China

Rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded information retrieval beyond purely textual inputs, enabling retrieval from complex real-world documents that combine text and visuals. However, most documents are private—either owned by individuals or confined within corporate silos—and current retrievers struggle when faced with unseen domains or languages. To address this gap, we introduce PREMIR, a simple yet effective framework that leverages the broad knowledge of an MLLM to generate cross-modal pre-questions (preQs) before retrieval. Unlike earlier multimodal retrievers that compare embeddings in a single vector space, PREMIR leverages preQs from multiple complementary modalities to expand the scope of matching to the token level. Experiments show that PREMIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-distribution benchmarks, including closed-domain and multilingual settings, outperforming strong baselines across all retrieval metrics. We confirm the contribution of each component through in-depth ablation studies, and qualitative analyses of the generated preQs further highlight the model’s robustness in real-world settings. The code will be publicly available.

EMNLP 2025

Zero-shot Multimodal Document Retrieval via Cross-modal Question Generation

document retrieval

multimodal

zero-shot

## 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.

poster

Large language models (LLMs) generate high-dimensional embeddings that capture rich semantic and syntactic information. However, high-dimensional embeddings exacerbate computational complexity and storage requirements, thereby hindering practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel training framework named Sequential Matryoshka Embedding Compression (SMEC). This framework introduces the Sequential Matryoshka Representation Learning(SMRL) method to mitigate gradient variance during training, the Adaptive Dimension Selection (ADS) module to reduce information degradation during dimension pruning, and the Selectable Cross-batch Memory (S-XBM) module to enhance unsupervised learning between high- and low-dimensional embeddings. Experiments on image, text, and multimodal datasets demonstrate that SMEC achieves significant dimensionality reduction while maintaining performance. For instance, on the BEIR dataset, our approach improves the performance of compressed LLM2Vec embeddings (256 dimensions) by 1.1 points and 2.7 points compared to the Matryoshka-Adaptor and Search-Adaptor models, respectively.

SMEC:Rethinking Matryoshka Representation Learning for Retrieval Embedding Compression

A multitude of interconnected risk events—ranging from regulatory changes to geopolitical tensions—can trigger ripple effects across firms. Identifying inter-firm risk relations is thus crucial for applications like portfolio management and investment strategy. Traditionally, such assessments rely on expert judgment and manual analysis, which are, however, subjective, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale. To address this, we propose a systematic method for extracting inter-firm risk relations using Form 10-K filings—authoritative, standardized financial documents—as our data source. Leveraging recent advances in natural language processing, our approach captures implicit and abstract risk connections through unsupervised fine-tuning based on chronological and lexical patterns in the filings. This enables the development of a domain-specific financial encoder with a deeper contextual understanding and introduces a quantitative risk relation score for transparency, interpretable analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines across multiple evaluation settings.

Financial Risk Relation Identification through Dual-view Adaptation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generalization and reasoning abilities, making them well-suited for complex decision-making tasks such as medical consultation (MC). However, existing LLM-based methods often fail to capture the dual nature of MC, which entails two distinct sub-tasks: symptom inquiry, a sequential decision-making process, and disease diagnosis, a classification problem. This mismatch often results in ineffective symptom inquiry and unreliable disease diagnosis. To address this, we propose textbfDDO, a novel LLM-based framework that performs textbfDual-textbfDecision textbfOptimization by decoupling and independently optimizing the the two sub-tasks through a collaborative multi-agent workflow. Experiments on three real-world MC datasets show that DDO consistently outperforms existing LLM-based approaches and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art generation-based methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in the MC task.

DDO: Dual-Decision Optimization for LLM-Based Medical Consultation via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Despite their strong performance, Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) models suffer from a lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel interpretability framework that leverages Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose previously uninterpretable dense embeddings from DPR models into distinct, interpretable latent concepts. We generate natural language descriptions for each latent concept, enabling human interpretations of both the dense embeddings and the query-document similarity scores of DPR models. We further introduce Concept-Level Sparse Retrieval (CL-SR), a retrieval framework that directly utilizes the extracted latent concepts as indexing units. CL-SR effectively combines the semantic expressiveness of dense embeddings with the transparency and efficiency of sparse representations. We show that CL-SR achieves high computational and storage efficiency while maintaining robust performance across vocabulary and semantic mismatches.

Decoding Dense Embeddings: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpreting and Discretizing Dense Retrieval

Mobile task automation is an emerging technology that leverages AI to automatically execute routine tasks by users' commands on mobile devices like Android, thus enhancing efficiency and productivity. While large language models (LLMs) excel at general mobile tasks through training on massive datasets, they struggle with app-specific workflows. To solve this problem, we designed UI Map, a structured representation of target app's UI information. We further propose a UI Map-guided LLM-based approach UICompass to automate mobile tasks. Specifically, UICompass first leverages static analysis and LLMs to automatically build UI Map from either source codes of apps or byte codes (i.e., APK packages). During task execution, UICompass mines the task-relevant information from UI Map to feed into the LLMs, generate a planned paths, and adaptively adjust the path based on the actual app state and action history. Experimental results demonstrate that UICompass achieves a 15.87% higher task executing success rate than SOTA approaches. Even when only APK is available, UICompass maintains superior performance, demonstrating its applicability to closed-source apps.

