United States

Instruction following is a key capability for LLMs. However, recent studies have shown that LLMs often struggle with instructions containing multiple constraints (e.g. a request to create a social media post &quot;in a funny tone&quot; with &quot;no hashtag&quot;). Despite this, most evaluations focus solely on synthetic data. To address this, we introduce RealInstruct, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs&#39; ability to follow real-world multi-constrained instructions by leveraging queries real users asked AI assistants. We also investigate model-based evaluation as a cost-effective alternative to human annotation for this task. Our findings reveal that even the proprietary GPT-4 model fails to meet at least one constraint on over 21% of instructions, highlighting the limitations of state-of-the-art models. To address the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models, we propose the Decompose, Critique and Refine (DeCRIM) self-correction pipeline, which enhances LLMs&#39; ability to follow constraints. DeCRIM works by decomposing the original instruction into a list of constraints and using a Critic model to decide when and where the LLM&#39;s response needs refinement. Our results show that DeCRIM improves Mistral’s performance by 7.3% on RealInstruct and 8.0% on IFEval even with weak feedback. Moreover, we demonstrate that with strong feedback, open-source LLMs with DeCRIM can outperform GPT-4 on both benchmarks.

EMNLP 2024

LLM Self-Correction with DeCRIM: Decompose, Critique, and Refine for Enhanced Following of Instructions with Multiple Constraints

image text matching

cross-modal pretraining

cross-modal content generation

## 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." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

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

Instruction following is a key capability for LLMs. However, recent studies have shown that LLMs often struggle with instructions containing multiple constraints (e.g. a request to create a social media post "in a funny tone" with "no hashtag"). Despite this, most evaluations focus solely on synthetic data. To address this, we introduce RealInstruct, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow real-world multi-constrained instructions by leveraging queries real users asked AI assistants. We also investigate model-based evaluation as a cost-effective alternative to human annotation for this task. Our findings reveal that even the proprietary GPT-4 model fails to meet at least one constraint on over 21% of instructions, highlighting the limitations of state-of-the-art models. To address the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models, we propose the Decompose, Critique and Refine (DeCRIM) self-correction pipeline, which enhances LLMs' ability to follow constraints. DeCRIM works by decomposing the original instruction into a list of constraints and using a Critic model to decide when and where the LLM's response needs refinement. Our results show that DeCRIM improves Mistral’s performance by 7.3% on RealInstruct and 8.0% on IFEval even with weak feedback. Moreover, we demonstrate that with strong feedback, open-source LLMs with DeCRIM can outperform GPT-4 on both benchmarks.

poster

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Visual Programming has recently emerged as an alternative to end-to-end black-box visual reasoning models. This type of method leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the source code for an executable computer program that solves a given problem. This strategy has the advantage of offering an interpretable reasoning path and does not require finetuning a model with task-specific data. We propose PropTest, a general strategy that improves visual programming by further using an LLM to generate code that tests for visual properties in an initial round of proposed solutions. Our method generates tests for data-type consistency, output syntax, and semantic properties. PropTest achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art methods while using publicly available LLMs. This is demonstrated across different benchmarks on visual question answering and referring expression comprehension. Particularly, PropTest improves ViperGPT by obtaining 46.1% accuracy (+6.0%) on GQA using Llama3-8B and 59.5% (+8.1%) on RefCOCO+ using CodeLlama-34B.

PropTest: Automatic Property Testing for Improved Visual Programming

Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), despite being successful, exhibit limited generality and often fall short when compared to specialized models. Recently, LLM-based agents have been developed to address these challenges by selecting appropriate specialized models as tools based on user inputs. However, such advancements have not been extensively explored within the medical domain. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces the first agent explicitly designed for the medical field, named \textbf{M}ulti-modal \textbf{Med}ical \textbf{Agent} (MMedAgent). We curate an instruction-tuning dataset comprising six medical tools solving seven tasks across five modalities, enabling the agent to choose the most suitable tools for a given task. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MMedAgent achieves superior performance across a variety of medical tasks compared to state-of-the-art open-source methods and even the closed-source model, GPT-4o. Furthermore, MMedAgent exhibits efficiency in updating and integrating new medical tools.

MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent

Recent studies reveal that integrating new modalities into large language models (LLMs), such as vision-language models (VLMs), creates a new attack surface that bypasses existing safety training techniques like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). While further SFT and RLHF-based safety training can be conducted in multi-modal settings, collecting multi-modal training datasets poses a significant challenge. Inspired by the structural design of recent multi-modal models, where all input modalities are ultimately fused into the language space, we explore whether unlearning solely in the textual domain can be effective for cross-modality safety alignment. Our empirical evaluation across seven datasets demonstrates promising transferability --- textual unlearning in VLMs significantly reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) to less than 8\% and in some cases, even as low as nearly 2\% for both text-based and vision-text-based attacks, alongside preserving the utility. Moreover, our experiments show that unlearning with a multi-modal dataset offers no potential benefits but incurs significantly increased computational demands.

Can Textual Unlearning Solve Cross-Modality Safety Alignment?

Recently, mobile AI agents based on VLMs have been gaining increasing attention. These works typically utilize VLM as a foundation, fine-tuning it with instruction-based mobile datasets. However, these VLMs are typically pre-trained on general-domain data, which often results in a lack of fundamental capabilities specific to the mobile domain. Therefore, they may struggle to recognize specific UI elements and understand intra-UI fine-grained information. In addition, the current fine-tuning task focuses on interacting with the most relevant element for the given instruction. These fine-tuned VLMs may still ignore the relationships between UI pages, neglect the roles of elements in page transitions and lack inter-UI understanding. To address issues, we propose a VLM called MobileVLM, which includes two additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. We defined four UI-based pre-training tasks, enabling the model to better perceive fine-grained elements and capture page transition actions. To address the lack of mobile pre-training data, we built a large Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M from scratch, which contains 3 million UI pages, and real-world transition actions, forming a directed graph structure. Experimental results show MobileVLM excels on both our test set and public mobile benchmarks, outperforming existing VLMs.

MobileVLM: A Vision-Language Model for Better Intra- and Inter-UI Understanding

This paper presents a way of enhancing the reliability of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) in addressing hallucination, where the models generate cross-modal inconsistent responses. Without additional training, we propose Counterfactual Inception, a novel method that implants counterfactual thinking into LMMs using self-generated counterfactual keywords. Our method is grounded in the concept of counterfactual thinking, a cognitive process where human considers alternative realities, enabling more extensive context exploration. Bridging the human cognition mechanism into LMMs, we aim for the models to engage with and generate responses that span a wider contextual scene understanding, mitigating hallucinatory outputs. We further introduce Plausibility Verification Process (PVP), a simple yet robust keyword constraint that effectively filters out sub-optimal keywords to enable the consistent triggering of counterfactual thinking in the model responses. Comprehensive analyses across various LMMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, corroborate that counterfactual thinking significantly reduces hallucination and helps to broaden contextual understanding based on true visual clues.

What if...?: Thinking Counterfactual Keywords Helps to Mitigate Hallucination in Large Multi-modal Models

We introduce a generalization of classic information-theoretic measures of predictive uncertainty in online language processing, based on the simulation of expected continuations of incremental linguistic contexts. Our framework provides a formal definition of anticipatory and responsive measures, and it equips experimenters with the tools to define new, more expressive measures beyond standard next-symbol entropy and surprisal. While extracting these standard quantities from language models is convenient, we demonstrate that using Monte Carlo simulation to estimate alternative responsive and anticipatory measures pays off empirically: New special cases of our generalized formula exhibit enhanced predictive power compared to surprisal for human cloze completion probability as well as ELAN, LAN, and N400 amplitudes, and greater complementarity with surprisal in predicting reading times.

