GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
UnifiedVisual: A Framework for Constructing Unified Vision-Language Datasets
Authors: Pengyu Wang; Shaojun Zhou; Chenkun Tan; Xinghao Wang; Wei Huang; Zhen Ye; Zhaowei Li; Botian Jiang; Dong Zhang; Xipeng Qiu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Unified vision large language models (VLLMs) have recently achieved impressive advancements in both multimodal understanding and generation, powering applications such as visual question answering and text-guided image synthesis. However, progress in unified VLLMs remains constrained by the lack of datasets that fully exploit the synergistic potential between these two core abilities. Existing datasets typically address understanding and generation in isolation, thereby limiting the performance of unified VLLMs. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce a novel dataset construction framework, UnifiedVisual, and present UnifiedVisual-240K, a high-quality dataset meticulously designed to facilitate mutual enhancement between multimodal understanding and generation. UnifiedVisual-240K seamlessly integrates diverse visual and textual inputs and outputs, enabling comprehensive cross-modal reasoning and precise text-to-image alignment. Our dataset encompasses a wide spectrum of tasks and data sources, ensuring rich diversity and addressing key shortcomings of prior resources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on UnifiedVisual-240K consistently achieve strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Notably, these models exhibit significant mutual reinforcement between multimodal understanding and generation, further validating the effectiveness of our framework and dataset. We believe UnifiedVisual represents a new growth point for advancing unified VLLMs and unlocking their full potential.
The Pursuit of Empathy: Evaluating Small Language Models for PTSD Dialogue Support
Authors: Suhas Bn; Yash Mahajan; Dominik O. Mattioli; Andrew M. Sherrill; Rosa I. Arriaga; Christopher Wiese; Saeed Abdullah
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper investigates the capacity of small language models (0.5B-5B parameters) to generate empathetic responses for individuals with PTSD. We introduce Trauma-Informed Dialogue for Empathy (TIDE), a novel dataset comprising 10,000 two-turn conversations across 500 diverse, clinically-grounded PTSD personas (https://huggingface.co/datasets/yenopoya/TIDE). Using frontier model outputs as ground truth, we evaluate eight small LLMs in zero-shot settings and after fine-tuning. Fine-tuning enhances empathetic capabilities, improving cosine similarity and perceived empathy, although gains vary across emotional scenarios and smaller models exhibit a “knowledge transfer ceiling.” As expected, Claude Sonnet 3.5 consistently outperforms all models, but surprisingly, the smaller models often approach human-rated empathy levels. Demographic analyses showed that older adults favored responses that validated distress before offering support (p = .004), while graduate-educated users preferred emotionally layered replies in specific scenarios. Gender-based differences were minimal (p > 0.15), suggesting the feasibility of broadly empathetic model designs. This work offers insights into building resource-efficient, emotionally intelligent systems for mental health support.
Is Cognition Consistent with Perception? Assessing and Mitigating Multimodal Knowledge Conflicts in Document Understanding
Authors: Zirui Shao; Feiyu Gao; Zhaoqing Zhu; Chuwei Luo; Hangdi Xing; Zhi Yu; Qi Zheng; Ming Yan; Jiajun Bu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding, a rapidly growing research area with significant industrial demand. As a multimodal task, document understanding requires models to possess both perceptual and cognitive abilities. However, due to different types of annotation noise in training, current MLLMs often face conflicts between perception and cognition. Taking a document VQA task (cognition) as an example, an MLLM might generate answers that do not match the corresponding visual content identified by its OCR (perception). This conflict suggests that the MLLM might struggle to establish an intrinsic connection between the information it “sees” and what it “understands”. Such conflicts challenge the intuitive notion that cognition is consistent with perception, hindering the performance and explainability of MLLMs. In this paper, we define the conflicts between cognition and perception as Cognition and Perception (C&P) knowledge conflicts, a form of multimodal knowledge conflicts, and systematically assess them with a focus on document understanding. Our analysis reveals that even GPT-4o, a leading MLLM, achieves only 75.26% C&P consistency. To mitigate the C&P knowledge conflicts, we propose a novel method called Multimodal Knowledge Consistency Fine-tuning. Our method reduces C&P knowledge conflicts across all tested MLLMs and enhances their performance in both cognitive and perceptual tasks.
