China

The integration of external knowledge through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become foundational in enhancing large language models (LLMs) for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing RAG paradigms often overlook the cognitive step of applying knowledge, leaving a gap between retrieved facts and task-specific reasoning. In this work, we introduce RAG+, a principled and modular extension that explicitly incorporates application-aware reasoning into the RAG pipeline. RAG+ constructs a dual corpus consisting of knowledge and aligned application examples, created either manually or automatically, and jointly retrieves both during inference. This design enables LLMs not only to access relevant information but also to apply it within structured, goal-oriented reasoning processes. Experiments across mathematical, law, and medical domains, conducted on multiple models, demonstrate that RAG+ consistently outperforms standard RAG variants, achieving average improvements of 3–5%, and peak gains up to 7.5% in complex scenarios. By bridging retrieval with actionable application, RAG+ advances a more cognitively grounded framework for knowledge integration, representing a step toward more interpretable and capable LLMs.

EMNLP 2025

RAG+: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Application-Aware Reasoning

prompt engineering

## 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

The widespread dissemination of toxic content on social media poses a serious threat to both online environments and public discourse, highlighting the urgent need for detoxification methods that effectively remove toxicity while preserving the original semantics. However, existing approaches often struggle to simultaneously achieve strong detoxification performance, semantic preservation, and robustness to out-of-distribution data. Moreover, they typically rely on costly, manually annotated parallel corpora while showing poor data efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage training framework that jointly optimizes for Data Efficiency, Semantic Preservation, and Model Generalization. We first perform supervised fine-tuning on a small set of high-quality, filtered parallel data to establish a strong initialization. Then, we leverage unlabeled toxic inputs and a custom-designed reward model to train the LLM using Group Relative Policy Optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates the trade-offs faced by previous work, achieving state-of-the-art performance with improved generalization and significantly reduced dependence on annotated data. Our code is available at https://github.com/allacnobug/Detoxification-of-Text.

Text Detoxification: Data Efficiency, Semantic Preservation and Model Generalization

Do LLMs genuinely incorporate external definitions, or do they primarily rely on their parametric knowledge? To address these questions, we conduct controlled experiments across multiple explanation benchmark datasets (general and domain-specific) and label definition conditions, including expert-curated, LLM-generated, perturbed, and swapped definitions. Our results reveal that while explicit label definitions can enhance accuracy and explainability, their integration into an LLM’s task-solving processes is neither guaranteed nor consistent, suggesting reliance on internalized representations in many cases. Models often default to their internal representations, particularly in general tasks, whereas domain-specific tasks benefit more from explicit definitions. These findings underscore the need for a deeper understanding of how LLMs process external knowledge alongside their pre-existing capabilities.

Do LLMs Adhere to Label Definitions? Examining Their Receptivity to External Label Definitions

With the rise of long-context language models (LMs) capable of processing tens of thousands of tokens in a single context window, do multi-stage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines still offer measurable benefits over simpler, single-stage approaches? To assess this question, we conduct a controlled evaluation for QA tasks under systematically scaled token budgets, comparing two recent multi-stage pipelines, ReadAgent and RAPTOR, against three baselines, including DOS RAG (Document's Original Structure RAG), a simple retrieve-then-read method that preserves original passage order. Despite its straightforward design, DOS RAG consistently matches or outperforms more intricate methods on multiple long-context QA benchmarks. We trace this strength to a combination of maintaining source fidelity and document structure, prioritizing recall within effective context windows, and favoring simplicity over added pipeline complexity. We recommend establishing DOS RAG as a simple yet strong baseline for future RAG evaluations, paired with state-of-the-art embedding and language models, and benchmarked under matched token budgets, to ensure that added pipeline complexity is justified by clear performance gains as models continue to improve.

Stronger Baselines for Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Long-Context Language Models

Given some information need, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for candidate text relevance assessment, typically using a one-by-one pointwise (PW) strategy where each LLM call evaluates one candidate at a time. Meanwhile, it has been shown that LLM performance can be improved through self-consistency: prompting the LLM to do the same task multiple times (possibly in perturbed ways) and then aggregating the responses. To take advantage of self-consistency, we hypothesize that batched PW strategies, where multiple passages are judged in one LLM call, are better suited than one-by-one PW methods since a larger input context can induce more diverse LLM sampling across self-consistency calls. We first propose several candidate batching strategies to create prompt diversity across self-consistency calls through subset reselection and permutation. We then test our batched PW methods on relevance assessment and ranking tasks against one-by-one PW and listwise LLM ranking baselines with and without self-consistency, using three passage retrieval datasets and GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 3, and Amazon Nova Pro. We find that batched PW methods outperform all baselines, and show that batching can greatly amplify the positive effects of self-consistency. For instance, on our legal search dataset, GPT-4o one-by-one PW ranking NDCG@10 improves only from 44.9% to 46.8% without self-consistency vs. with 15 self consistency calls, while batched PW ranking improves from 43.8% to 51.3%, respectively.