UICOMPASS: UI Map Guided Mobile Task Automation via Adaptive Action Generation

Conversational search systems require effective handling of context-dependent queries that often contain ambiguity, omission, and coreference. Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) addresses this challenge by transforming these queries into self-contained forms suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. However, existing CQR approaches suffer from two critical constraints: high dependency on costly external supervision from human annotations or large language models, and insufficient alignment between the rewriting model and downstream retrievers. We present ConvSearch-R1, the first self-driven framework that completely eliminates dependency on external rewrite supervision by leveraging reinforcement learning to optimize reformulation directly through retrieval signals. Our novel two-stage approach combines Self-Driven Policy Warm-Up to address the cold-start problem through retrieval-guided self-distillation, followed by Retrieval-Guided Reinforcement Learning with a specially designed rank-incentive reward shaping mechanism that addresses the sparsity issue in conventional retrieval metrics. Extensive experiments on TopiOCQA and QReCC datasets demonstrate that ConvSearch-R1 significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving over 10% improvement on the challenging TopiOCQA dataset while using smaller 3B parameter models without any external supervision.

ConvSearch-R1: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search with Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

We propose a compositional entity modeling framework for requirement extraction from online job advertisements (OJAs), representing complex, tree-like structures that connect atomic entities via typed relations. Based on this schema, we introduce GOJA, a manually annotated dataset of 500 German job ads that captures roles, tools, experience levels, attitudes, and their functional context. We report strong inter-annotator agreement and benchmark transformer models, demonstrating the feasibility of learning this structure. A focused case study on AI-related requirements illustrates the analytical value of our approach for labor market research.

Improving Online Job Advertisement Analysis via Compositional Entity Extraction

LLMs with in-context learning (ICL) obtain remarkable performance but are sensitive to the quality of ICL examples. Prior works on ICL example selection explored unsupervised heuristic methods and supervised LLM-based methods, but they typically focus on the selection of individual examples and ignore correlations among examples. Researchers use the determinantal point process (DPP) to model negative correlations among examples to select diverse examples. However, the DPP fails to model positive correlations among examples, while ICL still requires the positive correlations of examples to ensure the consistency of examples, which provides a clear instruction for LLMs. In this paper, we propose an ICL example selection method based on the nonsymmetric determinantal point process (NDPP) to capture positive and negative correlations, considering both the diversity and the relevance among ICL examples. Specifically, we optimize NDPP via kernel decomposition-based MLE to fit a constructed pseudo-labeled dataset, where we also propose a low-rank decomposition to reduce the computational cost. Further, we perform query-aware kernel adaptation on our NDPP to customize the input query, and we select examples via a MAP inference based on the adapted NDPP. Experimental results show our model outperforms strong baselines in ICL example selection.

Correlation-Aware Example Selection for In-Context Learning with Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes

Dense Retrieval Models (DRMs) estimate the semantic similarity between queries and documents based on their embeddings. Prior studies highlight the importance of embedding contextualization in enhancing retrieval performance. To this aim, existing approaches primarily leverage token-level information derived from query/document interactions. In this paper, we introduce a novel DRM that leverages query/document interactions based on the full embedding representations generated by a Transformer-based model. To enhance similarity estimation, our model integrates external linguistic information about the Cognitive Complexity of texts, enriching the contextualization of embeddings. We empirically evaluate our approach across seven datasets and three different IR tasks to assess the impact of Cognitive Complexity-aware query and document embeddings for contextualization in dense retrieval. Results show that our approach consistently outperforms standard fine-tuning techniques on lightweight bi-encoders (e.g., BERT-based) and traditional late-interaction models (i.e., ColBERT) across all benchmarks. On larger retrieval-optimized bi-encoders like Contriever, our model achieves comparable or higher performance on four of the considered evaluation benchmarks. Our findings suggest that Cognitive Complexity-aware embeddings enhance query and document representations, improving retrieval effectiveness in DRMs.

Leveraging Cognitive Complexity of Texts for Contextualization in Dense Retrieval

Table question answering (TQA) requires accurate retrieval and reasoning over tabular data. Existing approaches attempt to retrieve relevant content before leveraging large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over long tables. However, these methods often fail to accurately retrieve contextually relevant data, resulting in information loss. They may also suffer from excessive encoding overhead and hallucination issues. In this paper, we propose TALON, a multi-agent framework designed for question answering over long tables. The framework features a planning agent that iteratively invokes a tool agent to access and manipulate tabular data based on intermediate feedback, progressively collecting the information necessary for answer generation, while a critic agent ensures accuracy and efficiency in tool usage and planning. To comprehensively assess the effectiveness of our framework, we introduce two benchmarks derived from the WikiTableQuestion and BIRD-SQL datasets, containing tables ranging from 50 to over 10,000 rows. Experimental results demonstrate that TALON achieves average accuracy improvements of 7.5% and 12.0% across all language models, establishing a new state-of-the-art in long-table question answering. Our code is publicly available at:https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TALON-uouxy.

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