China

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains requiring moral understanding, yet their reasoning often remains shallow and misaligned with human reasoning. Unlike humans, whose moral reasoning integrates contextual trade-offs, value systems, and ethical theories, LLMs often rely on surface patterns, leading to biased decisions in morally and ethically complex scenarios. To address this gap, we present a value-grounded framework for evaluating and distilling structured moral reasoning in LLMs. We benchmark 12 open-source models across four moral datasets using a taxonomy of prompts grounded in value systems, ethical theories, and cognitive reasoning strategies. Our evaluation is guided by four questions: (1) Does reasoning improve LLM decision-making over direct prompting? (2) Which types of value/ethical frameworks most effectively guide LLM reasoning? (3) Which cognitive reasoning strategies lead to better moral performance? (4) Can small-sized LLMs acquire moral competence through distillation? We find that prompting with explicit moral structure consistently improves accuracy and coherence, with first-principles reasoning and Schwartz&#39;s + care-ethics scaffolds yielding the strongest gains. Furthermore, our supervised distillation approach transfers moral competence from large to small models without additional inference cost. Together, our results offer a scalable path toward interpretable and value-grounded models.

EMNLP 2025

Structured Moral Reasoning in Language Models: A Value-Grounded Evaluation Framework

and alignment in llms

human computer interaction

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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains requiring moral understanding, yet their reasoning often remains shallow and misaligned with human reasoning. Unlike humans, whose moral reasoning integrates contextual trade-offs, value systems, and ethical theories, LLMs often rely on surface patterns, leading to biased decisions in morally and ethically complex scenarios. To address this gap, we present a value-grounded framework for evaluating and distilling structured moral reasoning in LLMs. We benchmark 12 open-source models across four moral datasets using a taxonomy of prompts grounded in value systems, ethical theories, and cognitive reasoning strategies. Our evaluation is guided by four questions: (1) Does reasoning improve LLM decision-making over direct prompting? (2) Which types of value/ethical frameworks most effectively guide LLM reasoning? (3) Which cognitive reasoning strategies lead to better moral performance? (4) Can small-sized LLMs acquire moral competence through distillation? We find that prompting with explicit moral structure consistently improves accuracy and coherence, with first-principles reasoning and Schwartz's + care-ethics scaffolds yielding the strongest gains. Furthermore, our supervised distillation approach transfers moral competence from large to small models without additional inference cost. Together, our results offer a scalable path toward interpretable and value-grounded models.

poster

## 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*

[**Link to Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1johU5QqVVYO4RfH7QcIORr7qrVBdzdwC/view?usp=sharing)





<br>

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

We present Cacheback Decoding, a training-free model-agnostic speculative decoding method. Cacheback leverages only a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache of token n-grams to generate draft sequences. Despite its minimalist design, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable methods.

Cacheback: Speculative Decoding With Nothing But Cache

Large language model (LLM) reasoning can be improved by scaling test-time compute with aggregation, i.e., generating multiple samples and aggregating over them. While improving performance, this strategy often reaches a saturation point beyond which additional compute provides no return. Refinement offers an alternative by using model-generated feedback to improve answer quality. However, refinement faces three key challenges: (1) Excessive refinement: Uniformly refining all instances can cause over-correction and reduce overall performance. (2) Inability to localize and address errors: LLMs struggle to identify and correct their own mistakes. (3) Insufficient refinement: Stopping refinement too soon could leave errors unaddressed. To tackle these issues, we propose MAgICoRe, a framework for Multi-Agent Iteration for Coarse-to-fine Refinement. MAgICoRe mitigates excessive refinement by categorizing problems as easy or hard, solving easy problems with coarse-grained aggregation, and solving the hard ones with fine-grained multi-agent refinement. To better localize errors, we incorporate external step-wise reward model scores, and to ensure sufficient refinement, we iteratively refine the solutions using a multi-agent setup. We evaluate MAgICoRe on Llama-3-8B and GPT- 3.5 and show its effectiveness across seven reasoning datasets. One iteration of MAgICoRe beats Self-Consistency by 3.4%, Best-of-k by 3.2%, and Self-Refine by 4.0% even when these baselines use k = 120, and MAgICoRe uses less than 50% of the compute.

