China

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) is a practical yet challenging task, which is to ask questions based on documents while referring to multiple pages and different modalities of information, e.g., images and tables. To handle multi-modality, recent methods follow a similar Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but utilize Visual Language Models (VLMs) based embedding model to embed and retrieve relevant pages as images, and generate answers with VLMs that can accept an image as input. In this paper, we introduce SimpleDoc, a lightweight yet powerful retrieval‑augmented framework for DocVQA. It boosts evidence page gathering by first retrieving candidates through embedding similarity and then filtering and re-ranking these candidates based on page summaries. A single VLM-based reasoner agent repeatedly invokes this dual-cue retriever, iteratively pulling fresh pages into a working memory until the question is confidently answered. SimpleDoc outperforms previous baselines by 3.2% on average on 4 DocVQA datasets with much fewer pages retrieved.

EMNLP 2025

SimpleDoc: Multi‑Modal Document Understanding with Dual‑Cue Page Retrieval and Iterative Refinement

multi-modal document question answering (docvqa)

vision-language models (vlms)

retrieval-augmented generation (rag)

## 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

Temporal information extraction (IE) aims to extract structured temporal information from unstructured text, thereby uncovering the implicit timelines within. This technique is applied across domains such as healthcare, newswire, and intelligence analysis, aiding models in these areas to perform temporal reasoning and enabling human users to grasp the temporal structure of text. Transformer-based pre-trained language models have produced revolutionary advancements in natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional performance across a multitude of tasks. Despite the achievements garnered by Transformer-based approaches in temporal IE, there is a lack of comprehensive reviews on these endeavors. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by systematically summarizing and analyzing the body of work on temporal IE using Transformers while highlighting potential future research directions.

Transformer-Based Temporal Information Extraction and Application: A Review

Charts are very common for exploring data and communicating insights, but extracting key takeaways from charts and articulating them in natural language can be challenging. The chart-to-text task aims to automate this process by generating textual summaries of charts. While with the rapid advancement of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we have witnessed great progress in this domain, little to no attention has been given to potential biases in their outputs. This paper investigates how VLMs can amplify geo-economic biases when generating chart summaries, potentially causing societal harm. Specifically, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of geo-economic biases in VLM-generated chart summaries across 6,000 chart-country pairs from six widely used proprietary and open-source models to understand how a country’s economic status influences the sentiment of generated summaries. Our analysis reveals that existing VLMs tend to produce more positive descriptions for high-income countries compared to middle- or low-income countries, even when country attribution is the only variable changed. We also find that models such as GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-Flash, and Phi-3.5 exhibit varying degrees of bias. We further explore inference-time prompt-based debiasing techniques using positive distractors but find them only partially effective, underscoring the complexity of the issue and the need for more robust debiasing strategies. Our code and dataset are available at <redacted>.

From Charts to Fair Narratives: Uncovering and Mitigating Geo-Economic Biases in Chart-to-Text

The prototyping of computer games, particularly card games, requires extensive human effort in creative ideation and gameplay evaluation. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer opportunities to automate and streamline these processes. However, it remains challenging for LLMs to design novel game mechanics beyond existing databases, generate consistent gameplay environments, and develop scalable gameplay AI for large-scale evaluations. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a comprehensive automated card game prototyping framework. The approach highlights a graph-based indexing method for generating novel game variations, an LLM-driven system for consistent game code generation validated by gameplay records, and a gameplay AI constructing method that uses an ensemble of LLM-generated action-value functions optimized through self-play. These contributions aim to accelerate card game prototyping, reduce human labor, and lower barriers to entry for game developers.

Cardiverse: Harnessing LLMs for Novel Card Game Prototyping

In-context learning is an emergent learning paradigm that enables an LLM to learn an unseen task by seeing a number of demonstrations in the context window. The quality of the demonstrations is of paramount importance as 1) context window size limitations restrict the number of demonstrations that can be presented to the model, and 2) the model must identify the task and potentially learn new, unseen input-output mappings from the limited demonstration set. An increasing body of work has also shown the sensitivity of predictions to perturbations on the demonstration set. Given this importance, this work presents a survey on the current literature pertaining to the relationship between data and in-context learning. We present our survey in three parts: the "good" -- qualities that are desirable when selecting demonstrations, the "bad" -- qualities of demonstrations that can negatively impact the model, as well as issues that can arise in presenting demonstrations, and the "debatable" -- qualities of demonstrations with mixed results or factors modulating data impacts.

