China

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant promise in document understanding and question-answering. Despite the progress, existing approaches can only process short documents due to limited context length or fail to fully leverage multi-modal information. In this work, we introduce DocAgent, a multi-agent framework for long-context document understanding that imitates human reading practice. Specifically, we first extract a structured, tree-formatted outline from documents to help agents identify relevant sections efficiently. Further, we develop an interactive reading interface that enables agents to query and retrieve various types of content dynamically. To ensure answer reliability, we introduce a reviewer agent that cross-checks responses using complementary sources and maintains a task-agnostic memory bank to facilitate knowledge sharing across tasks. We evaluate our method on two long-context document understanding benchmarks, where it bridges the gap to human-level performance by surpassing competitive baselines, while maintaining a short context length.

EMNLP 2025

DocAgent: An Agentic Framework for Multi-Modal Long-Context Document Understanding

llm agent

document understanding

multi-modal

## 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*





<br>

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

poster

Software debugging is a time-consuming endeavor involving a series of steps, such as fault localization and patch generation, each requiring thorough analysis and a deep understanding of the underlying logic. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising potential in coding tasks, their performance in debugging remains limited. Current LLM-based methods often focus on isolated steps and struggle with complex bugs. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end framework, UniDebugger, for unified debugging through multi-agent synergy. It mimics the entire cognitive processes of developers, with each agent specialized as a particular component of this process rather than mirroring the actions of an independent expert as in previous multi-agent systems. Agents are coordinated through a three-level design, following a cognitive model of debugging, allowing adaptive handling of bugs with varying complexities. Experiments on extensive benchmarks demonstrate that UniDebugger significantly outperforms state-of-the-art repair methods, fixing 1.25x to 2.56x bugs on the repo-level benchmark, Defects4J. This performance is achieved without requiring ground-truth root-cause code statements, unlike the baselines. Our source code is available on an anonymous link: https://github.com/AcceptePapier/UniDebugger.

UniDebugger: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for Unified Software Debugging

An Agentic AI Workflow (AAW), also known as an LLM-based multi-agent system, is an autonomous system that assembles several LLM-based agents to work collaboratively towards a shared goal. The high autonomy, widespread adoption, and growing interest in such AAWs highlight the need for a deeper understanding of their operations, from both quality and security aspects. To this day, there are no existing methods to assess the influence of each agent on the AAW's final output. Adopting techniques from related fields is not feasible since existing methods perform only static structural analysis, which is unsuitable for inference time execution. We present Counterfactual-based Agent Influence Ranker (CAIR) - the first method for assessing the influence level of each agent on the AAW's output and determining which agents are the most influential. By performing counterfactual analysis, CAIR provides a task-agnostic analysis that can be used both offline and at inference time. We evaluate CAIR using an AAWs dataset of our creation, containing 30 different use cases with 230 different functionalities. Our evaluation showed that CAIR produces consistent rankings, outperforms baseline methods, and can easily enhance the effectiveness and relevancy of downstream tasks.

CAIR: Counterfactual-based Agent Influence Ranker for Agentic AI Workflows

The effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving tasks depends significantly on the quality of their instructions, which often require substantial human effort to craft. This underscores the need for automated instruction optimization. However, optimizing instructions is particularly challenging when working with black-box LLMs, where model parameters and gradients are inaccessible. We introduce ACING, an actor-critic reinforcement learning framework that formulates instruction optimization as a stateless, continuous-action problem, enabling exploration of infinite instruction spaces using only black-box feedback. ACING automatically discovers prompts that outperform human-written prompts in 76\% of instruction-induction tasks, with gains of up to 33 points and a 10-point median improvement over the best automatic baseline in 33 tasks spanning instruction-induction, summarization, and chain-of-thought reasoning. Extensive ablations highlight its robustness and efficiency. Code will be released as open source.

ACING: Actor-Critic for Instruction Learning in Black-Box LLMs

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems now attain near–human agreement on public benchmarks, yet real-world adoption—especially in high-stakes examinations—remains limited. A principal obstacle is that most models output a single score without any accompanying measure of confidence or explanation. We address this gap with conformal prediction, a distribution-free wrapper that equips any classifier with set-valued outputs enjoying formal coverage guarantees. Two open-weight large language models—Llama-3 8B and Qwen-2.5 3B—are fine-tuned on three diverse corpora (ASAP, TOEFL11, Cambridge-FCE) and calibrated at a 90% risk level. Reliability is assessed with UAcc, an uncertainty-aware accuracy that rewards models for being both correct and concise. To our knowledge, this is the first work to combine conformal prediction and UAcc for essay scoring. The calibrated models consistently meet the coverage target while keeping prediction sets compact, demonstrating that trustworthy, uncertainty-aware AES is already feasible with mid-sized, open source LLMs and paving the way for safer human-in the-loop marking.

Beyond the Score: Uncertainty-Calibrated LLMs for Automated Essay Assessment

As large language models continue to scale, computational costs and resource consumption have emerged as significant challenges. While existing sparsification methods like pruning reduce computational overhead, they risk losing model knowledge through parameter removal. This paper proposes DSMoE (Dynamic Sparse Mixture-of-Experts), a novel approach that achieves sparsification by partitioning pre-trained FFN layers into computational blocks. We implement adaptive expert routing using sigmoid activation and straight-through estimators, enabling tokens to flexibly access different aspects of model knowledge based on input complexity. Additionally, we introduce a sparsity loss term to balance performance and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on LLaMA models demonstrate that under equivalent computational constraints, DSMoE achieves superior performance compared to existing pruning and MoE approaches across language modeling and downstream tasks, particularly excelling in generation tasks. Analysis reveals that DSMoE learns distinctive layerwise activation patterns, providing new insights for future MoE architecture design.

