China

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in clinical decision making, but current approaches struggle to localize and correct errors at specific steps of the reasoning process. This limitation is critical in medicine, where identifying and addressing reasoning errors is essential for accurate diagnosis and effective patient care. We introduce Med-PRM, a process reward modeling framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to verify each reasoning step against established medical knowledge bases. By verifying intermediate reasoning steps with evidence retrieved from clinical guidelines and literature, our model can precisely assess the reasoning quality in a fine-grained manner. Evaluations on five medical QA benchmarks and two open-ended diagnostic tasks demonstrate that Med-PRM achieves state-of-the-art performance. We improve the performance of the base model by 6.95% using Med-PRM. Moreover, we demonstrate the generality of our reward model by integrating it in a plug-and-play fashion with strong policy models such as Meerkat, achieving over 80% accuracy on MedQA for the first time using small-scale models with fewer than 10 billion parameters.

EMNLP 2025

Med-PRM: Medical Reasoning Models with Stepwise, Guideline-verified Process Rewards

healthcare applications

biomedical qa

chain-of-thought

retrieval-augmented generation

reasoning

clinical nlp

## 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.

technical paper

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by integrating visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. Current MLLMs typically rely on simple adapter architectures and pretraining approaches to bridge vision encoders with large language models (LLM), guided by image-level supervision. We identify this paradigm often leads to suboptimal alignment between modalities, significantly constraining the LLM's ability to properly interpret and reason with visual features particularly for smaller language models. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose Supervised Embedding Alignment (SEA), a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. SEA introduces minimal computational overhead while preserving language capabilities and substantially improving cross-modal understanding. Our comprehensive analyses reveal critical insights into the adapter's role in multimodal integration, and extensive experiments demonstrate that SEA consistently improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most (average performance gain of 7.61\% for Gemma-2B). This work establishes a foundation for developing more effective alignment strategies for future multimodal systems.

SEA: Supervised Embedding Alignment for Token-Level Visual-Textual Integration in MLLMs

Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks. However, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks remains limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets. We propose VisualWebInstruct, a novel approach that leverages search engines to create a diverse and high-quality dataset spanning multiple disciplines, including mathematics, physics, finance, and chemistry, etc. Starting with a meticulously selected set of 30,000 seed images, we employ Google Image Search to identify websites containing similar images. We collect and process HTML data from over 700K unique URLs. Through a pipeline of content extraction, filtering, and synthesis, we construct a dataset of approximately 900K question-answer (QA) pairs, with 40% consisting of visual QA pairs and the remaining comprising text-based QA pairs. Models fine-tuned on VisualWebInstruct demonstrate significant performance improvements: (1) fine-tuning on Llava-OV results in 10-20 absolute points improvement across benchmarks, and (2) fine-tuning from MAmmoTH-VL yields a 5 absolute points gain across benchmarks. Our best model, MAmmoTH-VL2, achieves the best known performance with SFT without RL within the 10B parameter class on MMMU-Pro (40.7), MathVerse (42.6), and DynaMath (55.7). These results highlight the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models for complex multimodal tasks.

VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search

To serve global users safely and productively, LLMs need culture-specific knowledge that might not be learned during pre-training. How do we find such knowledge that is (1) salient to in-group users, but (2) unknown to LLMs? The most common solutions are single-initiative: either researchers define challenging questions that users passively answer (traditional annotation), or users actively produce data that researchers structure as benchmarks (knowledge extraction). The process would benefit from mixed-initiative collaboration, where users guide the process to meaningfully reflect their cultures, and LLMs steer the process towards more challenging questions that meet the researcher's goals. We propose a mixed-initiative methodology called CultureCartography. Here, an LLM initializes annotation with questions for which it has low-confidence answers, making explicit both its prior knowledge and the gaps therein. This allows a human respondent to fill these gaps and steer the model towards salient topics through direct edits. We implement this methodology as a tool called CultureExplorer. Compared to a baseline where humans answer LLM-proposed questions, we find that CultureExplorer more effectively produces knowledge that leading models like DeepSeek R1 and GPT-4o are missing, even with web search. Fine-tuning on this data boosts the accuracy of Llama-3.1-8B by up to 19.2% on related culture benchmarks.

Culture Cartography: Mapping the Landscape of Cultural Knowledge

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate explicit reasoning traces alongside final answers, yet the extent to which these traces influence answer generation remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a three-stage investigation into the interplay between reasoning and answer generation in three distilled DeepSeek R1 models. First, through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that including explicit reasoning consistently improves answer quality across diverse domains. Second, attention analysis reveals that answer tokens attend substantially to reasoning tokens, with certain mid-layer attention heads closely tracking the reasoning trajectory, including self-reflective cues. Third, we apply mechanistic interventions using activation patching to assess the dependence of answer tokens on reasoning activations. Our results show that perturbations to key reasoning tokens can reliably alter the final answers, confirming a directional and functional flow of information from reasoning to answer. These findings deepen our understanding of how LRMs leverage reasoning tokens for answer generation, highlighting the functional role of intermediate reasoning in shaping model outputs.