Batched Self-Consistency Improves LLM Relevance Assessment and Ranking

We introduce SemCSE, an unsupervised method for learning semantic embeddings of scientific texts. Building on recent advances in contrastive learning for text embeddings, our approach leverages LLM-generated summaries of scientific abstracts to train a model that positions semantically related summaries closer together in the embedding space. This resulting objective ensures that the model captures the true semantic content of a text, in contrast to traditional citation-based approaches that do not necessarily reflect semantic similarity. To validate this, we propose a novel benchmark designed to assess a model's ability to understand and encode the semantic content of scientific texts, demonstrating that our method enforces a stronger semantic separation within the embedding space. Additionally, we evaluate SemCSE on the comprehensive SciRepEval benchmark for scientific text embeddings, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of its size, thus highlighting the benefits of a semantically focused training approach.

SemCSE: Semantic Contrastive Sentence Embeddings Using LLM-Generated Summaries For Scientific Abstracts

In exploratory search, users often submit vague queries to investigate unfamiliar topics, but receive limited feedback about how the search engine understood their input. This leads to a self-reinforcing cycle of mismatched results and trial-and-error reformulation. To address this, we study the task of generating user-facing natural language query intent descriptions that surface what the system likely inferred the query to mean, based on post-retrieval evidence. We propose QUIDS, a method that leverages dual-space contrastive learning to isolate intent-relevant information while suppressing irrelevant content. QUIDS combines a dual-encoder representation space with a disentangling decoder that works together to produce concise and accurate intent descriptions. Enhanced by intent-driven hard negative sampling, the model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across ROUGE, BERTScore, and human/LLM evaluations. Our qualitative analysis confirms QUIDS' effectiveness in generating accurate intent descriptions for exploratory search. Our work contributes to improving the interaction between users and search engines by providing feedback to the user in exploratory search settings.\footnote{Our code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/QID-6E00/}}

QUIDS: Query Intent Description for Exploratory Search via Dual Space Modeling

While virtually all existing work on Automated Essay Scoring (AES) models an essay as a word sequence, we put forward the novel view that an essay can be modeled as a graph and subsequently propose GAT-AES, a graph-attention network approach to AES. A key advantage of a graph-based approach to AES is that it allows us to easily capture the interactions among essay traits directly. Experimental results show that GAT-AES has achieved the best multi-trait scoring results to date on the ASAP++ dataset.

Graph-Based Multi-Trait Essay Scoring

Medical decision-making often involves integrating knowledge from multiple clinical specialties, typically achieved through multidisciplinary teams. Inspired by this collaborative process, recent work has leveraged large language models (LLMs) in multi-agent collaboration frameworks to emulate expert teamwork. While these approaches improve reasoning through agent interaction, they are limited by static, pre-assigned roles, which hinder adaptability and dynamic knowledge integration. To address these limitations, we propose KAMAC, a Knowledge-driven Adaptive Multi-Agent Collaboration framework that enables LLM agents to dynamically form and expand expert teams based on the evolving diagnostic context. KAMAC begins with one or more expert agents and then conducts a knowledge-driven discussion to identify and fill knowledge gaps by recruiting additional specialists as needed. This supports flexible, scalable collaboration in complex clinical scenarios, with decisions finalized through reviewing updated agent comments. Experiments on two real-world medical benchmarks demonstrate that KAMAC significantly outperforms both single-agent and advanced multi-agent methods, particularly in complex clinical scenarios (i.e., cancer prognosis) requiring dynamic, cross-specialty expertise.

A Knowledge-driven Adaptive Collaboration of LLMs for Enhancing Medical Decision-making

This work introduces Castle, the first framework for schema-only cascade update generation using large language models (LLMs). Despite recent advances in LLMs for Text2SQL code generation, existing approaches focus primarily on SELECT queries, neglecting the challenges of SQL update operations and their ripple effects. Traditional CASCADE UPDATE constraints are static and unsuitable for modern, denormalized databases, which demand dynamic, context-aware updates. Castle enables natural language instructions to trigger multi-column, causally consistent SQL UPDATE statements, without revealing table content to the model. By framing UPDATE SQL generation as a divide-and-conquer task with LLMs’ reasoning capacity, Castle can determine not only which columns must be directly updated, but also how those updates propagate through the schema, causing cascading updates — all via nested queries and substructures that ensure data confidentiality. We evaluate it on real-world causal update scenarios, demonstrating its ability to produce accurate SQL updates, and thereby highlighting the reasoning ability of LLMs in automated DBMS.

Castle: Causal Cascade Updates in Relational Databases with Large Language Models

Image Difference Captioning (IDC) aims to generate natural language descriptions that highlight subtle differences between two visually similar images. While recent advances leverage pre-trained vision-language models to align fine-grained visual differences with textual semantics, existing supervised approaches often overfit to dataset-specific language patterns and fail to capture accurate preferences on IDC, which often indicates fine-grained and context-aware distinctions. To address these limitations, we propose an adversarial direct preference optimization (ADPO) framework for IDC, which formulates IDC as a preference optimization problem under the Bradley-Terry-Luce model, directly aligning the captioning policy with pairwise difference preferences via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). To model more accurate and diverse IDC preferences, we introduce an adversarially trained hard negative retriever that selects counterfactual captions, This results in a minimax optimization problem, which we solve via policy-gradient reinforcement learning, enabling the policy and retriever to improve jointly. Experiments on benchmark IDC datasets show that our approach outperforms existing baselines, especially in generating fine-grained and accurate difference descriptions.

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