Generalized Measures of Anticipation and Responsivity in Online Language Processing

Path planning is a fundamental scientific problem in robotics and autonomous navigation, requiring the derivation of efficient routes from starting to destination points while avoiding obstacles. Traditional algorithms like A* and its variants are capable of ensuring path validity but suffer from significant computational and memory inefficiencies as the state space grows. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) excel in broader environmental analysis through contextual understanding, providing global insights into environments. However, they fall short in detailed spatial and temporal reasoning, often leading to invalid or inefficient routes. In this work, we propose LLM-A*, an new LLM based route planning method that synergistically combines the precise pathfinding capabilities of A* with the global reasoning capability of LLMs. This hybrid approach aims to enhance pathfinding efficiency in terms of time and space complexity while maintaining the integrity of path validity, especially in large-scale scenarios. By integrating the strengths of both methodologies, LLM-A* addresses the computational and memory limitations of conventional algorithms without compromising on the validity required for effective pathfinding.

LLM-A*: Large Language Model Enhanced Incremental Heuristic Search on Path Planning

Human evaluation of generated language through pairwise preference judgments is pervasive. However, under common scenarios, such as when generations from a model pair are very similar, or when stochastic decoding results in large variations in generations, it results in inconsistent preference ratings. We address these challenges by introducing a meta-evaluation measure, separability, which estimates how suitable a test instance is for pairwise preference evaluation. For a candidate test instance, separability samples multiple generations from a pair of models, and measures how distinguishable the two sets of generations are. Our experiments show that instances with high separability values yield more consistent preference ratings from both human- and auto-raters. Further, the distribution of separability allows insights into which test benchmarks are more valuable for comparing models. Finally, we incorporate separability into ELO ratings, accounting for how suitable each test instance might be for reliably ranking LLMs. Overall, separability has implications for consistent, efficient and robust preference evaluation of LLMs with both human- and auto-raters.

Compare without Despair: Reliable Preference Evaluation with Generation Separability

Reference-based metrics such as BLEU and BERTScore are widely used to evaluate question generation (QG). In this study, on QG benchmarks such as SQuAD and HotpotQA, we find that using human-written references cannot guarantee the effectiveness of the reference-based metrics. Most QG benchmarks have only one reference; we replicate the annotation process and collect another reference. A good metric is expected to grade a human-validated question no worse than generated questions. However, the results of reference-based metrics on our newly collected reference disproved the metrics themselves. We propose a reference-free metric consisted of multi-dimensional criteria such as naturalness, answerability, and complexity, utilizing large language models. These criteria are not constrained to the syntactic or semantic of a single reference question, and the metric does not require a diverse set of references. Experiments reveal that our metric accurately distinguishes between high-quality questions and flawed ones, and achieves state-of-the-art alignment with human judgment.

Reference-based Metrics Disprove Themselves in Question Generation

Data scarcity in low-resource languages can be addressed with word-to-word translations from labeled task data in high-resource languages using bilingual lexicons. However, bilingual lexicons often have limited lexical overlap with task data, which results in poor translation coverage and lexicon utilization. We propose lexicon-conditioned data generation LexC-Gen, a method that generates low-resource-language classification task data at scale. Specifically, LexC-Gen first uses high-resource-language words from bilingual lexicons to generate lexicon-compatible task data, and then it translates them into low-resource languages with bilingual lexicons via word translation. Across 17 extremely low-resource languages, LexC-Gen generated data is competitive with expert-translated gold data, and yields on average 5.6 and 8.9 points improvement over existing lexicon-based word translation methods on sentiment analysis and topic classification tasks respectively. Through ablation study, we show that conditioning on bilingual lexicons is the key component of LexC-Gen. LexC-Gen serves as a potential solution to close the performance gap between open-source multilingual models, such as BLOOMZ and Aya-101, and state-of-the-art commercial models like GPT-4o on low-resource-language tasks.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

PropTest: Automatic Property Testing for Improved Visual Programming

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