China

We propose a large language model based reward decomposition framework for aligning dialogue agents using only a single session-level feedback signal. We leverage the reasoning capabilities of a frozen, pretrained large language model (LLM) to infer fine-grained local implicit rewards by decomposing global, session-level feedback. Our first text-only variant prompts the LLM to perform reward decomposition using only the dialogue transcript. The second multimodal variant incorporates additional behavioral cues, such as pitch, gaze, and facial affect, expressed as natural language descriptions. These inferred turn-level rewards are distilled into a lightweight reward model, which we utilize for RL-based fine-tuning for dialogue generation. We evaluate both text-only and multimodal variants against state-of-the-art reward decomposition methods and demonstrate notable improvements in human evaluations of conversation quality, suggesting that LLMs are strong reward decomposers that obviate the need for manual reward shaping and granular human feedback.

EMNLP 2025

Aligning Dialogue Agents with Global Feedback via Large Language Model Multimodal Reward Decomposition

dialogue agents

alignment

multimodality

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

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." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Although LLM-based conversational agents demonstrate strong fluency and coherence, they still produce undesirable behaviors (textiterrors) that are challenging to prevent from reaching users during deployment. Recent research leverages large language models (LLMs) to detect errors and guide response-generation models toward improvement. However, current LLMs struggle to identify errors not explicitly specified in their instructions, such as those arising from updates to the response-generation model or shifts in user behavior. In this work, we introduce textbfAutomated Error Discovery, a framework for detecting and defining errors in conversational AI, and propose textbfSEEED (underlineSoft-clustering underlineExtended underlineEncoder-Based underlineError underlineDetection), as an encoder-based approach to its implementation. We enhance the Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss by amplifying distance weighting for negative samples and introduce textbfLabel-Based Sample Ranking to select highly contrastive examples for better representation learning. SEEED outperforms adapted baselines---including GPT-4o and Phi-4---across multiple error-annotated dialogue datasets, improving the accuracy for detecting unknown errors by up to 8 points and demonstrating strong generalization to unknown intent detection.

Towards Automated Error Discovery: A Study in Conversational AI

Stories play a pivotal role in human communication, shaping beliefs and morals, particularly in children. As parents increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) to craft bedtime stories, the presence of cultural and gender stereotypes in these narratives raises significant concerns. To address this issue, we present Biased Tales, a comprehensive dataset designed to analyze how biases influence protagonists' attributes and story elements in LLM-generated stories. Our analysis uncovers striking disparities. When the protagonist is described as a girl (as compared to a boy), appearance-related attributes increase by 55.26%. Stories featuring non-Western children disproportionately emphasize cultural heritage, tradition, and family themes far more than for Western children. Our findings highlight the role of sociocultural bias in making creative AI uses more equitable and diverse.

Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories

Recent advances in reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled their potential as autonomous agents capable of tool use in dynamic environments. However, in multi-turn conversational environments like τ‑bench, these agents often struggle with consistent reasoning, adherence to domain-specific policies, and extracting correct information over a long horizon of tool-calls and conversation. To capture and mitigate these failures, we conduct a comprehensive manual analysis of the common errors occurring in the conversation trajectories. We then experiment with reformulations of inputs to the tool-calling agent for improvement in agent decision making. Finally, we propose the Input-Reformulation Multi-Agent (IRMA) framework, which automatically reformulates user queries augmented with relevant domain rules and tool suggestions for the tool-calling agent to focus on. The results show that IRMA significantly outperforms ReAct, Function Calling, and Self-Reflection by 16.1%, 12.7%, and 19.1%, respectively, in overall pass^5 scores. These findings highlight the superior reliability and consistency of IRMA compared to other methods in dynamic environments.

How Can Input Reformulation Improve Tool Usage Accuracy in a Complex Dynamic Environment? A Study on τ -bench

Protein-specific large language models (ProteinLLMs) are revolutionizing protein science by enabling more efficient protein structure prediction, function annotation, and design. While existing surveys focus on specific aspects or applications, this work provides the first comprehensive overview of ProteinLLMs, covering their architectures, training datasets, evaluation metrics, and diverse applications. Through a systematic analysis of over 100 articles, we propose a structured taxonomy of state-of-the-art ProteinLLMs, analyze how they leverage large-scale protein sequence data for improved accuracy, and explore their potential in advancing protein engineering and biomedical research. Additionally, we discuss key challenges and future directions, positioning ProteinLLMs as essential tools for scientific discovery in protein science. A GitHub repository and tutorial will be available upon publication.

Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Using language models to scalably approximate human preferences on text quality (LLM-as-a-judge) has become a standard practice applicable to many tasks. A judgment is often extracted from the judge's textual output alone, typically with greedy decoding. However, LLM judges naturally provide distributions over judgment tokens, inviting a breadth of inference methods for extracting fine-grained preferences. We find that taking the mean of the judgment distribution consistently outperforms taking the mode (i.e. greedy decoding) in all evaluation settings (i.e. pointwise, pairwise, and listwise). We further explore novel methods of deriving preferences from judgment distributions, and find that methods incorporating risk aversion often improve performance. Lastly, we analyze LLM-as-a-judge paired with chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, showing that CoT can collapse the spread of the judgment distribution, often harming performance. Our findings show that leveraging distributional output improves LLM-as-a-judge, as opposed to using the text interface alone.

