Singapore

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been demonstrated to effectively mitigate the knowledge recency issue in Large Language Models (LLMs) while significantly reducing hallucinations. However, existing RAG methods exhibit insufficient capability in modeling reasoning paths for complex multi-hop reasoning tasks. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated success in enhancing model reasoning ability , token-level RL frameworks exhibit inherent limitations in maintaining coherent reasoning trajectories. This approach remains susceptible to the compounding accumulation of contextual errors during the retrieval process, ultimately resulting in erroneous output generation. To address this challenge, we propose Chain Progressive Search (CP-Search), a novel two-stage training framework designed to enhance the model&#39;s retrieval capability in complex scenarios. This framework models the entire retrieval process as a Retrieval-level Markov Decision Process , systematically optimizing the model&#39;s retrieval behavior at each step of the chained retrieval. Specifically, CP-Search first constructs a retrieval-cognitive behavioral dataset and employs Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to endow the model with cognitive behaviors for searching. More importantly, by introducing a dense progressive process reward in reinforcement learning training, CP-Search significantly improves the model&#39;s reasoning consistency and feedback correction ability in chained retrieval. Experiments conducted on multiple multi-hop datasets demonstrate that CP-Search significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

AAAI 2026

CP-Search: A Chain Progressive Search Training Framework Incentivizing the Cognitive Behaviors for Searching in LLMs

nlp: sentence-level semantics

nlp: generation

textual inference

## 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*

EMNLP 2025

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

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been demonstrated to effectively mitigate the knowledge recency issue in Large Language Models (LLMs) while significantly reducing hallucinations. However, existing RAG methods exhibit insufficient capability in modeling reasoning paths for complex multi-hop reasoning tasks. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated success in enhancing model reasoning ability , token-level RL frameworks exhibit inherent limitations in maintaining coherent reasoning trajectories. This approach remains susceptible to the compounding accumulation of contextual errors during the retrieval process, ultimately resulting in erroneous output generation. To address this challenge, we propose Chain Progressive Search (CP-Search), a novel two-stage training framework designed to enhance the model's retrieval capability in complex scenarios. This framework models the entire retrieval process as a Retrieval-level Markov Decision Process , systematically optimizing the model's retrieval behavior at each step of the chained retrieval. Specifically, CP-Search first constructs a retrieval-cognitive behavioral dataset and employs Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to endow the model with cognitive behaviors for searching. More importantly, by introducing a dense progressive process reward in reinforcement learning training, CP-Search significantly improves the model's reasoning consistency and feedback correction ability in chained retrieval. Experiments conducted on multiple multi-hop datasets demonstrate that CP-Search significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

poster

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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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.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled realistic user simulators for developing and evaluating recommender systems (RSs). However, existing LLM-based simulators for RSs face two major limitations: (1) static and single-step prompt-based inference that leads to inaccurate and incomplete user profile construction; (2) unrealistic and single-round recommendation-feedback interaction pattern that fails to capture real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose DGDPO (**D**iagnostic-**G**uided **D**ynamic **P**rofile **O**ptimization), a novel framework that constructs user profile through a dynamic and iterative optimization process to enhance the simulation fidelity. Specifically, DGDPO incorporates two core modules within each optimization loop: firstly, a specialized LLM-based diagnostic module, calibrated through our novel training strategy, accurately identifies specific defects in the user profile. Subsequently, a generalized LLM-based treatment module analyzes the diagnosed defect and generates targeted suggestions to refine the profile. Furthermore, unlike existing LLM-based user simulators that are limited to single-round interactions, we are the first to integrate DGDPO with sequential recommenders, enabling a bidirectional evolution where user profiles and recommendation strategies adapt to each other over multi-round interactions. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization for LLM-based User Simulators in Sequential Recommendation

Accurate jailbreak evaluation is critical for LLM red team testing and jailbreak research. Mainstream methods rely on binary classification (string matching, toxic text classifiers, and LLM-based methods), outputting only "yes/no" labels without quantifying harm severity. Emerged multi-dimensional frameworks (e.g., Security Violation, Relative Truthfulness and Informativeness) use unified evaluation standards across scenarios, leading to scenario-specific mismatches (e.g., "Relative Truthfulness" is irrelevant to "hate speech"), undermining evaluation accuracy. To address these, we propose SceneJailEval, with key contributions:
(1) A pioneering scenario-adaptive multi-dimensional framework for jailbreak evaluation, overcoming the critical "one-size-fits-all" limitation of existing multi-dimensional methods, and boasting robust extensibility to seamlessly adapt to customized or emerging scenarios. 
(2) A novel 14-scenario dataset featuring rich jailbreak variants and regional cases, addressing the long-standing gap in high-quality, comprehensive benchmarks for scenario-adaptive evaluation. 
(3) SceneJailEval delivers state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 0.917 on our full-scenario dataset (+6\% over SOTA) and 0.995 on JBB (+3\% over SOTA), breaking through the accuracy bottleneck of existing evaluation methods in heterogeneous scenarios and solidifying its superiority.

