China

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrates external knowledge with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance factual correctness and mitigate hallucination. However, dense retrievers often become the bottleneck of RAG systems due to their limited parameters compared to LLMs and their inability to perform step-by-step reasoning. While prompt-based iterative RAG attempts to address these limitations, it is constrained by human-designed workflows. To address these limitations, we propose textbfR3-RAG, which uses textbfReinforcement learning to make the LLM learn how to textbfReason and textbfRetrieve step by step, thus retrieving comprehensive external knowledge and leading to correct answers. R3-RAG is divided into two stages. We first use cold start to make the model learn the manner of iteratively interleaving reasoning and retrieval. Then we use reinforcement learning to further harness its ability to better explore the external retrieval environment. Specifically, we propose two rewards for R3-RAG: 1) answer correctness for outcome reward, which judges whether the trajectory leads to a correct answer; 2) relevance-based document verification for process reward, encouraging the model to retrieve documents that are relevant to the user question, through which we can let the model learn how to iteratively reason and retrieve relevant documents to get the correct answer. Experimental results show that R3-RAG significantly outperforms baselines and can transfer well to different retrievers.

EMNLP 2025

R3-RAG: Learning Step-by-Step Reasoning and Retrieval for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

multihop qa

retrieval-augmented generation

reinforcement learning

## 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

Large-scale models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR), but their high memory and computation demands pose significant challenges for deployment. To address these challenges, weight-only quantization is widely adopted in large-scale models, where weights dominate memory usage, as it enables efficient compression with minimal accuracy degradation compared to activation quantization. Accordingly, most prior quantization studies for ASR models have focused on weights and employed quantization-aware training (QAT) to restore accuracy. However, QAT incurs substantial additional training costs, posing clear limitations for practical application to large-scale models. Moreover, despite the varying quantization sensitivity across layers, mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) remains underexplored in ASR. In this paper, we propose GenPTQ, a mixed-precision post-training quantization method that optimizes the trade-off among accuracy, model size, and optimization cost by leveraging gradient-based sensitivity measurement and transforming the search space into a continuous domain for efficient numerical optimization. Applied to Whisper and Conformer models across multiple speech datasets, GenPTQ achieves up to 89.1% model size reduction (2.5-bit average precision) with only a 0.8% increase in WER, and completes optimization in just 15 seconds. These results demonstrate its effectiveness for low-resource ASR deployment.

GenPTQ: Green Post-Training Quantization for Large-Scale ASR Models with Mixed-Precision Bit Allocation

Function calling enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external systems by leveraging tools and APIs. When faced with multi-step tool usage, LLMs still struggle with tool selection, parameter generation, and tool-chain planning. Existing methods typically rely on manually designing task-specific demonstrations, or retrieving from a curated library. These approaches demand substantial expert effort and prompt engineering becomes increasingly complex and inefficient as tool diversity and task difficulty scale. To address these challenges, we propose a self-guided method, Stepwise ExperiencE Recall (SEER), which performs fine-grained, stepwise retrieval from a continually updated experience pool. Instead of relying on static or manually curated library, SEER incrementally augments the experience pool with past successful trajectories, enabling continuous expansion of the pool and improved model performance over time. Evaluated on the ToolQA benchmark, SEER achieves an average improvement of 6.1\% on easy and 4.7\% on hard questions. We further test SEER on τ-bench, which includes two real-world domains. Powered by Qwen2.5-7B and Qwen2.5-72B models, SEER demonstrates substantial accuracy gains of 7.44\% and 23.38\%, respectively.

Self-Guided Function Calling in Large Language Models via Stepwise Experience Recall

Question-Answering (QA) systems are vital for rapidly accessing and comprehending information in academic literature. However, some complex academic questions require information from multiple documents for resolution. Existing datasets are insufficient to support complex reasoning in such multi-document scenarios. To address this, we introduce a pipeline methodology for constructing a Multi-Document Academic QA (MDA-QA) dataset. By both detecting communities based on citation networks and leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate QA, we were able to generate QA pairs related to multi-document content automatically. We further develop an automated filtering mechanism to ensure multi-document reliability. Our resulting dataset consists of 6,804 QA pairs and serves as a benchmark for evaluating multi-document retrieval and QA systems. Our experimental results highlight that standard lexical and embedding-based retrieval methods struggle to locate all relevant documents, indicating a persistent gap in multi-document reasoning. We will release our dataset and source code for the community.

Towards Multi-Document Question Answering in Scientific Literature: Pipeline, Dataset, and Evaluation

Despite impressive results on curated benchmarks, the practical impact of large language models (LLMs) on research-level neural theorem proving and proof autoformalization is still limited. We introduce RLMEval, an evaluation suite for these tasks, focusing on research-level mathematics from real-world Lean formalization projects. RLMEval targets the evaluation of neural theorem proving and proof autoformalization on challenging research-level theorems by leveraging real Lean Blueprint formalization projects. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models on RLMEval, comprising 613 theorems from 6 Lean projects, reveals a significant gap: progress on existing benchmarks does not readily translate to these more realistic settings, with the best model achieving only a 10.3% pass rate. RLMEval provides a new, challenging benchmark designed to guide and accelerate progress in automated reasoning for formal mathematics.

