China

Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed rapid advancements, demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, a notable vulnerability persists: LLMs often uncritically accept flawed or contradictory premises, leading to inefficient reasoning and unreliable outputs. This emphasizes the significance of possessing the **Premise Critique Ability** for LLMs, defined as the capacity to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises. Most existing studies assess LLMs&#39; reasoning ability in ideal settings, largely ignoring their vulnerabilities when faced with flawed premises. Thus, we introduce the **Premise Critique Bench (PCBench)**, designed by incorporating four error types across three difficulty levels, paired with multi-faceted evaluation metrics. We conducted systematic evaluations of 15 representative LLMs, Our findings reveal: (1) Most models rely heavily on explicit prompts to detect errors, with limited autonomous critique; (2) Premise critique ability depends on question difficulty and error type, with direct contradictions being easier to be detected than complex or procedural errors; (3) Reasoning ability does not consistently correlate with the premise critique ability; (4) Flawed premises trigger overthinking in reasoning models, markedly lengthening responses due to repeated attempts at resolving conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LLMs’ proactive evaluation of input validity, positioning premise critique as a foundational capability for developing reliable, human-centric systems.

EMNLP 2025

Don’t Take the Premise for Granted: Evaluating the Premise Critique Ability of Large Language Models

evaluation methodologies

benchmarking

evaluation

## 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.

Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed rapid advancements, demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, a notable vulnerability persists: LLMs often uncritically accept flawed or contradictory premises, leading to inefficient reasoning and unreliable outputs. This emphasizes the significance of possessing the **Premise Critique Ability** for LLMs, defined as the capacity to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises. Most existing studies assess LLMs' reasoning ability in ideal settings, largely ignoring their vulnerabilities when faced with flawed premises. Thus, we introduce the **Premise Critique Bench (PCBench)**, designed by incorporating four error types across three difficulty levels, paired with multi-faceted evaluation metrics. We conducted systematic evaluations of 15 representative LLMs, Our findings reveal: (1) Most models rely heavily on explicit prompts to detect errors, with limited autonomous critique; (2) Premise critique ability depends on question difficulty and error type, with direct contradictions being easier to be detected than complex or procedural errors; (3) Reasoning ability does not consistently correlate with the premise critique ability; (4) Flawed premises trigger overthinking in reasoning models, markedly lengthening responses due to repeated attempts at resolving conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LLMs’ proactive evaluation of input validity, positioning premise critique as a foundational capability for developing reliable, human-centric systems.

poster

Logic reasoning in natural language has been recognized as an important measure of human intelligence for Large Language Models (LLMs). Popular benchmarks may entangle multiple reasoning skills and thus provide unfaithful evaluations on the logic reasoning skill. Meanwhile, existing logic reasoning benchmarks are limited in language diversity and their distributions are deviated from the distribution of an ideal logic reasoning benchmark, which may lead to biased evaluation results. This paper thereby proposes a new classical logic benchmark DivLogicEval, consisting of natural sentences composed of diverse statements in a counterintuitive way. To ensure a more reliable evaluation, we also introduce a new evaluation metric that mitigates the influence of bias and randomness inherent in LLMs. Through experiments, we demonstrate the extent to which logical reasoning is required to answer the questions in DivLogicEval and compare the performance of different popular LLMs in conducting logical reasoning.

DivLogicEval: A Framework for Benchmarking Logical Reasoning Evaluation in Large Language Models

Text-to-image synthesis has made remarkable progress, yet accurately interpreting complex and lengthy prompts remains challenging, often resulting in semantic inconsistencies and missing details. Existing solutions, such as fine-tuning, are model-specific and require training, while prior automatic prompt optimization (APO) approaches typically lack systematic error analysis and refinement strategies, resulting in limited reliability and effectiveness. Meanwhile, test-time scaling methods operate on fixed prompts and on noise or sample numbers, limiting their interpretability and adaptability. To solve these, we introduce a flexible and efficient test-time prompt optimization strategy that operates directly on the input text. We propose a plug-and-play multi-agent system called GenPilot, integrating error analysis, clustering-based adaptive exploration, fine-grained verification, and a memory module for iterative optimization. Our approach is model-agnostic, interpretable, and well-suited for handling long and complex prompts. Simultaneously, we summarize the common patterns of errors and the refinement strategy, offering more experience and encouraging further exploration. Experiments on DPG-bench and Geneval with improvements of up to 16.9% and 5.7% demonstrate the strong capability of our methods in enhancing the text and image consistency and structural coherence of generated images, revealing the effectiveness of our test-time prompt optimization strategy. The code is available at https://github.com/GenPilot-Any/GenPilot.

