China

World models achieve remarkable success in predicting future states and planning in complex environments and Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as promising foundation to build general world models. However, their performances are usually constrained by the limited external knowledge to specific environments. Existing research attempts to enhance LLM-based world models through prompting or fine-tuning approaches, which are either requiring human knowledge or computationally extensive. Therefore, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented World Models (RAWM), a novel framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to efficiently integrate the external knowledge to LLM-based world models. Our main contributions are threefold: (i) We introduce a memory system and design an embedding model to retrieve relevant experiences as the in-context examples to improve the world model’s predictive accuracy. (ii) We develop a reinforcement learning (RL) training pipeline that fine-tunes a small MLP head on the pre-trained embedding model using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), further enhancing prediction performance. (iii) We conduct extensive experiments across three diverse environments, i.e., Game24, BlocksWorld, and BabyAI, demonstrating that RAWM consistently outperforms baseline models and exhibits strong generalizability. By leveraging the retrieval-augmented generation and the efficient RL training pipeline, RAWM dynamically utilizes relevant historical experiences and equips LLMs with environment-specific external knowledge without retraining, enabling more accurate and generalizable predictions.

EMNLP 2025

Efficient Integration of External Knowledge to LLM-based World Models via Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Reinforcement Learning

world model

retrieval-augmented generation

reinforcement learning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

poster

## 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*

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

Humour, as a complex and often esoteric language form, is derived from myriad aspects of life, whilst existing work on computational humour has focussed almost exclusively on short, self-contained pun-based jokes. In this work, we investigate whether the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to explain humour is dependent on the particular humour form. Specifically, we aim to compare models on simple pun-based jokes and more complex contemporary topical humour that requires knowledge of real-world entities and events. In doing so, we curate a dataset of 600 jokes, evenly split across 4 joke types, and manually write high-quality textual explanations, including heterographic and homographic puns, as well as contemporary internet humour and topical jokes where adequate understanding is reliant on reasoning beyond "common sense", rooted instead in world knowledge regarding news events, politics, pop culture, and more. Using this dataset, we compare the zero-shot abilities of a range of open- and closed-source LLMs to accurately and comprehensively explain jokes of different types, identifying key research gaps in the task of humour explanation. We find that none of the tested models are capable of reliably generating adequate explanations of all joke forms (inc. reasoning models), further highlighting the narrow focus of most works in computational humour processing on overly simple humour forms.

Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across natural language generation tasks, their ability to generate truly creative content—characterized by novelty, diversity, surprise, and quality—remains limited. Existing methods for enhancing LLM creativity often focus narrowly on diversity or specific tasks, failing to address creativity’s multifaceted nature in a generalizable way. In this work, we propose Creative Preference Optimization (CrPO), a novel alignment method that injects signals from multiple creativity dimensions into the preference optimization objective in a modular fashion. We train and evaluate creativity-augmented versions of several models using CrPO and MuCE, a new large-scale human preference dataset spanning over 200,000 human-generated responses and ratings from more than 30 psychological creativity assessments. Our models outperform strong baselines, including GPT-4o, on both automated and human evaluations, producing more novel, diverse, and surprising generations while maintaining high output quality. Additional evaluations on NoveltyBench further confirm the generalizability of our approach. Together, our results demonstrate that directly optimizing for creativity within preference frameworks is a promising direction for advancing the creative capabilities of LLMs without compromising output quality.

Creative Preference Optimization

Virtual Teaching Assistants (VTAs) can reduce the workload of teaching teams in Asynchronous Learning Environments (ALEs) where timely, personalized support is often limited. As VTA systems grow more capable, rigorous and pedagogically sound evaluation becomes essential. Existing assessments often rely on surface-level metrics and lack sufficient grounding in educational theory, making it difficult to meaningfully compare the pedagogical effectiveness of VTA systems. To bridge this gap, we propose a pedagogically-oriented evaluation framework that is rooted in learning sciences and tailored to asynchronous forum discussions, a common VTA deployment context in ALE. We construct classifiers using expert annotations of VTA responses on a diverse set of forum posts. We evaluate the effectiveness of our classifiers, identifying approaches that improve accuracy as well as challenges that hinder generalization. Our work establishes a foundation for theory-driven evaluation of VTA systems, paving the way for more pedagogically effective AI in education.