Improving LLM-as-a-Judge Inference with the Judgment Distribution

Deep learning models trained on extensive Electronic Health Records (EHR) data have achieved high accuracy in diagnosis prediction, offering the potential to assist clinicians in decision-making and treatment planning. However, these models lack two crucial features that clinicians highly value: interpretability and interactivity. The ``black-box'' nature of these models makes it difficult for clinicians to understand the reasoning behind predictions, limiting their ability to make informed decisions. Additionally, the absence of interactive mechanisms prevents clinicians from incorporating their own knowledge and experience into the decision-making process. To address these limitations, we propose II-KEA, a knowledge-enhanced agent-driven causal discovery framework that integrates personalized knowledge databases and agentic LLMs. II-KEA enhances interpretability through explicit reasoning and causal analysis, while also improving interactivity by allowing clinicians to inject their knowledge and experience through customized knowledge bases and prompts. II-KEA is evaluated on both MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, demonstrating superior performance along with enhanced interpretability and interactivity, as evidenced by its strong results from extensive case studies.

No Black Boxes: Interpretable and Interactable Predictive Healthcare with Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Causal Discovery

This paper introduces GeoChain, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating step-by-step geographic reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Leveraging 1.46 million Mapillary street-level images, GeoChain pairs each image with a 21-step chain-of-thought (CoT) question sequence (over 30 million Q&A pairs). These sequences guide models from coarse attributes to fine-grained localization across four reasoning categories - visual, spatial, cultural, and precise geolocation - annotated by difficulty. Images are also enriched with semantic segmentation (150 classes) and a visual locatability score. Our benchmarking of contemporary MLLMs (GPT-4.1 variants, Claude 3.7, Gemini 2.5 variants) on a diverse 2,088-image subset reveals consistent challenges: models frequently exhibit weaknesses in visual grounding, display erratic reasoning, and struggle to achieve accurate localization, especially as the reasoning complexity escalates. GeoChain offers a robust diagnostic methodology, critical for fostering significant advancements in complex geographic reasoning within MLLMs.

GeoChain: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought for Geographic Reasoning

LLM-as-Judge frameworks are increasingly popular for AI evaluation, yet research findings on the relationship between models' generation and judgment abilities remain inconsistent. We investigate this relationship through systematic dataset- and instance-level analyses across 11 models and 21 diverse tasks. Despite both capabilities relying on the same underlying knowledge, our analyses reveal they are only weakly correlated, primarily due to LLMs' sensitivity to the responses being judged. To address this, we propose a self-reference-guided evaluation strategy that leverages a model's own answers as references. This approach significantly strengthens the correlation between generation and judgment abilities, offering a practical path to align these skills and providing a reliable proxy for model selection in evaluation tasks.

Do Before You Judge: Self-Reference as a Pathway to Better LLM Evaluation

Developers using LLMs and LLM-based agents in their applications have provided plenty of anecdotal evidence that in-context-learning (ICL) is fragile. In addition to the quantity and quality of examples, we show that the order in which the in-context examples are listed in the prompt affects the output of the LLM and, consequently, their performance. While prior work has explored improving ICL through dataset-dependent techniques, we introduce OptiSeq, a purely inference-time, dataset-free optimization method that efficiently determines the best example order. OptiSeq leverages log probabilities of LLM-generated outputs to systematically prune the search space of possible orderings and recommend the best order(s) by distinguishing orderings that yield high levels of accuracy and those that underperform Extensive empirical evaluation on multiple LLMs, datasets, and prompts demonstrates that OptiSeq improves accuracy by 5.5 - 10.5 percentage points across multiple tasks.

OptiSeq: Ordering Examples On-The-Fly for In-Context Learning

Scientific discovery, especially for new drugs and materials, urgently needs our help. The traditional manual approach is highly artisanal, and thus slow and expensive. Most importantly, many commercial drugs or materials have well-documented limitations that have remained unaddressed. In fact, AI for Science has become a rapidly growing field, with NLP researchers playing a central role by organizing shared tasks and competing on various
leaderboards, especially through approaches powered by large language models (LLMs). In this talk, however, I will offer a provocative perspective on why our community may be heading in the wrong direction. Take drug discovery as an example: much of the existing work merely classifies properties of known drugs and thus discovers nothing, or generates
molecules that are chemically impossible to make. 
Unlike machines, human scientists are inherently “multilingual,” seamlessly navigating diverse modalities, from natural language in literature to complex scientific data such as molecular structures in knowledge bases. Human scientists also “think before they talk”: they ground their reasoning in deliberate reflection and subject new ideas to critical evaluation and
verification. Against this backdrop, I argue that there is a correctable fundamental mismatch between the way LLMs work and the way scientists traditionally discover and verify new research hypotheses. I propose to design new LLM paradigms by drawing inspiration from the scientific discovery process itself: (1) “Observe”- acquire, represent and integrate
knowledge from multiple data modalities; (2) “Think” - think critically to generate hypotheses; and (3) “Propose and Verify” - verify hypotheses through the Physical World. 
As a prototype example, I will present mCLM, a modular Chemical-Language Model that speaks two complementary languages: one that represents molecular building blocks indicative of specific functions and compatible with automated modular assembly, and another that describes these functions in natural language. Experiments on 430 FDA-approved drugs showed that mCLM is capable of significantly improving chemical functions critical to determining drug potentials. mCLM, with only 3B parameters, also achieves improvements in function scores and synthetic accessibility relative to 7 other leading generative AI methods including GPT-5. mCLM can also reason on multiple functions and iteratively self-improve to rescue drug candidates that failed late in clinical trials (“fallen
angels”). Preliminary animal testing results further underscore the promise of this approach.
In the long term, I envision a comprehensive, multi-agent, human-in-the-loop autonomous laboratory, structured around iterative cycles of reasoning, proposal, synthesis, physical testing, feedback, and reasoning to enable never-ending self-improvement and co-evolvement with human scientists.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Towards Automated Error Discovery: A Study in Conversational AI

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