Austria

The success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often relies on high-resolution schemes that preserve image details, while these approaches also generate an excess of visual tokens, leading to a substantial decrease in model efficiency. A typical VLM includes a visual encoder, a text encoder, and an LLM. Recent studies suggest pruning visual tokens based on visual and textual priors to accelerate VLMs without additional training costs. However, these methods often overlook prompt semantics or suffer from biased self-attention in the LLM. Inspired by the efficient mechanisms of the human brain for multimodal understanding, we introduce AdaV, a novel training-free visual token pruning method. By emulating the neural pathways that preprocess visual and auditory information before the reasoning stage, we shift text-guided visual attention redirection to the pre-LLM stage, which reduces biased token pruning and enhances model robustness with a limited visual token budget. A Self-adaptive Cross-modality Attention Redirection (SCAR) module is further proposed that effectively merges and redirects visual attention with text-to-image attention. Extensive experiments on seven challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our AdaV achieves SOTA performance in training-free VLM acceleration and can be plug-and-play on various VLMs. We plan to open-source the code upon publication.

ACL 2025

AdaV: Adaptive Text-visual Redirection for Vision-Language Models

visual token pruning

vision language model

model acceleration

## 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)

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2025". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. 

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

As the scale of large language models (LLMs) grows and natural language tasks become increasingly diverse, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become the standard paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs. Among PEFT methods, LoRA is widely adopted for not introducing additional inference overhead. However, existing LoRA’s shared parameter space paradigm introduces parameter interference, leading to a gap in generalization performance for specific tasks compared to full fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose a parameter-separated low-rank adapter, called Subspace Low-Rank Adaptation (SuLoRA). The core idea of SuLoRA is to account for task differences by decomposing LoRA’s parameter matrix into multiple independent subspaces and assigning them differentially to distinct tasks. This prevents interference across tasks and enhances the effectiveness of low-rank adaptation. Additionally, SuLoRA achieves higher rank expansion by freezing the A matrix, further improving generalization capability. We conduct extensive experiments on various NLP tasks, demonstrating that SuLoRA significantly outperforms LoRA in trainable parameter efficiency and overall model performance. Furthermore, we validate SuLoRA’s effectiveness in domain generalization and multi-modal tasks, showcasing its strong generalization ability.

SuLoRA: Subspace Low-Rank Adaptation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Hierarchical Merging is a technique commonly used to summarize very long texts (>100K tokens) by breaking down the input into smaller sections, summarizing those sections individually, and then merging or combining those summaries into a final coherent summary. Although it helps address the limitations of large language models (LLMs) with fixed input length constraints, the recursive merging process can amplify LLM hallucinations, increasing the risk of factual inaccuracies. In this paper, we seek to mitigate hallucinations by enriching hierarchical merging with context from the source document. Specifically, we propose different approaches to contextual augmentation ranging from *replacing* intermediate summaries with relevant input context, to *refining* them while using the context as supporting evidence, and *aligning* them implicitly (via citations) to the input. Experimental results on datasets representing legal and narrative domains show that contextual augmentation consistently outperforms zero-shot and hierarchical merging baselines for the Llama 3.1 model family. Our analysis further reveals that refinement methods tend to perform best when paired with extractive summarization for identifying relevant input.

Context-Aware Hierarchical Merging for Long Document Summarization

Detecting rumors on social media has become a crucial issue. Propagation structure-based methods have recently attracted increasing attention. When the propagation structure is represented by the dynamic graph, temporal information is considered. However, existing rumor detection models using dynamic graph typically focus only on coarse-grained temporal information and ignore the fine-grained temporal dynamics within individual snapshots and across snapshots. In this paper, we propose a novel Fine-Grained Dynamic Graph Neural Network (FGDGNN) model, which can incorporate the fine-grained temporal information of dynamic propagation graph in the intra-snapshot and dynamic embedding update mechanism in the inter-snapshots into a unified framework for rumor detection. Specifically, we firstly construct the edge-weighed propagation graph and the edge-aware graph isomorphism network is proposed. To get fine-grained temporal representations across snapshots, we propose an embedding transformation layer to update node embedding. Finally, we integrate the temporal information in the inter-snapshots at the graph level to enhance the effectiveness of the proposed model. Extensive experiments conducted on three public real-world datasets demonstrate that our FGDGNN model achieves significant improvements compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.

FGDGNN: Fine-Grained Dynamic Graph Neural Network for Rumor Detection on Social Media

Information retrieval has evolved from traditional sparse and dense retrieval methods to approaches driven by large language models (LLMs). Recent techniques, such as Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) and Generative Document Retrieval (GDR), leverage LLMs to enhance retrieval but face key challenges: GAR’s generated content may not always align with the target document corpus, while GDR limits the generative capacity of LLMs by constraining outputs to predefined document identifiers. To address these issues, we propose Context-Aware Generation-Augmented Retrieval (CA-GAR), which enhances LLMs by integrating corpus information into their generation process. CA-GAR optimizes token selection by incorporating relevant document information and leverages a Distribution Alignment Strategy to extract corpus information using a lexicon-based approach. Experimental evaluations on seven tasks from the BEIR benchmark and four non-English languages from Mr.TyDi demonstrate that CA-GAR outperforms existing methods.