MAgICoRe: Multi-Agent, Iterative, Coarse-to-Fine Refinement for Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have improved significantly in their reasoning through extensive training on massive datasets. However, relying solely on additional data for improvement is becoming increasingly impractical, highlighting the need for models to autonomously enhance their reasoning without external supervision. In this paper, we propose textbfDebate, Train, Evolve (DTE), a novel ground truth-free training framework that uses multi-agent debate traces to evolve a single language model. We also introduce a new prompting strategy textbfReflect-Critique-Refine, to improve debate quality by explicitly instructing agents to critique and refine their reasoning. Extensive evaluations on textbffive reasoning benchmarks with textbfsix open-weight models show that our DTE framework achieve substantial improvements, with an average accuracy gain of textbf8.92\% on the challenging GSM-PLUS dataset. Furthermore, we observe strong cross-domain generalization, with an average accuracy gain of textbf5.8\% on all other benchmarks, suggesting that our method captures general reasoning capabilities.

DEBATE, TRAIN, EVOLVE: Self‑Evolution of Language Model Reasoning

Nonverbal vocalizations are an essential component of human communication, conveying rich information without linguistic content. However, the computational analysis of nonverbal vocalization faces significant challenges due to a lack of lexical anchors in the data, compounded by biased distributions of imbalanced multi-label data. While disentangled representation learning has shown promise in isolating specific speech features, its application to nonverbal speech remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce N-CORE, a novel supervised framework designed to disentangle representations in nonverbal vocalizations by leveraging N views of the audio sample to learn invariance to specific perturbed features. We find that N-CORE achieves competitive performance compared to the baseline methods when tested for emotion and speaker classification tasks on the VIVAE, ReCANVo, and ReCANVo-Balanced datasets. We further propose an emotion perturbation function for audio signals that preserves speaker information, and validate speech transformation functions on nonverbal vocalizations. Our work informs research directions on the application of paralinguistic speech, including privacy-preserving encoding, clinical diagnoses of atypical speech, and longitudinal analysis of communicative development.

N-CORE: N-View Consistency Regularization for Disentangled Representation Learning in Nonverbal Vocalizations

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models like Whisper, perform poorly on atypical speech, such as that produced by individuals with dysarthria. Past works for atypical speech have mostly investigated fully personalized (or idiosyncratic) models, but modeling strategies that can both generalize and and handle idiosyncracy could be more effective for capturing atypical speech. To investigate this, we compare four strategies: (a) *normative* models trained on typical speech (no personalization), (b) *idiosyncratic* models completely personalized to individuals, (c) *dyarthric-normative* models trained on other dysarthric speakers and (d) *dyarthric-idiosyncratic* models which combine strategies by first modeling normative patterns before adapting to individual speech. We find the dysarthric-idiosyncratic model performs better than idiosyncratic approach while requiring less than half as much personalized data (36.43 WER with 128 train size vs 36.99 with 256). Further, we found that tuning the speech encoder alone (as opposed to the LM decoder) yielded the best results reducing word error rate from 71% to 32% on average. Our findings highlight the value of leveraging both normative (cross-speaker) and idiosyncratic (speaker-specific) patterns to improve ASR for underrepresented speech populations.

Idiosyncratic Versus Normative Modeling of Atypical Speech Recognition: Dysarthric Case Studies

The resurgence of autonomous agents built using large language models (LLMs) to solve complex real-world tasks has brought increased focus on LLMs' fundamental ability of tool or function calling. At the core of these agents, an LLM must plan, execute, and respond using external tools, APIs, and custom functions. Research on tool calling has gathered momentum, but evaluation benchmarks and datasets representing the complexity of the tasks have lagged behind. In this work, we focus on one such complexity, nested sequencing, with the goal of extending existing benchmarks and evaluation. Specifically, we present NESTFUL, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e., sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. NESTFUL contains 1800+ nested sequences where all the function calls are executable. Experimental results on a variety of models show that the best-performing model (GPT-4o) achieves a full sequence match accuracy of 28% and a win-rate of 60%, necessitating a large scope for improvement in the nested sequencing aspect of function calling. Our analysis of these results provides possible future research directions for the community, in addition to a benchmark to track progress.

NESTFUL: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Nested Sequences of API Calls

We introduce **seqBench**, a parametrized benchmark for probing sequential reasoning limits in Large Language Models (LLMs) through precise, multi-dimensional control over several key complexity dimensions. **seqBench** allows systematic variation of (1) the logical depth, defined as the number of sequential actions required to solve the task; (2) the number of backtracking steps along the optimal path, quantifying how often the agent must revisit prior states to satisfy deferred preconditions (e.g., retrieving a key after encountering a locked door); and (3) the noise ratio, defined as the ratio between supporting and distracting facts about the environment. Our evaluations on state-of-the-art LLMs reveal a universal failure pattern: accuracy collapses exponentially beyond a model-specific logical depth. Unlike existing benchmarks, **seqBench**'s fine-grained control facilitates targeted analyses of these reasoning failures, illuminating universal scaling laws and statistical limits, as detailed in this paper alongside its generation methodology and evaluation metrics. We find that even top-performing models systematically fail on **seqBench**'s structured reasoning tasks despite minimal search complexity, underscoring key limitations in their commonsense reasoning capabilities. Designed for future evolution to keep pace with advancing models, the **seqBench** datasets are publicly released to spur deeper scientific inquiry into LLM reasoning, aiming to establish a clearer understanding of their true potential and current boundaries for robust real-world application.