GenPilot: A Multi-Agent System for Test-Time Prompt Optimization in Image Generation

Despite their impressive performance in coarse-grained video understanding, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) still face challenges in fine-grained temporal grounding, including ineffective temporal modeling and inadequate timestamp representations. In this work, we introduce Grounded-VideoLLM, a novel Video-LLM designed to perceive and reason over specific video moments with fine-grained temporal precision. Our model features (1) a two-stream encoder that explicitly captures inter-frame relationships while preserving intra-frame visual details and (2) discrete temporal tokens enriched with structured time knowledge for timestamp representation. Besides, we propose a multi-stage training strategy tailored to such grounding-specific architecture. The model is initially trained on simple video-caption tasks and progressively introduced to complex video temporal grounding tasks, ensuring a smooth learning curve and temporal alignment. We further strengthen Grounded-VideoLLM’s temporal reasoning by constructing a VideoQA dataset with grounded information using an automated annotation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Grounded-VideoLLM not only surpasses existing models in fine-grained grounding tasks but also exhibits strong potential as a general video understanding assistant.

Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models

Dongba pictographic is the only pictographic script still in use in the world. Its pictorial ideographic features carry rich cultural and contextual information. However, due to the lack of relevant datasets, research on semantic understanding of Dongba hieroglyphs has progressed slowly. To this end, we constructed DongbaMIE - the first dataset focusing on multimodal information extraction of Dongba pictographs. The dataset consists of images of Dongba hieroglyphic characters and their corresponding semantic annotations in Chinese. It contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level high-quality text-image pairs. The annotations cover four semantic dimensions: object, action, relation and attribute. Systematic evaluation of mainstream multimodal large language models shows that the models are difficult to perform information extraction of Dongba hieroglyphs efficiently under zero-shot and few-shot learning. Although supervised fine-tuning can improve the performance, accurate extraction of complex semantics is still a great challenge at present.

DongbaMIE: A Multimodal Information Extraction Dataset for Evaluating Semantic Understanding of Dongba Pictograms

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations, generating factually incorrect or semantically irrelevant content in response to prompts. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can mitigate hallucinations by encouraging step-by-step reasoning, but its impact on hallucination detection remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we conduct a systematic empirical evaluation. We begin with a pilot experiment, revealing that CoT reasoning significantly affects the LLM's internal states and token probability distributions. Building on this, we evaluate the impact of various CoT prompting methods on mainstream hallucination detection methods across both instruction-tuned and reasoning-oriented LLMs. Specifically, we examine three key dimensions: changes in hallucination score distributions, variations in detection accuracy, and shifts in detection confidence. Our findings show that while CoT prompting helps reduce hallucination frequency, it also tends to obscure critical signals used for detection, impairing the effectiveness of various detection methods. Our study highlights an overlooked trade-off in the use of reasoning. Code is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/cot-hallu-detect .

Chain-of-Thought Prompting Obscures Hallucination Cues in Large Language Models: An Empirical Evaluation

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is essential for adapting large language models (LLMs), with low rank adaptation (LoRA) being the most popular approach. However, LoRA suffers from slow convergence, and some recent LoRA variants, such as PiSSA, primarily rely on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for initialization, leading to expensive computation. To mitigate these problems, we resort to Nyström method, which follows a three-matrix manipulation. Therefore, we first introduce StructuredLoRA (SLoRA), investigating to introduce a small intermediate matrix between the low-rank matrices (A) and (B). Secondly, we propose NyströmLoRA (NLoRA), which leverages Nyström-based initialization for SLoRA to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. Finally, we propose IntermediateTune (IntTune) to explore fine-tuning exclusively the intermediate matrix of NLoRA to furthermore boost LLMs' efficiency. We evaluate our methods on 5 natural language generation (NLG) tasks and 8 natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. On GSM8K, SLoRA and NLoRA achieve accuracies of 56.48% and 57.70%, surpassing LoRA by 33.52% and 36.41% with only 3.67M additional trainable parameters. IntTune boosts average NLG performance over LoRA by 7.45% while using only 1.25% of its parameters. These results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in enhancing model performance with minimal parameter overhead.

