China

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. However, tabular data inherently exhibits sparse feature-level dependencies, where many feature interactions are structurally insignificant. This creates a fundamental mismatch as LLMs&#39; self-attention mechanism inevitably distributes focus across all pairs, diluting attention on critical relationships, particularly in datasets with complex dependencies or semantically ambiguous features. To address this limitation, we propose GraDe (Graph-Guided Dependency Learning), a novel method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs&#39; attention mechanism. GraDe employs a lightweight dynamic graph learning module guided by externally extracted functional dependencies, prioritizing key feature interactions while suppressing irrelevant ones. Our experiments across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that GraDe outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. Our method is minimally intrusive yet effective, offering a practical solution for structure-aware tabular data modeling with LLMs.

EMNLP 2025

Not All Features Deserve Attention: Graph-Guided Dependency Learning for Tabular Data Generation with Language Models

generative models

graph-based methods

data augmentation

## 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 shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. However, tabular data inherently exhibits sparse feature-level dependencies, where many feature interactions are structurally insignificant. This creates a fundamental mismatch as LLMs' self-attention mechanism inevitably distributes focus across all pairs, diluting attention on critical relationships, particularly in datasets with complex dependencies or semantically ambiguous features. To address this limitation, we propose GraDe (Graph-Guided Dependency Learning), a novel method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs' attention mechanism. GraDe employs a lightweight dynamic graph learning module guided by externally extracted functional dependencies, prioritizing key feature interactions while suppressing irrelevant ones. Our experiments across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that GraDe outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. Our method is minimally intrusive yet effective, offering a practical solution for structure-aware tabular data modeling with LLMs.

poster

Multi-label classification (MLC) faces persistent challenges from label imbalance, spurious correlations, and distribution shifts, especially in rare label prediction. We propose the Causal Cooperative Game (CCG) framework, which models MLC as a multi-player cooperative process. CCG integrates explicit causal discovery via Neural Structural Equation Models, a counterfactual curiosity reward to guide robust feature learning, and a causal invariance loss to ensure generalization across environments, along with targeted rare label enhancement. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CCG significantly improves rare label prediction and overall robustness compared to strong baselines. Ablation and qualitative analyses further validate the effectiveness and interpretability of each component. Our work highlights the promise of combining causal inference and cooperative game theory for more robust and interpretable multi-label learning.

CCG: Rare-Label Prediction via Neural SEM–Driven Causal Game

While text-based emotion recognition methods have achieved notable success, real-world dialogue systems often demand a more nuanced emotional understanding than any single modality can offer. Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) has thus emerged as a crucial direction for enhancing the naturalness and emotional understanding of human-computer interaction. Its goal is to accurately recognize emotions by integrating information from various modalities such as text, speech, and visual signals. This survey offers a systematic overview of MERC, including its motivations, core tasks, representative methods, and evaluation strategies. We further examine recent trends, highlight key challenges, and outline future directions. As interest in emotionally intelligent systems grows, this survey provides timely guidance for advancing MERC research.

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations: A Survey of Methods, Trends, Challenges and Prospects

This paper introduces OSC (Orchestrating Cognitive Synergy), a knowledge-aware adaptive collaboration framework designed to enhance cognitive synergy in multi-agent systems with large language models. While prior work has advanced agent selection and result aggregation, efficient linguistic interactions for deep collaboration among expert agents remain a critical bottleneck. OSC addresses this gap as a pivotal intermediate layer between selection and aggregation, introducing Collaborator Knowledge Models (CKM) to enable each agent to dynamically perceive its collaborators' cognitive states. Through real-time cognitive gap analysis, agents adaptively adjust communication behaviors, including content focus, detail level, and expression style, using learned strategies. Experiments on complex reasoning and problem-solving benchmarks demonstrate that OSC significantly improves task performance and communication efficiency, transforming "parallel-working individuals'' into a "deeply collaborative cognitive team.'' This framework not only optimizes multi-agent collaboration but also offers new insights into LLM agent interaction behaviors.

OSC: Cognitive Orchestration through Dynamic Knowledge Alignment in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration

This paper identifies that misinterpreting the context can be a significant issue during the reasoning process of large language models, spanning from smaller models like Llama3.2-3B-Instruct to cutting-edge ones like DeepSeek-R1. We introduce a novel, post-training approach called **Stick to the Facts (SIFT)** to tackle this. SIFT leverages increasing inference-time compute to ground LLM reasoning in contexts. At the core of SIFT lies the Sticker, which is generated by the model itself to explicitly emphasize the key information within the context. Given the Sticker, SIFT generates two predictions—one from the Sticker alone and one from the query augmented with the Sticker. If they differ, the Sticker is sequentially refined via forward optimization (to better align the extracted facts with the query) and inverse generation (to conform with the model’s inherent tendencies) for more faithful reasoning outcomes. Studies across diverse models (from 3B to 100B+) and benchmarks (e.g., MATH, AIME) reveal consistent performance improvements. Notably, SIFT improves the pass@1 accuracy of DeepSeek-R1 on AIME2024 from 78.33% to **85.67%** and that on AIME2025 from 69.8% to **77.33%**. Code will be public after acceptance.

