China

Continual learning (CL) is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in dynamic real-world environments without the need for costly retraining. Recent model merging-based methods have attracted significant attention, but they still struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing forgetting, a challenge largely stemming from suboptimal number of merges and merging frequency. In this paper, we introduce Adaptive Iterative Model Merging (AimMerging), a novel CL framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model&#39;s training status. Guided by dynamic monitoring, the training trajectory-guided merge controller adaptively determines the timing and frequency of iterative fusion, while the rehearsal-based knowledge fusion module computes the merging weights and executes the fusion. Comprehensive experiments on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B) demonstrate that AimMerging achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods, with an average relative improvement of 80% and 59% on FWT and BWT, respectively. The source code is provided for reproducibility.

EMNLP 2025

AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning

model merging

continual learning

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Continual learning (CL) is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in dynamic real-world environments without the need for costly retraining. Recent model merging-based methods have attracted significant attention, but they still struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing forgetting, a challenge largely stemming from suboptimal number of merges and merging frequency. In this paper, we introduce Adaptive Iterative Model Merging (AimMerging), a novel CL framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model's training status. Guided by dynamic monitoring, the training trajectory-guided merge controller adaptively determines the timing and frequency of iterative fusion, while the rehearsal-based knowledge fusion module computes the merging weights and executes the fusion. Comprehensive experiments on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B) demonstrate that AimMerging achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods, with an average relative improvement of 80% and 59% on FWT and BWT, respectively. The source code is provided for reproducibility.

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.

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have recently attracted significant attention, with models such as DeepSeek-R1 achieving remarkable performance across various reasoning benchmarks. However, a common challenge to these models is the "overthinking" problem, leading to excessive intermediate steps and diminished inference efficiency. While numerous efforts have targeted reduction in generated tokens, these frequently encounter an inherent trade-off: enhancements in efficiency often come at the cost of degradation in performance. To overcome such challenges, we introduce the Multi-Turn Intervention Sampling Framework (MuTIS). Our framework leverages multi-turn interventions within rollouts to produce high-quality, concise reasoning chains. It fine-tunes reasoning models through reinforcement learning, demonstrably surpassing the previously described accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Through extensive experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach achieves a substantial 11.3% improvement in accuracy while concurrently reducing token utilization by an average of 60.1%. Code, data, and models will be fully open-sourced.

MuTIS: Enhancing Reasoning Efficiency through Multi Turn Intervention Sampling in Reinforcement Learning

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of large language models (LLMs) is critical for adapting to diverse downstream tasks with minimal computational cost. We propose **Di**rectional-**S**VD **Lo**w-**R**ank **A**daptation (DisLoRA), a novel PEFT framework that leverages singular value decomposition (SVD) to decompose pretrained weight matrices into orthogonal backbone and task-specific subspaces, enabling precise capture of task-specific directions (TSDs). By dynamically identifying TSDs and employing adaptive soft orthogonal regularization with mean-normalization mechanism, DisLoRA balances task-specific and orthogonal losses without manual tuning, ensuring robust training stability. Extensive experiments on GLUE and Commonsense Reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DisLoRA surpasses established PEFT methods, including LoRA, PiSSA, DoRA, LoRA-Dash, and SORSA. DisLoRA achieves superior performance on multiple individual GLUE datasets, surpassing baselines by up to 10.28\% on SST-2 and 3.28\% on CoLA, and consistently attains higher average accuracy than baselines across Commonsense Reasoning Tasks, with a maximum gain of 3.1\%. These results demonstrate DisLoRA’s performance in efficient and high-performing LLM adaptation for domain-specific tasks while preserving generalization.