CA-GAR: Context-Aware Alignment of LLM Generation for Document Retrieval

Recent success in large multimodal models (LMMs) has sparked promising applications of agents capable of autonomously completing complex web tasks. While open-source LMM agents have made significant advances in offline evaluation benchmarks, their performance still falls substantially short of human-level capabilities in more realistic online settings. A key bottleneck is the lack of diverse and large-scale trajectory-level datasets across various domains, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we address this challenge by developing a scalable recipe to synthesize the largest and most diverse trajectory-level dataset to date, containing over 94K successful multimodal web trajectories, spanning 49K unique URLs, 720K screenshots, and 33M web elements. In particular, we leverage extensive web exploration and refinement to obtain diverse task intents. The average cost is 28 cents per successful trajectory, making it affordable to a wide range of users in the community. Leveraging this dataset, we train Explorer, a multimodal web agent, and demonstrate strong performance on both offline and online web agent benchmarks such as Mind2Web-Live, Multimodal-Mind2Web, and MiniWob++. Additionally, our experiments highlight data scaling as a key driver for improving web agent capabilities. We hope this study makes state-of-the-art LMM-based agent research at a larger scale more accessible.

Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent-based frameworks, the "Chain of Models" approach is widely used, where multiple specialized models work sequentially on distinct sub-tasks. This approach is effective but increases resource demands as each model must be deployed separately. Recent advancements attempt to address this by applying prompt tuning, which allows a shared base model to adapt to multiple tasks with minimal parameter changes. However, a key challenge remains: intermediate outputs, passed between models as plain text, require recomputation of hidden states (i.e., Key and Value (KV) states in Transformers) during inference. In this paper, we introduce FTHSS, a novel prompt-tuning method that enables models to share KV hidden states, eliminating redundant forward passes and reducing KV cache storage. By modifying input and attention masks during training, FTHSS allows models to effectively utilize KV hidden states from prior models in both single- and multi-round scenarios. Empirical results on four tasks show that FTHSS matches the performance of traditional model chains while improving inference efficiency.

Streamlining the Collaborative Chain of Models into A Single Forward Pass in Generation-Based Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but their deployment in high-stake domains requires consistent performance across multiple interaction rounds. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving LLM response consistency, making three key contributions. First, we propose a novel Position-Weighted Consistency (PWC) score that captures both the importance of early-stage stability and recovery patterns in multi-turn interactions. Second, we present a carefully curated benchmark dataset spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels, specifically designed to evaluate LLM consistency under various challenging follow-up scenarios. Third, we introduce Confidence-Aware Response Generation (CARG), a framework that significantly improves response stability by incorporating model confidence signals into the generation process. Empirical results demonstrate that CARG significantly improves response stability without sacrificing accuracy, underscoring its potential for reliable LLM deployment in critical applications.

Firm or Fickle? Evaluating Large Language Models Consistency in Sequential Interactions

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the importance of improving their reasoning capabilities. 
A critical challenge lies in the scarcity of high-quality reasoning data—characterized by diversity and rich supervisory signals—necessary for robust model training. 
While data augmentation (DA) methods have been leveraged to mitigate this scarcity, prevailing approaches often introduce noise and exhibit logical inconsistencies, thereby diminishing their utility for complex reasoning tasks. 
Moreover, existing DA paradigms predominantly isolate data synthesis from label validation, failing to unify these complementary processes within a cohesive architecture.
To address these limitations, we introduce Logical DA, a multi-agent framework for enhancing reasoning-focused data augmentation in few-shot learning scenarios. 
Our system includes four agents operating through two synergistic phases: (1) diverse data generation, and (2) label verification.
The system incorporates a reflection mechanism to continuously improve data quality by leveraging feedback from logical validation. 
We demonstrate the effectiveness of Logical DA through experiments on various tasks and datasets, achieving the highest average improvement in task accuracy in both fine-tuning and in-context learning paradigms, with an average improvement of 7.61\% when applied to fine-tuning.

Logical DA: Enhancing Data Augmentation for Logical Reasoning via a Multi-Agent System

We introduce KodCode, a synthetic dataset that addresses the persistent challenge of acquiring high-quality, verifiable training data across diverse difficulties and domains for training Large Language Models for coding. Existing code-focused resources typically fail to ensure either the breadth of coverage (e.g., spanning simple coding tasks to advanced algorithmic problems) or verifiable correctness (e.g., unit tests). In contrast, KodCode comprises question–solution–test triplets that are systematically validated via a self-verification procedure. Our pipeline begins by synthesizing a broad range of coding questions, then generates solutions and test cases with additional attempts allocated to challenging problems. Finally, post-training data synthesis is done by rewriting questions into diverse formats and generating responses under a test-based reject sampling procedure from a reasoning model (DeepSeek R1). This pipeline yields a large-scale, robust and diverse coding dataset. It is suitable for supervised fine-tuning and the paired unit tests also provide great potential for RL tuning. Fine-tuning experiments on coding benchmarks (HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), BigCodeBench, and LiveCodeBench) demonstrate that KodCode-tuned models achieve state-of-the-art performance, surpassing models like Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B.

KodCode: A Diverse, Challenging, and Verifiable Synthetic Dataset for Coding

Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) enforce uniform computation across all tokens. We analyze the correlation between the input-output difference of self-attention block and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) within the same transformer layer, and find that these two differential vectors are highly correlated. Thus, we propose to dynamically skip the FFN blocks based on the self-attention difference and introduce Diffential Layer Skipping (DiffSkip) to show that LLMs are inherently dynamic-depth models, capable of adjusting computational depth when generating different tokens. DiffSkip employs a lightweight router module to dynamically skip a set of FFN blocks in LLMs and only requires efficient fine-tuning while keeping the whole LLM frozen. Experimental results demonstrate that DiffSkip effectively enables dynamic FFN skipping in decoder-only language models, even in continuous token generation tasks where many layer-skipping methods struggle.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2025

SuLoRA: Subspace Low-Rank Adaptation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Similar lecture

DCP: Dual-Cue Pruning for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models