DSMoE: Matrix-Partitioned Experts with Dynamic Routing for Computation-Efficient Dense LLMs

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have recently gained attention due to their effectiveness to understand and generate descriptions of visual content. Most existing LMMs are in English language. While few recent works explore multilingual image LMMs, to the best of our knowledge, moving beyond the English language for cultural and linguistic inclusivity is yet to be investigated in the context of video LMMs. In pursuit of more inclusive video LMMs, we introduce a multilingual Video LMM benchmark, named ViMUL-Bench, to evaluate Video LMMs across 14 languages, including both low- and high-resource languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Bengali, Urdu, Sinhala, Tamil, Swedish, and Japanese. Our ViMUL-Bench is designed to rigorously test video LMMs across 15 categories including eight culturally diverse categories, ranging from lifestyles and festivals to foods and rituals and from local landmarks to prominent cultural personalities. ViMUL-Bench comprises both open-ended (short and long-form) and multiple-choice questions spanning various video durations (short, medium, and long) with 8k samples that are manually verified by native language speakers. In addition, we also introduce a machine translated multilingual video training set comprising 1.2 million samples and develop a simple multilingual video LMM, named ViMUL, that is shown to provide a better tradeoff between high-and low-resource languages for video understanding. We hope our ViMUL-Bench and multilingual video LMM along with a large-scale multilingual video training set will help ease future research in developing cultural and linguistic inclusive multilingual video LMMs. Our proposed benchmark, video LMM and training data will be publicly released.

A Culturally-diverse Multilingual Multimodal Video Benchmark & Model

Recent progress in natural language processing has popularized causal language models, but their internal behavior remains poorly understood due to the high cost and reliance on large-scale benchmarks in existing analysis methods. To address these challenges, we introduce a graph-theoretical framework for analyzing causal language models. Our method constructs graphs from model outputs by linking high-probability token transitions and applies classical metrics to capture linguistic features of model behavior. Based on previous works, none have examined or applied graph analysis from this perspective. For the first time, a macroscopic view of the overall behavior of a language model is provided by analyzing the mathematical characteristics of small sample graphs derived from the generated outputs. We first discuss the metrics theoretically, then demonstrate how they work through experiments, followed by some applications of this graph-theoretical framework in natural language processing tasks. Through experiments across training steps and model sizes, we demonstrate that these metrics can reflect model evolution and predict performance with minimal data. We further validate our findings by comparing them with benchmark accuracy scores, highlighting the reliability of our metrics. In contrast to existing evaluation methods, our approach is lightweight, efficient, and especially well-suited for low-resource settings.

A Graph-Theoretical Framework for Analyzing the Behavior of Causal Language Models

We study cost-efficient collaboration between strong and weak language models for repository-level code generation, where the weak model handles simpler tasks at lower cost, and the most challenging tasks are delegated to the strong model. While many works propose architectures for this task, few analyze performance relative to cost. We evaluate a broad spectrum of collaboration strategies: context-based, pipeline-based, and dynamic, on GitHub issue resolution. Our most effective collaborative strategy achieves equivalent performance to the strong model while reducing the cost by 40\%. Based on our findings, we offer actionable guidelines for choosing collaboration strategies under varying budget and performance constraints. Our results show that strong–weak collaboration substantially boosts the weak model’s performance at a fraction of the cost, pipeline and context-based methods being most efficient.

An Empirical Study on Strong-Weak Model Collaboration for Repo-level Code Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they often refuse to answer legitimate queries—a phenomenon known as overrefusal. Overrefusal typically stems from over-conservative safety alignment, causing models to treat many reasonable prompts as potentially risky. To systematically understand this issue, we probe and leverage the models’ safety decision boundaries to analyze and mitigate overrefusal. Our findings reveal that overrefusal is closely tied to misalignment at these boundary regions, where models struggle to distinguish subtle differences between benign and harmful content. Building on these insights, we present **RASS**, an automated framework for prompt generation and selection that strategically targets overrefusal prompts near the safety boundary. By harnessing steering vectors in the representation space, **RASS** efficiently identifies and curates boundary-aligned prompts, enabling more effective and targeted mitigation of overrefusal. This approach not only provides a more precise and interpretable view of model safety decisions but also seamlessly extends to multilingual scenarios. We have explored the safety decision boundaries of various LLMs and construct the **MORBench** evaluation set to facilitate robust assessment of model safety and helpfulness across multiple languages. Code and datasets will be released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RASS-80D3.

Understanding and Mitigating Overrefusal in LLMs from an Unveiling Perspective of Safety Decision Boundary

Accurate grading of rhinitis severity in nasal endoscopy relies heavily on the characterization of key secretion types, notably clear nasal discharge (CND) and purulent nasal secretion (PUS). However, both exhibit ambiguous appearance and high structural variability, posing challenges to automated grading under weak supervision. To address this, we propose Multimodal Learning for Mucus Anomaly Grading (MMAG), which integrates structured prompts with rank-aware vision-language modeling for joint detection and grading. Attribute prompts are constructed from clinical descriptors (e.g., secretion type, severity, location) and aligned with multi-level visual features via a dual-branch encoder. During inference, the model localizes mucus anomalies and maps the input image to severity-specific prompts (e.g., “moderate pus”), projecting them into a rank-aware feature space for progressive similarity scoring.Extensive evaluations on CND and PUS datasets show that our method achieves consistent gains over Baseline, improving AUC by 6.31% and 4.79%, and F1 score by 12.85% and 6.03%, respectively.This framework enables interpretable, annotation-efficient, and semantically grounded assessment of rhinitis severity based on mucus anomalies.

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