DisLoRA: Task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation via Orthogonal Basis from Singular Value Decomposition

Sign language translation remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of large-scale, sentence-aligned datasets. Prior arts have focused on various feature extraction and architectural changes to support neural machine translation for sign languages. In this work, we propose a training scheme that is inspired by linguistic-templates-based sentence generation schemes. With translation comparison on 2 sign language datasets, How2Sign, and iSign, we show that a simple transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture outperforms the prior art when considering template-generated sentence pairs in training. We achieve BLEU-4 score improvements from 1.97 to 4.56 on How2Sign and from 0.55 to 3.43 on iSign, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of template-driven synthetic supervision in low-resource sign language settings.

PoseStitch-SLT: Linguistically Inspired Pose-Stitching for End-to-End Sign Language Translation

Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot learning, but their ability to reject out-of-distribution examples remains under-explored. We study this challenge under the setting of few-shot open-set classification, where a model must not only classify examples from a small set of seen classes but also reject unseen ones at inference time. This setting is more realistic and challenging than traditional closed-set supervised learning, requiring both fine-grained classification and robust rejection. We show that, for small LLMs, neither chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting nor supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone are sufficient to generalise reliably, particularly when class semantics are anonymised. We introduce Wasserstein GFN (W-GFN), a novel amortised Generative Flow Network approach that uses latent trajectories to approximate the Bayesian posterior. With as few as 4 examples per class, W-GFN substantially improves performance, enabling LLaMA 3.2B to achieve geq 80% of the performance of LLaMA 3.3 70B in complex datasets, despite being sim 23 times smaller which highlights the importance of reasoning-aware approaches for robust open-set few-shot learning.

Few-Shot Open-Set Classification via Reasoning-Aware Decomposition

LLMs are evolving into assistants that leverage tools, significantly expanding their capabilities but also introducing critical safety risks. Current models exhibit notable vulnerabilities, particularly in maintaining safety during multi-step tool interactions and in scenarios involving indirect harm. This paper introduces \texbf{ToolSafety}, a safety fine-tuning dataset designed to address these limitations. ToolSafety comprises 5,668 direct harm samples, 4,331 indirect harm samples, and 4,331 multi-step samples. Key features include support for multi-step safety through synthesized trajectories and realistic, context-aware sample generation. We fine-tuned LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct using ToolSafety. Experimental results demonstrate that these models effectively maintain safety in multi-step and indirect harm scenarios. Further analysis into superficial alignment across different decoding strategies, languages, and jailbreak prompts indicates that while some risks persist, the issue is less severe than in multi-step settings. Overall, our approach significantly improves safety across various scenarios with small impact on helpfulness, positioning ToolSafety as a valuable resource for building safer tool-using AI systems.

ToolSafety: A Comprehensive Dataset for Enhancing Safety in LLM-Based Agent Tool Invocations

Comprehensive evaluation of large language models (LLMs) typically requires large-scale benchmarks, which is costly in terms of both data annotation and computational resource needed for evaluation. To mitigate these challenges, we propose an efficient evaluation framework that selects a question subset based on pre-tested results, thereby reducing the costs. We formulate the subset selection problem as an optimization task, solved using optimal random sampling and simulated annealing algorithms. We compare our approach with prior clustering-based methods and assess their reliability in terms of score accuracy. Additionally, we perform semantic analysis and evaluate whether the selected subsets preserve the semantic information of the original benchmark using Wasserstein distance. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous approaches in terms of reliability, as measured by L2 norm. Our study provides an optimized perspective for balancing evaluation efficiency and reliability in LLM assessments, while revealing the relationship between optimization methods and semantic retention.