SceneJailEval: A Scenario-Adaptive Multi-Dimensional Framework for Jailbreak Evaluation

In multi-hop reasoning, multi-round retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods typically rely on LLM-generated content as the retrieval query. However, these approaches are inherently vulnerable to knowledge overshadowing—a phenomenon where critical information is overshadowed during generation. As a result, the LLM-generated content may be incomplete or inaccurate, leading to irrelevant retrieval and causing error accumulation during the iteration process. To address this challenge, we propose ActiShade, which detects and activates overshadowed knowledge to guide large language models(LLMs) in multi-hop reasoning. Specifically, ActiShade iteratively detects the overshadowed keyphrase in the given query, retrieves documents relevant to both the query and the overshadowed keyphrase, and generates a new query based on the retrieved documents to guide the next-round iteration. By supplementing the overshadowed knowledge during the formulation of next-round queries while minimizing the introduction of irrelevant noise, ActiShade reduces the error accumulation caused by knowledge overshadowing. Extensive experiments show that ActiShade outperforms existing methods across multiple datasets and LLMs.

ActiShade: Activating Overshadowed Knowledge to Guide Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models

Text representation plays a critical role in tasks like clustering, retrieval, and other downstream applications. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in harnessing their capabilities for this purpose. However, most of the LLMs are inherently causal and optimized for next-token prediction, making them suboptimal for producing holistic representations. To address this, recent studies introduced pretext tasks to adapt LLMs for text representation. Most of these tasks, however, rely on token-level prediction objectives, such as the masked next-token prediction (MNTP) used in LLM2Vec. In this work, we explore the untapped potential of context compression as a pretext task for unsupervised adaptation of LLMs. During compression pre-training, the model learns to generate compact memory tokens, which substitute the whole context for downstream $\textit{sequence prediction}$. Experiments demonstrate that a well-designed compression objective can significantly enhance LLM-based text representations, outperforming models trained with $\textit{token-level pretext tasks}$. Further improvements through contrastive learning produce a strong representation model (LLM2Comp) that outperforms contemporary LLM-based text encoders on a wide range of tasks while being more sample‑efficient, requiring significantly less training data.

Learning to Compress: Unlocking the Potential of Large Language Models for Text Representation

In this paper, we propose AMS-IO-Agent, a domain-specialized LLM-based agent for structure-aware analog and mixed-signal (AMS) input/output (I/O) generation, to address the challenges of manual and error-prone I/O subsystem design in AMS integrated circuits (ICs), and AMS-IO-Bench, to evaluate design results. 
I/O subsystems are critical for all IC chips, but their implementation remains largely manual due to intricate, project-specific requirements. 
AMS-IO-Agent integrates two core capabilities: 
(1) a structured domain knowledge base built from fragmented engineering practices, capturing reusable constraints and layout conventions; 
(2) design intent structuring, which converts ambiguous design intent into verifiable logic steps using JSON and Python as intermediate formats.
Furthermore, we introduce AMS-IO-Bench, a benchmark for wirebond-packaged AMS I/O rings, used to assess the correctness, adaptability, and efficiency of generated designs. 
Experimental results demonstrate that AMS-IO-Agent produces practical I/O designs while reducing manual workload and improving turnaround time. 
On AMS-IO-Bench, AMS-IO-Agent achieves over 70% DRC+LVS signoff pass rate and reduces design turnaround time from days to minutes, significantly outperforming baseline LLM approaches. Furthermore, we validated our system in real industrial tape-out projects, where agent-generated I/O rings were successfully fabricated and tested on silicon, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of our approach in commercial chip design flows.

AMS-IO-Bench and AMS-IO-Agent: Benchmarking and Structured Reasoning for Analog and Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuit Input/Output Design

This paper investigates the reliable parking space search problem in structured environments, with the objective of minimizing the linear combination of mean and standard deviation (mean-std) parking space search time. While canonical parking space search algorithms usually target the minimal expected search time, we argue that risk-averse users would like to trade expectation with its variance, leading to the reliable parking space search problem, which minimizes the mean-std search time. However, the non-additive nature of standard deviation makes the reliable parking space search problem difficult to solve with canonical search algorithms. To address the challenge, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, namely MS-PPO, which simultaneously estimates the mean and standard deviation of the current decision-making policy's search time, and performs policy optimization via clipped mean-std advantage function maximization. MS-PPO is compared with several baseline parking space search algorithms as well as canonical reinforcement learning algorithms in a range of representative parking lot networks, and achieves the best overall performance in terms of the mean-std parking space search time. We also validate the effectiveness of MS-PPO in a real parking garage by deploying it to an autonomous vehicle testbed.