seqBench: A Tunable Benchmark to Quantify Sequential Reasoning Limits of LLMs

Digitization is essential yet challenging for preserving historical heritage. This paper investigates the potential and limitations of large multimodal models (LMMs) in historical document digitization. Despite having advanced text recognition, LMMs today primarily focus on contemporary documents with modern layouts and high-resource languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce CHURRO, a large unified benchmark and dataset comprising over 150 historical corpora. CHURRO includes 100,471 pages spanning 22 centuries of textual heritage, covering handwritten and printed documents from 48 language clusters, historical language variants, and dead languages such as Latin and Sanskrit. The dataset features diverse layouts representative of real-world archival scenarios. We evaluate state-of-the-art LMMs and OCR systems on CHURRO and find that all models struggle with historical documents. Gemini 2.5 Pro is by far the best-performing model, yet it achieves only 78.7% and 67.5% normalized Levenshtein similarity on printed and handwritten documents, respectively. Importantly, fine-tuning a 3-billion-parameter multimodal model on CHURRO improves its performance substantially, by 12.4% (printed) and 25.4% (handwritten), attaining a performance of 75.9% (printed) and 66.7% (handwritten), respectively. These results highlight the untapped potential of targeted fine-tuning for historical document digitization.

CHURRO: Making History Readable with an Open-Weight Large Vision-Language Model for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost Historical Text Recognition

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, more than 3.4 million children experience speech disorders that require clinical intervention. The number of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) is roughly twenty times fewer than the number of affected children, highlighting a significant gap in children's care and a pressing need for technological support that improves the productivity of SLPs. State-of-the-art multimodal language models (MLMs) hold a promise for supporting SLPs, as recent advances have demonstrated their ability to understand human speech patterns from audio inputs. Despite their potential, the use of MLMs in supporting SLPs remains underexplored, largely due to a limited holistic understanding of their performance in high-stakes clinical settings. To address this gap, we collaborate with domain experts to develop a taxonomy of real-world use cases of MLMs in speech-language pathologies. Based on our taxonomy, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark that assesses the performance of LLMs on five core use cases, such as speech disorder diagnosis and symptom identification. For each use case, we manually label 1,000 data points to assess model performance. To further improve the performance of LLMs for SLPs, we fine-tune MLMs, enhancing performance across multiple tasks by more than 30\% over baseline models. We study the robustness and sensitivity of model performance under various settings, including background noise, speaker gender, and accent. Our evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art MLMs reveals that no single model consistently outperforms others across all tasks. Notably, we observe a performance disparity favoring male speakers and find that enabling reasoning may degrade performance. These findings highlight both the promise and limitations of current MLMs in speech-language pathology applications, underscoring the need for further research and targeted development.

The Sound of Syntax: Finetuning and Comprehensive Evaluation of Language Models for Speech Pathology

LLMs are increasingly applied in the legal domain in tasks such as summarizing legal texts and providing basic legal advice. Yet, their capacity to draft full judicial analyses in U.S. court opinions is still largely uncharted, such as generating entire judicial reasoning sections in U.S. court decisions, remain under-explored. Given the continued adoption of LLMs and the significance of law to society at large, measurement of LLM's legal reasoning capabilities is a pressing task. We propose CourtReasoner, a novel expert-annotated judicial reasoning benchmark for evaluating LLM agents' capabilities in complex legal reasoning. Sourcing U.S. court opinions, we construct benchmarks that measure the LLMs ability to construct goal-oriented legal reasoning. CourtReasoner measured the agent's ability to argue both ways in a legal dispute, rather than simple Q/A. Our results show that more than 60% of frontier model outputs contain invalid arguments and more than 53% of frontier model produced irrelevant citations when conducting complex legal reasoning. We also introduce a meta-evaluation benchmark to provide insights into the capabilities of LLMs as evaluators of legal reasoning. We will release our data, code and full annotation guidelines publicly for future research.

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Cacheback: Speculative Decoding With Nothing But Cache