NLoRA: Nyström-Initiated Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models

Critique ability, a meta-cognitive capability of humans, presents significant challenges for LLMs to improve. While utilizing human annotation can enhance critique ability effectively, most recent works primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using critiques generated by a single LLM like GPT-4, which is more scalable and cost-effective. However, such model-generated critiques often suffer from inherent flaws due to the complexity of critique. Consequently, fine-tuning LLMs on these flawed critiques not only limits performance but also propagates errors into the learned model. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{MultiCritique}, a unified framework that leverages multi-agent feedback to improve critique ability in both the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) stages. In the SFT stage, MultiCritique aggregates high-quality multi-agent critiques through a fine-grained meta-critique mechanism. In the RL stage, preference critiques are constructed and refined by validating their contributions to revisions, thereby enhancing robustness of RL in improving critique ability. Based on MultiCritique, we construct SFT and RL datasets. Extensive experimental results on two benchmarks highlight the key benefits of our dataset, including superior quality, enhanced data efficiency, strong generalization on unseen tasks, and improvements in the general capability of LLMs. Notably, our fine-tuned 7B model significantly surpasses advanced 7B-13B models, approaching advanced 70B LLMs and GPT-4. Codes and datasets will be publicly available.

Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback

Existing key–value (KV) cache compression methods typically rely on heuristics, such as uniform cache allocation across layers or static eviction policies, however, they ignore the critical interplays among layer-specific feature patterns and task performance, which can lead to degraded generalization. In this paper, we propose EvolKV, an adaptive framework for layer-wise, task-driven KV cache compression that jointly optimizes the memory efficiency and task performance. By reformulating cache allocation as a multi-objective optimization problem, EvolKV leverages evolutionary search to dynamically configure layer budgets while directly maximizing downstream performance. Extensive experiments across eight tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms all baseline methods across a wide range of KV cache sizes on long-context tasks and surpasses heuristic baselines by up to 7 percentage points on GSM8K. Notably, EvolKV achieves comparable or superior performance to full KV cache methods on code completion while utilizing only 1.5% of the original budget, suggesting the untapped potential in learned compression strategies for KV cache budget allocation.

EvolKV: Evolutionary KV Cache Compression for LLM Inference

Lossless compression techniques are crucial in an era of rapidly growing data. Traditional universal compressors like gzip offer low computational overhead, high speed, and broad applicability across data distributions. However, they often lead to worse compression rates than modern neural compressors, which leverage large-scale training data to model data distributions more effectively. Despite their advantages, neural compressors struggle to generalize to unseen data. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that performs Test-Time Steering via a Weighted Product of Experts (wPoE). At inference, our method adaptively combines a universal compression model with a pretrained neural language model, ensuring the compression rate is at least as good as the best individual model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the performance of text compression without requiring fine-tuning. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with any autoregressive language model, providing a practical solution for enhancing text compression across diverse data distributions.

Test-Time Steering for Lossless Text Compression via Weighted Product of Experts

The evaluation of cross-lingual semantic search capabilities of models is often limited to existing datasets from tasks such as information retrieval and semantic textual similarity. To allow for domain-specific evaluation, we introduce Cross Lingual Semantic Discrimination (CLSD), a novel cross-lingual semantic search task that does not require a large evaluation corpus, only parallel sentences of the language pair of interest within the target domain. This task focuses on the ability of a model to cross-lingually rank the true parallel sentence higher than challenging distractors generated by a large language model. We create a case study of our introduced CLSD task for the language pair German-French in the news domain. Within this case study, we find that models that are also fine-tuned for retrieval tasks benefit from pivoting through English, while bitext mining models perform best directly cross-lingually. A fine-grained similarity analysis enabled by our distractor generation strategy indicate that different embedding models are sensitive to different types of perturbations.

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