RLMEval: Evaluating Research-Level Neural Theorem Proving

Virtual environments are essential to AI agent research. Existing environments for LLM agent research typically focus on either physical task solving or social simulation, with the former oversimplifying agent individuality and social dynamics, and the latter lacking physical grounding of social behaviors. We introduce IndoorWorld, a heterogeneous multi-agent environment that tightly integrates physical and social dynamics. By introducing novel challenges for LLM-driven agents in orchestrating social dynamics to influence physical environments and anchoring social interactions within world states, IndoorWorld opens up possibilities of LLM-based building occupant simulation for architectural design. We demonstrate the potential with a series of experiments within an office setting to examine the impact of multi-agent collaboration, resource competition, and spatial layout on agent behavior.

INDOORWORLD : Integrating Physical Task Solving and Social Simulation in A Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Environment

LLMs are highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, yet standard benchmarks typically report performance using a single prompt, raising concerns about the reliability of such evaluations. In this work, we argue for a stochastic method of moments evaluation over the space of meaning-preserving prompt perturbations. We introduce a formal definition of *reliable evaluation* that accounts for prompt sensitivity, and suggest ReliableEval - a method for estimating the number of prompt resamplings needed to obtain meaningful results. Using our framework, we stochastically evaluate five frontier LLMs and find that even top-performing models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.7-Sonnet exhibit substantial prompt sensitivity. Our approach is model-, task-, and metric-agnostic, offering a recipe for meaningful and robust LLM evaluation.

ReliableEval: A Recipe for Stochastic LLM Evaluation via Method of Moments

In recent years, multi-agent frameworks powered by large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly. Despite this progress, there is still a notable absence of benchmark datasets specifically tailored to evaluate their performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce Auto-SLURP, a benchmark dataset aimed at evaluating LLM-based multi-agent frameworks in the context of smart personal assistants. Auto-SLURP extends the original SLURP dataset—initially developed for natural language understanding tasks—by relabeling the data and integrating simulated servers and external services. This enhancement enables a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation pipeline, covering language understanding, task execution, and response generation. Our experiments demonstrate that Auto-SLURP presents a significant challenge for current state-of-the-art frameworks, highlighting that truly reliable and intelligent multi-agent personal assistants remain a work in progress.

Auto-SLURP: A Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating Multi-Agent Frameworks in Smart Personal Assistant

In the context of fact-checking, claims are often repeated across various platforms and in different languages, which can benefit from a process that reduces this redundancy. While retrieving previously fact-checked claims has been investigated as a solution, the growing number of unverified claims and expanding size of fact-checked databases calls for alternative, more efficient solutions. A promising solution is to group claims that discuss the same underlying facts into clusters to improve claim retrieval and validation. However, research on claim clustering is hindered by the lack of suitable datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce MultiClaimNet, a collection of three multilingual claim cluster datasets containing claims in 86 languages across diverse topics. Claim clusters are formed automatically from claim-matching pairs with limited manual intervention. We leverage two existing claim-matching datasets to form the smaller datasets within MultiClaimNet. To build the larger dataset, we propose and validate an approach involving retrieval of approximate nearest neighbors to form candidate claim pairs and an automated annotation of claim similarity using large language models. This larger dataset contains 85.3K fact-checked claims written in 78 languages. We further conduct extensive experiments using various clustering techniques and sentence embedding models to establish baseline performance. Our datasets and findings provide a strong foundation for scalable claim clustering, contributing to efficient fact-checking pipelines.

MultiClaimNet: A Massively Multilingual Dataset of Fact-Checked Claim Clusters

Large language models excel at many tasks but often incur high inference costs during deployment. To mitigate hallucination, many systems use a knowledge graph to enhance retrieval-augmented generation (KG-RAG). However, the large amount of retrieved knowledge contexts increase these inference costs further. A promising solution to balance performance and cost is LLM routing, which directs simple queries to smaller LLMs and complex ones to larger LLMs. However, no dedicated routing methods currently exist for RAG, and existing training-based routers face challenges scaling to this domain due to the need for extensive training data. We observe that the score distributions produced by the retrieval scorer strongly correlate with query difficulty. Based on this, we propose a novel, training-free routing framework—the first tailored to KG-RAG—that effectively balances performance and cost in a plug-and-play manner. Experiments show our method reduces calls to larger LLMs by up to 50% without sacrificing response quality, demonstrating its potential for efficient and scalable LLM deployment.

SkewRoute: Training-Free LLM Routing for Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Score Skewness of Retrieved Context

LLMs are used predominantly in synchronous communication, where a human user and a model communicate in alternating turns. In contrast, many real-world settings are inherently asynchronous. For example, in group chats, online team meetings, or social games, there is no inherent notion of turns; therefore, the decision of when to speak forms a crucial part of the participant's decision making. In this work, we develop an adaptive asynchronous LLM-agent which, in addition to determining what to say, also decides when to say it. To evaluate our agent, we collect a unique dataset of online Mafia games, including both human participants, as well as our asynchronous agent. Overall, our agent performs on par with human players, both in game performance, as well as in its ability to blend in with the other human players. Our analysis shows that the agent's behavior in deciding when to speak closely mirrors human patterns, although differences emerge in message content. We release all our data and code to support and encourage further research for more realistic asynchronous communication between LLM agents. This work paves the way for integration of LLMs into realistic human group settings, from assistance in team discussions to educational and professional environments where complex social dynamics must be navigated.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

GenPTQ: Green Post-Training Quantization for Large-Scale ASR Models with Mixed-Precision Bit Allocation

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