SIFT: Grounding LLM Reasoning in Contexts via Stickers

Unlearning aims to remove copyrighted, sensitive, or private content from large language models (LLMs) without a full retraining. In this work, we develop a multi-task unlearning benchmark LUME that features three tasks: (1) unlearn synthetically generated creative short novels, (2) unlearn synthetic biographies with sensitive information, and (3) unlearn a collection of public biographies. We further release two fine-tuned LLMs of 1B and 7B parameter sizes as the target models. We conduct detailed evaluations of several recently-proposed algorithms and present results on carefully crafted metrics to understand their behavior and limitations.

LUME: LLM Unlearning with Multitask Evaluations

We investigate the effect of problem presentation on LLMs' ability to solve optimization problems. We introduce the dataset of Everyday Hard Optimization Problems (EHOP), a collection of NP-hard problems expressed in natural language. EHOP includes problem formulations that could be found in computer science textbooks (e.g., graph coloring), versions that are dressed up as problems that could arise in real life (e.g., party planning), and variants with inverted rules. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs, across multiple prompting strategies, systematically solve textbook problems more accurately than their real-life and inverted counterparts. While reasoning models are more robust, they nonetheless show high variance across problem presentations, suggesting they lack a truly robust reasoning mechanism. We argue that this constitutes evidence that LLMs are still heavily dependent on what was seen in training, and struggle to generalize to novel problems.

A Knapsack by Any Other Name: Presentation impacts LLM performance on NP-hard problems

Persona agents, which are LLM agents conditioned to act according to an assigned persona, enable contextually rich and user aligned interactions across domains like education and healthcare. However, evaluating how faithfully these agents adhere to their personas remains a significant challenge, particularly in free-form settings that demand consistency across diverse, persona-relevant environments. We introduce PersonaGym, the first dynamic evaluation framework for persona agents, and PersonaScore, a human-aligned automatic metric grounded in decision theory that enables comprehensive, large-scale evaluation. Our evaluation of 10 leading LLMs across 200 personas and 10,000 questions reveals significant advancement opportunities. For example, GPT-4.1 had the exact same PersonaScore as LLaMA-3-8b despite being a more recent and advanced closed source model. Importantly, increased model size and complexity do not necessarily enhance persona agent capabilities, underscoring the need for algorithmic and architectural innovation toward faithful, performant persona agents. Code available at: anonymous.4open.science/r/PersonaGym-014A

PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs

We propose Rotate, Clip, and Partition (RCP), a Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) approach that first realizes extreme compression of LLMs with W2A4KV4 (2-bit weight, 4-bit activation, and 4-bit KV-cache) configuration. RCP integrates recent rotation techniques with a novel non-uniform weight quantizer design by theoretically and empirically analyzing the impact of rotation on the non-uniformity of weight distribution. Our weight quantizer, Learnable Direct Partitioning (LDP), introduces learnable parameters to directly learn non-uniform intervals jointly with LLM weights. We also present a GPU kernel supporting GEMV on non-uniform W2A4 as proof of concept. Experiments show that RCP can compress LLaMA-2-7B to W2A4KV4 with a loss of only 2.84 WikiText2 PPL and 5.29 times reduced memory footprint. Furthermore, RCP can quantize challenging mobile-targeted LLaMA-3.2 models and domain-specific WizardCoder-7B and MetaMath-7B with no critical problems such as convergence failure and repetition. Code will be made available at \url{blind_review}.

Rotate, Clip, and Partition: Towards W2A4KV4 Quantization by Integrating Rotation and Learnable Non-uniform Quantizer

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to address queries beyond their internal knowledge by integrating domain knowledge in specialized corpus, which necessitates the generation of benchmarks on specific corpus to evaluate RAG systems. However, existing automated generation methods exhibit Weak Applicability and Weak Scalability. Weak Applicability refers to the reliance on metadata from specific corpora for query generation, constraining applicability to other corpora. Weak Scalability is characterized by fixed query content after generation, unable to dynamically increase difficulty, limiting scalability of the query. To overcome these issues, we propose AutoEvolve, an applicable approach for dynamically evolving queries to construct scalable RAG benchmarks. Our approach is grounded in three key innovations: (i) a corpus-agnostic method for constructing the universal entity-document graph; (ii) a suite of evolution operations designed to dynamically update queries; and (iii) a difficulty-guided metric that directs query evolution process. Through experiments on three generated benchmarks, we demonstrate that AutoEvolve evolves queries that are significantly more challenging, paving the way for more applicable and scalable RAG evaluations.

AutoEvolve: Automatically Evolving Queries for Applicable and Scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmarking

Knowledge editing aims to update LLMs with new information without costly retraining. However, consistently reflecting these updates in complex multi-hop QA, which demands reasoning over interconnected facts, is challenging. Many existing methods overlook the interplay with pre-existing knowledge, leading to inconsistent edit propagation. To overcome this, we introduce StepKE (Stepwise Knowledge Editing for Multi-hop QA), a novel framework for robustly integrating edited and existing knowledge for coherent multi-hop reasoning. StepKE uniquely decomposes multi-hop questions into sequential single-hop sub-questions, retrieving relevant facts (both edited and pre-existing) from an external knowledge graph for each step. Crucially, it employs context-aware prompting with prior reasoning history and an LTE-inspired fine-tuning for precise edit propagation. This systematic integration enables effective stepwise reasoning. Experiments show StepKE generates significantly more accurate and consistent responses than baselines, showcasing strong knowledge editing and integration in multi-hop QA.

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CCG: Rare-Label Prediction via Neural SEM–Driven Causal Game

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