Austria

In dialogue state tracking (DST), in-context learning comprises a retriever that selects labeled dialogues as in-context examples and a DST model that uses these examples to infer the dialogue state of the query dialogue. Existing methods for constructing training data for retrievers suffer from three key limitations: (1) the synergistic effect of examples is not considered, (2) the linguistic characteristics of the query are not sufficiently factored in, and (3) scoring is not directly optimized for DST performance. Consequently, the retriever can fail to retrieve examples that would substantially improve DST performance. To address these issues, we present CombiSearch—a method that scores effective in-context examples based on their combinatorial impact on DST performance. 
Our evaluation on MultiWOZ shows that retrievers trained with CombiSearch surpass state-of-the-art models, achieving a 20× gain in data efficiency and generalizing well to the SGD dataset. 
Moreover, CombiSearch attains a 12\% absolute improvement in the upper bound DST performance over traditional approaches when no retrieval errors are assumed. 
This significantly increases the headroom for practical DST performance while demonstrating that existing methods rely on suboptimal data for retriever training.

ACL 2025

Improving Dialogue State Tracking through Combinatorial Search for In-Context Examples

in-context example selection

combinatorial search

dialogue state tracking

## 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*

EMNLP 2025

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

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Efficient processing of long contexts in large language models (LLMs) is essential for real-world applications like retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning, especially in resource-constrained environments such as edge computing. This paper explores the embedding-based context compression to reduce inference costs while preserving the downstream LLM configurations. We propose a decoupled compressor-LLM framework, pretrained on text reconstruction and completion tasks, designed to effectively preserve essential contextual information within condensed embedding representations. Our extensive experiments investigate pretraining, model configurations, compression rates, efficiency across tasks, and adaptability to various LLMs. Results demonstrate that our approach outperforms competitive baselines in three domains and across eight datasets while being adaptable to different downstream LLMs. We find that thorough pretraining and carefully selected compression rates, such as 4x and 16x, enable a lightweight compressor to achieve a good balance between accuracy and speed. These findings underscore the potential of embedding-based compression to enhance LLM efficiency and motivate further research in this area.

Pretraining Context Compressor for Large Language Models with Embedding-Based Memory

Emotional support dialogue systems aim to reduce help-seekers' distress and help them overcome challenges. While human values—core beliefs that shape an individual's priorities—are increasingly emphasized in contemporary psychological therapy for their role in fostering internal transformation and long-term emotional well-being, their integration into emotional support systems remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present a value-driven method for training emotional support dialogue systems designed to reinforce positive values in seekers. Notably, our model identifies which values to reinforce at each turn and how to do so, by leveraging online support conversations from Reddit. We evaluate the method across support skills, seekers' emotional intensity, and value reinforcement. Our method consistently outperforms various baselines, effectively exploring and eliciting values from seekers. Additionally, leveraging crowd knowledge from Reddit significantly enhances its effectiveness. Therapists highlighted its ability to validate seekers' challenges and emphasize positive aspects of their situations—both crucial elements of value reinforcement. Our work, being the first to integrate value reinforcement into emotional support systems, demonstrates its promise and establishes a foundation for future research.

Dialogue Systems for Emotional Support via Value Reinforcement

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proven to be an effective approach to address the hallucination problem in large language models (LLMs). In current RAG systems, LLMs typically need to synthesize knowledge provided by two main external sources (user prompts and an external database) to generate a final answer. When the knowledge provided by the user conflicts with that retrieved from the database, a critical question arises: Does the LLM favor one knowledge source over the other when generating the answer? In this paper, we are the first to unveil a new phenomenon, Authority Bias, where the LLMs tend to favor the knowledge provided by the user even when it deviates from the facts; this new phenomenon is rigorously evidenced via our novel and comprehensive characterization of Authority Bias in six widely used LLMs and across diverse task scenarios. We propose a novel dataset specifically designed for detecting Authority Bias, called the Authority Bias Detection Dataset (ABDD), and introduce new, detailed metrics to measure Authority Bias. To mitigate Authority bias, we finally propose the Conflict Detection Enhanced Query (CDEQ) framework. We identify the sentences and atomic information that generate conflicts, perform a credibility assessment on the conflicting paragraphs, and ultimately enhance the query to detect perturbed text, thereby reducing Authority bias. Comparative experiments with widely used mitigation methods demonstrate that CDEQ exhibits both effectiveness and advancement, significantly enhancing the robustness of RAG systems.

LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, their ability to autonomously execute complex real-world tasks remains limited. Accordingly, tool learning has emerged to enable LLMs to effectively leverage external tools to extend their capabilities. Current tool-learning paradigms like CoT/ReAct employ sequential tool invocation but suffer from constrained perception and inadequate task planning. Alternative approaches using search-based decision trees incur substantial computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose DTA-Llama (Divide-Then-Aggregate Llama), a novel parallel tool invocation framework featuring: (1) A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure that transformed from traditional tree-based tool search paths, enabling parallel execution and contributing high-quality training data; (2) A process-thread-inspired inference mechanism that iteratively decomposes tasks into parallel tool-using subtasks while aggregating results for subsequent decisions. Experimental results show that our approach substantially enhances task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time. Llama2-7B, using our method, is comparable to the official parallel function calling method of GPT-3.5. The relevant code, dataset, and model weights are available at https://corn0205.github.io/.

Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation

While many advanced LLMs are designed to handle long sequence data, we can still observe notable quality degradation even within the sequence limit. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Scaling to Emphasize Attention for Long-context retrieval (SEAL), which enhances the retrieval performance of large language models (LLMs) over long contexts. We observe that specific attention heads are closely tied to long-context retrieval, showing positive or negative correlation with retrieval scores, and adjusting the strength of these heads boosts the quality of LLMs in long context by a large margin. Built on this insight, we propose a learning-based mechanism that leverages generated data to emphasize these heads. By applying SEAL, we achieve significant improvements in long-context retrieval performance across various tasks and models. Additionally, when combined with existing training-free context extension techniques, SEAL extends the contextual limits of LLMs while maintaining highly reliable outputs.

SEAL: Scaling to Emphasize Attention for Long-Context Retrieval

As Large Language Models (LLMs) advance, aligning them with human values is critical for their responsible development. Value principles serve as the foundation for clarifying alignment goals.
Multiple sets of value principles have been proposed, such as HHH (helpful, honest, harmless) and instructions for data synthesis in reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF). However, most of them are heuristically crafted, without consideration of three primary challenges in practical LLM alignment: 1) Comprehensiveness to deal with diverse and even unforeseen scenarios in which LLMs could be applied; 2) Precision to provide LLMs with clear and actionable guidance in specific scenarios; and 3) Compatability to avoid internal contracts between principles.
In this paper, we formalize quantitative metrics to evaluate value principles along the three desirable properties. Building on these metrics, we propose the Hierarchical Value Principle framework (HiVaP), which constructs a hierarchical principle set and retrieves principles tailored to each scenario in a cascading way, addressing above challenges.
Experimental results validate that the three metrics capture the effectiveness of value principles for LLM alignment, and our HiVaP framework that enhances these metrics leads to superior alignment. 

Warning: This paper contains several toxic and offensive statements.

Towards Better Value Principles for Large Language Model Alignment: A Systematic Evaluation and Enhancement

Text-guided image editing, fueled by recent advancements in generative AI, is becoming increasingly widespread. This trend highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to verify text-guided edits and assess their quality. To address this need, we introduce EditInspector, a novel benchmark for evaluation of text-guided image edits, based on human annotations collected using an extensive template for edit verification. We leverage EditInspector to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art (SoTA) vision and language models in assessing edits across various dimensions, including accuracy, artifact detection, visual quality, seamless integration with the image scene, adherence to common sense, and the ability to describe edit-induced changes. Our findings indicate that current models struggle to evaluate edits comprehensively and frequently hallucinate when describing the changes. To address these challenges, we propose two novel methods that outperform SoTA models in both artifact detection and difference caption generation.

EditInspector: A Benchmark for Evaluation of Text-Guided Image Edits

We introduce a novel framework for analyzing sorting algorithms in pairwise ranking prompting (PRP), re-centering the cost model around LLM inferences rather than traditional pairwise comparisons. While classical metrics based on comparison counts have traditionally been used to gauge efficiency, our analysis reveals that expensive LLM inferences overturn these predictions; accordingly, our framework encourages strategies such as batching and caching to mitigate inference costs. We show that algorithms optimal in the classical setting can lose efficiency when LLM inferences dominate the cost under certain optimizations.

Are Optimal Algorithms Still Optimal? Rethinking Sorting in LLM-Based Pairwise Ranking with Batching and Caching

Current language models (LMs) use a fixed, static subword tokenizer. This default choice typically results in degraded efficiency and language capabilities, especially in languages other than English. To address this issue, we challenge the static design and propose retrofitting LMs with dynamic tokenization: a way to dynamically decide on token boundaries based on the input text via a subword-merging algorithm inspired by byte-pair encoding. We merge frequent subword sequences in a batch, then apply a pre-trained embedding-prediction hypernetwork to compute the token embeddings on-the-fly. For encoder-style models (e.g., XLM-R), this on average reduces token sequence lengths by >20% across 14 languages while degrading performance by less than 2%. The same method applied to pre-filling and scoring in decoder-style models (e.g., Mistral-7B) results in minimal performance degradation at up to 17% reduction in sequence length. Overall, we find that dynamic tokenization can mitigate the limitations of static tokenization by substantially improving inference speed and promoting fairness across languages, enabling more equitable and adaptable LMs.

Retrofitting Large Language Models with Dynamic Tokenization

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of handling longer contexts, recent work has demonstrated that they exhibit the _"lost in the middle"_ phenomenon (Liu et al., 2024) of unevenly attending to different parts of the provided context. This hinders their ability to cover diverse source material in multi-document summarization, as noted in the DiverseSumm benchmark (Huang et al., 2024). In this work, we contend that principled content selection is a simple way to increase source coverage on this task. As opposed to prompting an LLM to perform the summarization in a single step, we explicitly divide the task into three steps---(1) reducing document collections to atomic key points, (2) using determinantal point processes (DPP) to perform select key points that prioritize diverse content, and (3) rewriting to the final summary. By combining prompting steps, for extraction and rewriting, with principled techniques, for content selection, we consistently improve source coverage on the DiverseSumm benchmark across various LLMs. Finally, we also show that by incorporating relevance to a provided user intent into the DPP kernel, we can generate _personalized_ summaries that cover _relevant_ source information while retaining coverage.

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Pretraining Context Compressor for Large Language Models with Embedding-Based Memory

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