Towards Optimal Evaluation Efficiency for Large Language Models

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) faces considerable challenges concerning resource constraints and inference efficiency. Recent research has increasingly focused on smaller, task-specific models enhanced by distilling knowledge from LLMs. However, prior studies have often overlooked the diversity and quality of knowledge, especially the untapped potential of negative knowledge. Constructing effective negative knowledge remains severely understudied. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework called quality-guided contrastive rationale distillation aimed at enhancing reasoning capabilities through contrastive knowledge learning. For positive knowledge, we enrich its diversity through temperature sampling and employ self-consistency for further denoising and refinement. For negative knowledge, we propose an innovative self-adversarial approach that generates low-quality rationales by sampling previous iterations of smaller language models, embracing the idea that one can learn from one’s own weaknesses. A contrastive loss is developed to distill both positive and negative knowledge into smaller language models, where an online-updating discriminator is integrated to assess qualities of rationales and assign them appropriate weights, optimizing the training process. Through extensive experiments across multiple reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing distillation techniques, yielding higher-quality rationales.

QCRD: Quality-guided Contrastive Rationale Distillation for Large Language Models

Designing effective reasoning-capable LLMs typically requires training using Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) or distillation with carefully curated Long Chain of Thoughts (CoT), both of which depend heavily on extensive training data. This creates a major challenge when the amount of quality training data is scarce. We propose a sample-efficient, two-stage training strategy to develop reasoning LLMs under limited supervision. In the first stage, we "warm up" the model by distilling Long CoTs from a toy domain, namely, Knights \& Knaves (K\&K) logic puzzles to acquire general reasoning skills. In the second stage, we apply RLVR to the warmed-up model using a limited set of target-domain examples. Our experiments demonstrate that this two-phase approach offers several benefits: (i) the warmup phase alone facilitates generalized reasoning, leading to performance improvements across a range of tasks, including MATH, HumanEval\textsuperscript{+}, and MMLU-Pro; (ii) When both the base model and the warmed-up model are RLVR trained on the same small dataset (leq100 examples), the warmed-up model consistently outperforms the base model; (iii) Warming up before RLVR training allows a model to maintain cross-domain generalizability even after training on a specific domain; (iv) Introducing warmup in the pipeline improves not only accuracy but also overall sample efficiency during RLVR training. The results in this paper highlight the promise of warmup for building robust reasoning LLMs in data-scarce environments.

Warm Up Before You Train: Unlocking General Reasoning in Resource-Constrained Settings

Lifelong model editing aims to dynamically adjust a model's output with respect to specific facts, knowledge points, or behaviors, enabling the model to adapt to the ever-changing demands of the real world without requiring retraining. While some retrieval-based methods have demonstrated potential in lifelong editing scenarios by storing edited knowledge in external memory, they often suffer from limitations in usability, such as requiring additional training corpora or lacking support for reversible and detachable edits. To address these issues, we propose a plug-and-play method for knowledge retrieval and storage, i.e., Layer-Level Prompting (LLP), which enables seamless and efficient lifelong model editing. In our LLP framework, the reasoning process of LLMs is divided into two stages, respectively knowledge retrieval (Think) and knowledge injection(Recall). Specifically, the knowledge retrieval process is performed in the early layers of the model. Based on the retrieved information, the model is guided to access the updated knowledge stored in the subsequent layer to complete the knowledge editing process. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing techniques on lifelong model editing tasks, achieving superior performance on question answering and hallucination benchmarks across different LLMs.

Think and Recall: Layer-Level Prompting for Lifelong Model Editing

Speech Language Models (SLMs) enable natural interactions via spoken instructions, which has the potential to more effectively capture user intent by detecting nuances in their speech. This enhanced functionality, however, introduces new security risks as it enables adversaries to bypass safety mechanisms by injecting noise into the input. In this work, we analyze the vulnerability of open-source SLMs to adversarial attacks and evaluate various defense mechanisms. In our experiments, we harnessed a standard PGD in white-box scenario. We find that these models are susceptible to jailbreaks with 100% attack success rates in some instances. We propose post hoc defense techniques that include activation patching to improve robustness up to 99% with a negligible impact on utility. Additionally, we evaluate defenses applied at both the audio encoder and the language model components, weighing their impact on adversarial resistance and usability.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

MuTIS: Enhancing Reasoning Efficiency through Multi Turn Intervention Sampling in Reinforcement Learning

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