The Good, the Bad, and the Debatable: A Survey on the Impacts of Data for In-Context Learning

New large language models (LLMs) are being released every day. Some perform significantly better or worse than expected given their parameter count. Therefore, there is a need for a method to independently evaluate models. The current best way to evaluate a model is to measure its Elo score by comparing it to other models in a series of contests—an expensive operation since humans are ideally required to compare LLM outputs. We observe that when an LLM is asked to judge such contests, the consistency with which it selects a model as the best in a matchup produces a metric that is 91% correlated with its own human-produced Elo score. This provides a simple proxy for Elo scores that can be computed cheaply, without any human data or prior knowledge.

Model Consistency as a Cheap yet Predictive Proxy for LLM Elo Scores

Disinformation poses a significant threat to democratic societies, public health, and national security. To address this challenge, fact-checking experts analyze and track disinformation narratives. However, the process of manually identifying these narratives is highly time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this article, we introduce DiNaM, the first algorithm and structured framework specifically designed for mining disinformation narratives. DiNaM uses a multi-step approach to uncover disinformation narratives. It first leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect false information, then applies clustering techniques to identify underlying disinformation narratives. We evaluated DiNaM’s performance using ground-truth disinformation narratives from the EUDisinfoTest dataset. The evaluation employed the Weighted Chamfer Distance (WCD), which measures the similarity between two sets of embeddings: the ground truth and the predicted disinformation narratives. DiNaM achieved a state-of-the-art WCD score of 0.73, outperforming general-purpose narrative mining methods by a notable margin of 16.4–24.7%. We are releasing DiNaM's codebase and the dataset to the public.

DiNaM: Disinformation Narrative Mining with Large Language Models

Modern GPUs evolve rapidly, yet production compilers still rely on hand-crafted register allocation heuristics that require substantial re-tuning for each hardware generation. We introduce VeriLocc, a framework that combines large language models (LLMs) with formal compiler techniques to enable generalizable and verifiable register allocation across GPU architectures. VeriLocc fine-tunes an LLM to translate intermediate representations (MIRs) into target-specific register assignments, aided by static analysis for cross-architecture normalization and generalization and a verifier-guided regeneration loop to ensure correctness. Evaluated on matrix multiplication (GEMM) and multi-head attention (MHA), VeriLocc achieves 85–99% single-shot accuracy and near-100% pass@100. Case study shows that VeriLocc discovers more performant assignments than expert-tuned libraries, outperforming rocBLAS by over 10% in runtime.

VeriLocc: End-to-End Cross-Architecture Register Allocation via LLM

Frame-semantic parsing is a critical task in natural language understanding, yet the ability of large language models (LLMs) to extract frame-semantic arguments remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs on frame-semantic argument identification, analyzing the impact of input representation formats, model architectures, and generalization to unseen and out-of-domain samples. Our experiments, spanning models from 0.5B to 78B parameters, reveal that JSON-based representations significantly enhance performance, and while larger models generally perform better, smaller models can achieve competitive results through fine-tuning. We also introduce a novel approach to frame identification leveraging predicted frame elements, achieving state-of-the-art performance on ambiguous targets. Despite strong generalization capabilities, our analysis finds that LLMs still struggle with out-of-domain data.

Can LLMs Extract Frame-Semantic Arguments?

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) capable of performing a wide range of visual understanding tasks. While LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance on standard natural images, their capabilities have not been thoroughly explored in cluttered datasets where there is complex environment having deformed shaped objects. In this work, we introduce a novel dataset specifically designed for waste classification in real-world scenarios, characterized by complex environments and deformed shaped objects. Along with this dataset, we present an in-depth evaluation approach to rigorously assess the robustness and accuracy of VLLMs. The introduced dataset and comprehensive analysis provide valuable insights into the performance of VLLMs under challenging conditions. Our findings highlight the critical need for further advancements in VLLM's robustness to perform better in complex environments. The dataset and code for our experiments will be made publicly available.

Waste-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating VLLMs in Cluttered Environments

In this paper, we introduce a novel weighted co-training approach that is guided by Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, in our co-training approach, we use LLM labels on unlabeled data as target labels and co-train two encoder-only based networks that train each other over multiple iterations: first, all samples are forwarded through each network and historical estimates of each network's confidence in the LLM label are recorded; second, a dynamic importance weight is derived for each sample according to each network's belief (or confidence) in the quality of the LLM label for that sample; finally, the two networks exchange importance weights with each other—each network back-propagates all samples weighted with the importance weights coming from its peer network and updates its own parameters. By strategically utilizing LLM-generated guidance, our approach significantly outperforms conventional SSL methods, particularly in settings with abundant unlabeled data. Empirical results show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance on 4 out of 5 benchmark datasets and ranks first among 14 compared methods according to the Friedman test. Our results highlight a new direction in semi-supervised learning—where LLMs serve as knowledge amplifiers, enabling backbone co-training models to achieve SOTA performance efficiently.

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