MS-PPO: Mean Standard Deviation Proximal Policy Optimization for Reliable Parking Space Search in Structured Environments

Pairwise evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has become the dominant paradigm for benchmarking open-ended tasks, yet non-transitive preferences—where evaluators prefer A over B, B over C, but C over A—fundamentally undermine ranking reliability. We show that this critical issue stems largely from low-quality data that contains inherently ambiguous preference pairs. To address this challenge, we propose ELSPR, a principled graph-theoretic framework that models pairwise preferences as tournament graphs and systematically identifies problematic training data. ELSPR quantifies non-transitivity through strongly connected components (SCCs) analysis and measures overall preference clarity using a novel normalized directed graph structural entropy metric. Our filtering methodology selectively removes preference data that induce non-transitivity while preserving transitive preferences. Extensive experiments on the AlpacaEval benchmark demonstrate that models fine-tuned on ELSPR-filtered data achieve substantial improvements: a 13.8\% reduction in non-transitivity, a 0.088 decrease in structural entropy, and significantly enhanced discriminative power in real-world evaluation systems. Human validation confirms that discarded data exhibit dramatically lower inter-annotator agreement (34.4\% vs. 52.6\%) and model-human consistency (51.2\% vs. 80.6\%) compared to cleaned data. These findings establish ELSPR as an effective data self-purification approach for developing more robust, consistent, and human-aligned LLM evaluation systems.

ELSPR: Evaluator LLM Training Data Self-Purification on Non-Transitive Preferences via Tournament Graph Reconstruction

Advanced image generative models have led to concerns about malicious use, underscoring the necessity for generalizable detection methods. However, existing approaches tend to overfit to domain-specific forgery patterns, while overlooking complementary cues from different domains. Therefore, we introduce DySy-Det (Dynamic Synergy Detector), a novel framework that mines collaborative and robust forgery artifacts from multiple evidence domains. First, DySy-Det fine-tunes a CLIP vision transformer to extract high-level semantics for identifying conceptual inconsistencies, while generating attention maps that pinpoint key discriminative regions. Then, this semantic guidance, in the form of a mask, directs a targeted reconstruction process. By focusing on these salient areas, our approach effectively extracts localized reconstruction errors, thereby filtering out irrelevant background noise. Furthermore, inspired by the intrinsic generative mechanics of diffusion models, we introduce the concept of Reconstruction-Path Consistency (RPC), which quantifies the temporal stability of the denoising trajectory to expose dynamic generative artifacts. We capture this by computing noise alignment scores across multiple timesteps and encode them via a lightweight network. Extensive evaluations on GenImage and UniversalFakeDetect benchmarks demonstrate that DySy-Det outperforms the state-of-the-art detector by 6.14% and 1.57% in mean accuracy, respectively.

DySy-Det: A Synergistic Framework with Dynamic Reconstruction-Path Consistency for AI-Generated Image Detection

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been extensively employed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods for multi-hop reasoning tasks often lack global planning, increasing the risk of falling into local reasoning impasses. Insufficient exploitation of retrieved content and the neglect of latent clues fail to ensure the accuracy of reasoning outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose **R**ecursive **E**valuation and **A**daptive **P**lanning (REAP), whose core idea is to explicitly maintain structured sub-tasks and facts related to the current task through the Sub-task Planner (SP) and Fact Extractor (FE) modules. SP maintains a global perspective, guiding the overall reasoning direction and evaluating the task state based on the outcomes of FE, enabling dynamic optimization of the task-solving trajectory. FE performs fine-grained analysis over retrieved content to extract reliable answers and clues. These two modules incrementally enrich a logically coherent representation of global knowledge, enhancing the reliability and the traceability of the reasoning process. Furthermore, we propose a unified task paradigm design that enables effective multi-task fine-tuning, significantly enhancing SP's performance on complex, data-scarce tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public multi-hop datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating its effectiveness in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

REAP: Enhancing RAG with Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient are used to inform and motivate public policymaking, and are increasingly applied to digital platforms.
We analyze how measures fare in pseudonymous settings, as common to internet-based or blockchain-based platforms.
One key challenge that arises is the ability of actors to create multiple fake identities under fictitious false names, also known as ``Sybils.''
While some actors may do so to preserve their privacy, we show that this can inadvertently distort inequality metrics.
We prove a set of impossibilities for Sybil-proof measures that simultaneously satisfy subsets of the literature's canonical set of desired properties, and show that a wide range of commonly used measures are indeed sensitive to Sybil manipulations, including the famous Gini coefficient.
We present several classes of Sybil-proof measures, and, by fully characterizing them, we prove that the structure imposed restricts their ability to assess inequality at a fine-grained level.
In addition, we examine which popular inequality metrics are vulnerable to Sybil manipulations and the dynamics that result in the creation of Sybils, whether in pseudonymous settings or traditional ones.

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Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization for LLM-based User Simulators in Sequential Recommendation

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