From Reasoning to Answer: Empirical, Attention-Based and Mechanistic Insights into Distilled DeepSeek R1 Models

With thousand years of history, calligraphy serve as one of the representative symbols of Chinese culture. Increasing works try to digitize calligraphy by recognizing the context of calligraphy for better preservation and propagation. However, previous works stick to isolated single character recognition, not only requires unpractical manual splitting into characters, but also abandon the enriched context information that could be supplementary. To this end, we construct the pioneering end-to-end calligraphy recognition benchmark dataset, this dataset is challenging due to both the visual variations such as different writing styles and the textual understanding such as the domain shift in semantics. We further propose CalligraphicOCR (COCR) equipped with calligraphic image augmentation and action-based corrector targeted at the challenging root of this setting. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of our proposed model over cutting-edge baselines, underscoring the necessity of introducing this new setting, thereby facilitating a solid precondition for protecting and propagating the already scarce resources.

CalligraphicOCR for Chinese Calligraphy Recognition

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown immense potential in improving the performance of large-scale models by effectively incorporating structured relational information. However, current approaches face two key challenges: (1) achieving robust semantic alignment between graph representations and large models, and (2) ensuring interpretability in the generated outputs. To address these challenges, we propose ExGLM (Explainable Graph Language Model), a novel training framework designed to seamlessly integrate graph and language modalities while enhancing transparency. Our framework introduces two core components: (1) a graph-language synergistic alignment module, which aligns graph structures with language model to ensure semantic consistency across modalities; and (2) a judge-and-improve paradigm, which allows the language model to iteratively evaluate, refine, and prioritize responses with higher interpretability, thereby improving both performance and transparency. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets—ogbn-arxiv, Cora, and PubMed—demonstrate that ExGLM not only surpasses existing methods in efficiency but also generates outputs that are significantly more interpretable, effectively addressing the primary limitations of current approaches.

Judge and Improve: Towards a Better Reasoning of Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models

The multilingual capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention over the past decade. Assessing the accuracy with which LLMs provide answers in multilingual contexts is essential for determining their level of multilingual proficiency. Nevertheless, existing multilingual benchmarks generally reveal severe drawbacks, such as overly translated content (translationese), the absence of difficulty control, constrained diversity, and disciplinary imbalance, making the benchmarking process unreliable and showing low convincingness. To alleviate those shortcomings, we introduce NOVA-63 (Native Omni-lingual Versatile Assessments of 63 Disciplines), a comprehensive, difficult multilingual benchmark featuring 93,536 questions sourced from native speakers across 14 languages and 63 academic disciplines. Leveraging a robust pipeline that integrates LLM-assisted formatting, expert quality verification, and multi-level difficulty screening, NOVA-63 is balanced on disciplines with consistent difficulty standards while maintaining authentic linguistic elements. Extensive experimentation with current LLMs has shown significant insights into cross-lingual consistency among language families, and exposed notable disparities in models' capabilities across various disciplines. This work provides valuable benchmarking data for the future development of multilingual models. Furthermore, our findings underscore the importance of moving beyond overall scores and instead conducting fine-grained analyses of model performance.

NOVA-63: Native Omni-lingual Versatile Assessments of 63 Disciplines

The reasoning capabilities of large language reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have seen substantial advancements through deep thinking. However, these enhancements come with significant resource demands, underscoring the need for training effective small reasoning models. A critical challenge is that small models possess different reasoning capacities and cognitive trajectories compared with their larger counterparts. Hence, directly distilling chain-of-thought (CoT) results from large LRMs to smaller ones can sometimes be ineffective and often requires a substantial amount of annotated data. In this paper, we first introduce a novel Critique-Rethink-Verify (CRV) system, designed for training smaller yet powerful LRMs. Our CRV system consists of multiple LLM agents, each specializing in unique abilities: (i) critiquing the CoT qualities according to the cognitive capabilities of smaller models, (ii) rethinking and refining these CoTs based on the critiques, and (iii) verifying the correctness of the refined results. Based on the CRV system, we further propose the Cognitive Preference Optimization (CogPO) algorithm to continuously enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller models by aligning their reasoning processes with their cognitive capacities. Comprehensive evaluations on challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our CRV+CogPO framework, which outperforms other methods by a large margin.

Enhancing Reasoning Abilities of Small LLMs with Cognitive Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into users’ daily lives, leading to a growing demand for personalized outputs. Previous work focuses on leveraging a user's own history, overlooking inter-user differences that are crucial for effective personalization. While recent work has attempted to model such differences, the reliance on language-based prompts often hampers the effective extraction of meaningful distinctions. To address these issues, we propose Difference-aware Embedding-based Personalization (DEP), a framework that models inter-user differences in the latent space instead of relying on language prompts. DEP constructs soft prompts by contrasting a user’s embedding with those of peers who engaged with similar content, highlighting relative behavioral signals. A sparse autoencoder then filters and compresses both user-specific and difference-aware embeddings, preserving only task-relevant features before injecting them into a frozen LLM. Experiments on personalized review generation show that \ours consistently outperforms baseline methods across multiple metrics. Our code is available on an \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DEP-A8A0}{Anonymous GitHub}.

Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization

The rapid spread of information via social media has made text-based fake news detection critically important due to its societal impact. This paper presents a novel detection method called Dynamic Representation and Ensemble Selection (DRES) for identifying fake news based solely on text. DRES leverages instance hardness measures to estimate the classification difficulty for each news article across multiple textual feature representations. By dynamically selecting the textual representation and the most competent ensemble of classifiers for each instance, DRES significantly enhances prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments show that DRES achieves notable improvements over state-of-the-art methods, confirming the effectiveness of representation selection based on instance hardness and dynamic ensemble selection in boosting performance. Codes and data are available at: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FakeNewsDetection_DRES-FAA2}.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

SEA: Supervised Embedding Alignment for Token-Level Visual-Textual Integration in MLLMs

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