AutoCT: Automating Interpretable Clinical Trial Prediction with LLM Agents
Authors: Fengze Liu; Haoyu Wang; Joonhyuk Cho; Dan Roth; Andrew Lo
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Clinical trials are critical for advancing medical treatments but remain prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Accurate prediction of clinical trial outcomes can significantly reduce research and development costs and accelerate drug discovery. While recent deep learning models have shown promise by leveraging unstructured data, their black-box nature, lack of interpretability, and vulnerability to label leakage limit their practical use in high-stakes biomedical contexts. In this work, we propose AutoCT, a novel framework that combines the reasoning capabilities of large language models with the explainability of classical machine learning. AutoCT autonomously generates, evaluates, and refines tabular features based on public information without human input. Our method uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to iteratively optimize predictive performance. Experimental results show that AutoCT performs on par with or better than SOTA methods on clinical trial prediction tasks within only a limited number of self-refinement iterations, establishing a new paradigm for scalable, interpretable, and cost-efficient clinical trial prediction.
MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Long Documents
Authors: Kuicai Dong; Yujing Chang; Derrick Goh Xin Deik; Dexun Li; Ruiming Tang; Yong Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Multimodal document retrieval aims to identify and retrieve various forms of multimodal content, such as figures, tables, charts, and layout information from extensive documents. Despite its increasing popularity, there is a notable lack of a comprehensive and robust benchmark to effectively evaluate the performance of systems in such tasks. To address this gap, this work introduces a new benchmark, named MMDocIR, that encompasses two distinct tasks: page-level and layout-level retrieval. The former evaluates the performance of identifying the most relevant pages within a long document, while the later assesses the ability of detecting specific layouts, providing a more fine-grained measure than whole-page analysis. A layout refers to a variety of elements, including textual paragraphs, equations, figures, tables, or charts. The MMDocIR benchmark comprises a rich dataset featuring 1,685 questions annotated by experts and 173,843 questions with bootstrapped labels, making it a valuable resource in multimodal document retrieval for both training and evaluation. Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate that (i) visual retrievers significantly outperform their text counterparts, (ii) MMDocIR training set effectively enhances the performance of multimodal document retrieval and (iii) text retrievers leveraging VLM-text significantly outperforms retrievers relying on OCR-text.
Program of Thoughts for Financial Reasoning: Leveraging Dynamic In-Context Examples and Generative Retrieval
Authors: Subhendu Khatuya; Shashwat Naidu; Pawan Goyal; Niloy Ganguly
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Despite continuous advancements in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), numerical reasoning remains a challenging area. Techniques like chain-of-thought prompting, tree-of-thought prompting, and program-of-thought prompting guide LLMs through intermediate reasoning steps. Although in-context learning with few-shot prompting has improved performance, LLMs still lag behind state-of-the-art models on financial numerical reasoning datasets such as FinQA and ConvFinQA. In this work, we introduce FINDER, a novel two-step framework, to enhance LLM’s capabilities in financial numerical reasoning. The first step utilizes a generative retriever to extract relevant facts from unstructured data, including both text and tables. This is followed by context-aware Program of Thought prompting with dynamic selection of in-context examples. Our model FINDER achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on both the FinQA and ConvFinQA datasets, surpassing previous benchmarks with execution accuracy improvements of 5.98% and 4.05%, respectively.
Waste-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating VLLMs in Cluttered Environments
Authors: Muhammad Ali; Salman Khan
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for VisionLarge Language Models (VLLMs) capable ofperforming a wide range of visual understand-ing tasks. While LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance on standard naturalimages, their capabilities have not been thoroughly explored in cluttered datasets where there is complex environment having deformedshaped objects. In this work, we introduce a novel dataset specifically designed for waste classification in real-world scenarios, character-ized by complex environments and deformed shaped objects. Along with this dataset, we present an in-depth evaluation approach to rig-orously assess the robustness and accuracy of VLLMs. The introduced dataset and comprehensive analysis provide valuable insights intothe performance of VLLMs under challenging conditions. Our findings highlight the critical need for further advancements in VLLM’s ro-bustness to perform better in complex enviroments. The dataset and code for our experiments are available at https://github.com/aliman80/wastebench.
