect and adjust the framework’s decisions to ensure alignment with their needs. We introduce techniques to mitigate both search engine bias and LLM hallucinations during data extraction. Experiments across three diverse data collection tasks show our framework significantly outperforms existing methods, while a user-centered case study demonstrates its practical utility. We open-source our code to help other researchers create custom datasets more efficiently.

LLM-Based Web Data Collection for Research Dataset Creation

Two-step approaches combining pre-trained large language model embeddings and anomaly detectors show good performance in text anomaly detection by leveraging rich semantic representations. However, high-dimensional dense embeddings extracted by large language models create challenges in substantial memory requirements and high computation time. To address this challenge, we introduce the Simplified Isolation Kernel (SIK), which maps high-dimensional dense embeddings to lower-dimensional sparse representations while preserving crucial anomaly characteristics. SIK has linear-time complexity and significantly reduces space complexity through its innovative boundary-focused feature mapping. Experiments across 7 datasets demonstrate that SIK achieves better detection performance than 11 SOTA anomaly detection algorithms while maintaining computational efficiency and low memory cost. All code and demonstrations are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SIK-6577/.

Text Anomaly Detection with Simplified Isolation Kernel

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have showcased their impressive capabilities in mathematical reasoning tasks in visual contexts. As a step toward developing AI models to conduct rigorous multi-step multimodal reasoning, we introduce StatsChartMWP, a real-world educational dataset for evaluating visual mathematical reasoning abilities on math word problems (MWPs) with statistical charts. Our dataset contains 8,514 chart-based MWPs, meticulously curated by K-12 educators within real-world teaching scenarios. We provide detailed preprocessing steps and manual annotations to help evaluate state-of-the-art models on StatsChartMWP. Comparing baselines, we find that current models struggle in undertaking meticulous multi-step mathematical reasoning among technical languages, diagrams, tables, and equations. Towards alleviate this gap, we introduce CoTAR, a chain-of-thought (CoT) augmented reasoning solution that fine-tunes the LMMs with solution-oriented CoT-alike reasoning steps. The LMM trained with CoTAR is more effective than current open-source approaches. We conclude by shedding lights on challenges and opportunities in enhancement in LMMs and steer future research and development efforts in the realm of statistical chart comprehension and analysis. The code and data are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StatsChartMWP-D25A}.

StatsChartMWP: A Dataset for Evaluating Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning Abilities on Math Word Problems with Statistical Charts

Complex chart understanding tasks demand advanced visual recognition and reasoning capabilities from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current research provides limited coverage of complex chart scenarios and computation-intensive reasoning tasks prevalent in real-world applications. This study proposes an automated multi-stage code-driven pipeline for systematically generating visual reasoning datasets to address these limitations. The pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve professional chart templates and employs chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies to generate reasoning codes that simulate real data distributions, thereby driving chart rendering and question-related statistical computations. Through model-based evaluation, the pipeline enhances chart diversity and data quality. Using this framework, we construct ChartM³, a multi-dimensional and multi-step dataset containing 38K charts and 142K Q&A pairs for training, along with 2,871 high-quality evaluation samples for enabling practical performance assessment. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves reasoning capabilities and cross-domain generalization performance, enabling smaller models to achieve performance comparable to larger-scale models in complex chart comprehension.

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Semantic Geometry of Sentence Embeddings

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