Demystifying Domain-adaptive Post-training for Financial LLMs
Authors: Zixuan Ke; Yifei Ming; Xuan-Phi Nguyen; Caiming Xiong; Shafiq Joty
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Domain-adaptive post-training of large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach for specialized domains such as medicine and finance. However, significant challenges remain in identifying optimal adaptation criteria and training strategies across varying data and model configurations. To address these challenges, we introduce FINDAP, a systematic and fine-grained investigation into domain-adaptive post-training of LLMs for the finance domain. Our approach consists of four key components: FinCap, which defines the core capabilities required for the target domain; FinRec, an effective training recipe that jointly optimizes continual pre-training and instruction-following, along with a novel preference data distillation method leveraging process signals from a generative reward model; FinTrain, a curated set of training datasets supporting FinRec; and FinEval, a comprehensive evaluation suite aligned with FinCap. The resulting model, Llama-Fin, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of financial tasks. Our analysis also highlights how each post-training stage contributes to distinct capabilities, uncovering specific challenges and effective solutions, providing valuable insights for domain adaptation of LLMs.
HICode: Hierarchical Inductive Coding with LLMs
Authors: Mian Zhong; Pristina Wang; Anjalie Field
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Despite numerous applications for fine-grained corpus analysis, researchers continue to rely on manual labeling, which does not scale, or statistical tools like topic modeling, which are difficult to control. We propose that LLMs have the potential to scale the nuanced analyses that researchers typically conduct manually to large text corpora. To this effect, inspired by qualitative research methods, we develop HICode, a two-part pipeline that first inductively generates labels directly from analysis data and then hierarchically clusters them to surface emergent themes. We validate this approach across three diverse datasets by measuring alignment with human-constructed themes and demonstrating its robustness through automated and human evaluations. Finally, we conduct a case study of litigation documents related to the ongoing opioid crisis in the U.S., revealing aggressive marketing strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies and demonstrating HICode’s potential for facilitating nuanced analyses in large-scale data.
Cacheback: Speculative Decoding With Nothing But Cache
Authors: Zhiyao Ma; In Gim; Lin Zhong
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We present Cacheback Decoding, a training-free and model-agnostic speculative decoding method that exploits the locality in language to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference.Cacheback leverages only Least Recently Used (LRU) cache tables of token n-grams to generate draft sequences.Cacheback achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable methods despite its minimalist design, and its simplicity allows easy integration into existing systems.Cacheback also shows potential for fast adaptation to new domains.
MA-DPR: Manifold-aware Distance Metrics for Dense Passage Retrieval
Authors: Yifan Liu; Qianfeng Wen; Mark Zhao; Jiazhou Liang; Scott Sanner
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) typically relies on Euclidean or cosine distance to measure query–passage relevance in embedding space, which is effective when embeddings lie on a linear manifold. However, our experiments across DPR benchmarks suggest that embeddings often lie on lower-dimensional, non-linear manifolds, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, where cosine and Euclidean distance fail to capture semantic similarity. To address this limitation, we propose a *manifold-aware* distance metric for DPR (**MA-DPR**) that models the intrinsic manifold structure of passages using a nearest-neighbor graph and measures query–passage distance based on their shortest path in this graph. We show that MA-DPR outperforms Euclidean and cosine distances by up to **26%** on OOD passage retrieval, with comparable in-distribution performance across various embedding models, while incurring a minimal increase in query inference time. Empirical evidence suggests that manifold-aware distance allows DPR to leverage context from related neighboring passages, making it effective even in the absence of direct semantic overlap. MA-DPR can be applied to a wide range of dense embedding and retrieval tasks, offering potential benefits across a wide spectrum of domains.
LLM-Guided Co-Training for Text Classification
Authors: Md Mezbaur Rahman; Cornelia Caragea
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel weighted co-training approach that is guided by Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, in our co-training approach, we use LLM labels on unlabeled data as target labels and co-train two encoder-only based networks that train each other over multiple iterations: first, all samples are forwarded through each network and historical estimates of each network’s confidence in the LLM label are recorded; second, a dynamic importance weight is derived for each sample according to each network’s belief (or confidence) in the quality of the LLM label for that sample; finally, the two networks exchange importance weights with each other—each network back-propagates all samples weighted with the importance weights coming from its peer network and updates its own parameters. By strategically utilizing LLM-generated guidance, our approach significantly outperforms conventional SSL methods, particularly in settings with abundant unlabeled data. Empirical results show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance on 4 out of 5 benchmark datasets and ranks first among 14 compared methods according to the Friedman test. Our results highlight a new direction in semi-supervised learning—where LLMs serve as knowledge amplifiers, enabling backbone co-training models to achieve SOTA performance efficiently.
LeanK: Learnable K Cache Channel Pruning for Efficient Decoding
Authors: Yike Zhang; Zhiyuan He; Huiqiang Jiang; Chengruidong Zhang; Yuqing Yang; Jianyong Wang; Lili Qiu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) enable long-context tasks but face efficiency challenges due to the growing key-value (KV) cache. We propose LeanK, a learning-based method that prunes unimportant key (K) cache channels by leveraging static channel sparsity. LeanK reduces GPU memory and accelerates decoding without sacrificing accuracy. Experiments demonstrate up to 70% K cache and 16%–18% V cache memory reduction, and 1.45× decoding speedup. We also provide insights into model channels and attention heads during long-context inference by analyzing the learned importance distribution. Our code is anonymously available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LeanK-7A87/README.md.
DELOC: Document Element Localizer
Authors: Hammad Ayyubi; Puneet Mathur; Mehrab Tanjim; Vlad I Morariu
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Editing documents and PDFs using natural language instructions is desirable for many reasons – ease of use, increasing accessibility to non-technical users, and for creativity. To do this automatically, a system needs to first understand the user’s intent and convert this to an executable plan or command, and then the system needs to identify or localize the elements that the user desires to edit. While there exist methods that can accomplish these tasks, a major bottleneck in these systems is the inability to ground the spatial edit location effectively. We address this gap through our proposed system, DELOC (Document Element LOCalizer). DELOC adapts the grounding capabilities of existing Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) from natural images to PDFs. This adaptation involves two novel contributions: 1) synthetically generating PDF-grounding instruction tuning data from partially annotated datasets; and 2) synthetic data cleaning via Code-NLI, an NLI-inspired process to clean data using generated Python code. The effectiveness of DELOC is apparent in the >3x zero-shot improvement it achieves over the next best Multimodal LLM, GPT-4o.
NL2Lean: Translating Natural Language into Lean 4 through Multi-Aspect Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yue Fang; Shaohan Huang; Xin Yu; Haizhen Huang; Zihan Zhang; Weiwei Deng; Furu Wei; Feng Sun; Qi Zhang; Zhi Jin
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Translating natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 has gained attention for its potential to automate formal proof development. Automated methods provide a scalable and cost-effective alternative to manual formalization, driving increasing interest in this task. However, existing LLMs mainly rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment, making it difficult to generate syntactically and logically sound formal proofs.To address this, we propose a reinforcement learning framework ReLean that enables LLMs to generate high-quality Lean 4 statements from natural language.We first fine-tune a LLaMA3-8B model on NL–Lean 4 data to obtain a base translator with basic translation ability. Then, we design a multi-aspect dense reward mechanism covering four key dimensions: semantic alignment, term-level alignment, global-level alignment, and compile-checking. Separate reward models are trained via preference modeling, and their normalized outputs are combined to guide optimization via PPO. Finally, a curriculum learning strategy based on multi-dimensional difficulty allows the model to learn progressively from simple to complex cases. Experiments on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks show that our method consistently outperforms baseline models. Further analysis on reward model and curriculum learning confirms their effectiveness in enhancing model performance.
A Multilingual, Culture-First Approach to Addressing Misgendering in LLM Applications
Authors: Sunayana Sitaram; Adrian de Wynter; Isobel McCrum; Qilong Gu; Si-Qing Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Misgendering is the act of referring to someone by a gender that does not match their chosen identity. It marginalizes and undermines a person’s sense of self, causing significant harm. English-based approaches have clear-cut approaches to avoiding misgendering, such as the use of the pronoun “they”. However, other languages pose unique challenges due to both grammatical and cultural constructs. In this work we develop methodologies to assess and mitigate misgendering across 42 languages and dialects using a participatory-design approach to design effective and appropriate guardrails across all languages. We test these guardrails in a standard LLM-based application (meeting transcript summarization), where both the data generation and the annotation steps followed a human-in-the-loop approach. We find that the proposed guardrails are very effective in reducing misgendering rates across all languages in the summaries generated, and without incurring loss of quality. Our human-in-the-loop approach demonstrates a method to feasibly scale inclusive and responsible AI-based solutions across multiple languages and cultures. We release the guardrails and synthetic dataset encompassing 42 languages, along with human and LLM-judge evaluations, to encourage further research on this subject.