Bringing Pedagogy into Focus: Evaluating Virtual Teaching Assistants’ Question-Answering in Asynchronous Learning Environments

The field of explainable Automatic Fact-Checking (AFC) aims to enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of automated fact-verification systems by providing clear and comprehensible explanations. However, the effectiveness of these explanations depends on their actionability—the extent to which an AFC explanation pinpoints the error, supplies the correct fact, and backs it with sources. Despite actionability being critical for high-quality explanations, no prior research has proposed a method to evaluate it. This paper introduces FinGrAct, a fine-grained evaluation framework that can access the web and is designed to assess actionability in AFC explanations through well-defined criteria. We also introduce and a novel dataset to evaluate actionabilty in AFC explanations. FinGrAct surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) evaluators, achieving the highest Pearson and Kendall correlation with human judgments while demonstrating the lowest ego-centric bias, making it a more robust evaluation approach for actionability evaluation in AFC.

FinGrAct: A Framework for FINe-GRrained Evaluation of ACTionability in Explainable Automatic Fact-Checking

We cast nested named entity recognition (NNER) as a sequence labeling task by leveraging prior work that linearizes constituency structures, effectively reducing the complexity of this structured prediction problem to straightforward token classification. By combining these constituency linearizations with pretrained encoders, our method captures nested entities while performing exactly tagging actions. Our approach achieves competitive performance compared to less efficient systems, and it can be trained using any off-the-shelf sequence labeling library.

Nested Named Entity Recognition as Single-Pass Sequence Labeling

Image Difference Captioning (IDC) methods have advanced in highlighting subtle differences between similar images, but their performance is often constrained by limited training data. Using LMMs to describe changes in image pairs mitigates data limits but adds noise. These change descriptions are often coarse summaries, obscuring fine details and hindering noise detection. In this work, we improve IDC with a noise-robust approach at both data and model levels. We use LMMs with structured prompts to generate fine-grained change descriptions during data curation. We propose a Noise-Aware Modeling and Captioning (NAMC) model with three modules: Noise Identification and Masking (NIM) to reduce noisy correspondences, Masked Image Reconstruction (MIR) to correct over-masking errors, and Fine-grained Description Generation (FDG) to produce coherent change descriptions. Experiments on four IDC benchmarks show that NAMC, pre-trained on our large-scale data, outperforms streamlined architectures and achieves competitive performance with LLM-finetuned methods, offering better inference efficiency.

Learning to Describe Implicit Changes: Noise-robust Pre-training for Image Difference Captioning

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have opened a new era in programming with their impressive capabilities. However, recent research has revealed critical limitations in their ability to reason about runtime behavior and understand the actual functionality of programs, which poses significant challenges for their post-training and practical deployment. Specifically, Code LLMs encounter two principal issues: (1) a lack of proficiency in reasoning about program execution behavior, as they struggle to interpret what programs actually do during runtime, and (2) inconsistent and fragmented representation of semantic information, such as execution traces, across existing methods, which hinders their ability to generalize and reason effectively. These challenges underscore the necessity for more systematic approaches to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Code LLMs. To address these issues, we introduce a generic framework to support integrating semantic information~(e.g., execution trace) to code task-relevant prompts, and conduct a comprehensive study to explore the role of semantic information in enhancing the reasoning ability of Code LLMs accordingly. Specifically, we focus on investigating the usefulness of trace-based semantic information in boosting supervised fine-tuning(SFT) and post-phase inference of Code LLMs. The experimental results surprisingly disagree with previous works and demonstrate that semantic information has limited usefulness for SFT and test time scaling of Code LLM.

Do Code Semantics Help? A Comprehensive Study on Execution Trace-Based Information for Code Large Language Models

Cultural competence, defined as the ability to understand and adapt to multicultural contexts, is increasingly vital for large language models (LLMs) in global environments. While several cultural benchmarks exist to assess LLMs' cultural competence, current evaluations suffer from fragmented taxonomies, domain specificity, and heavy reliance on manual data annotation. To address these limitations, we introduce CultureSynth, a novel framework comprising (1) a comprehensive hierarchical multilingual cultural taxonomy covering 12 primary and 130 secondary topics, and (2) a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based methodology leveraging factual knowledge to synthesize culturally relevant question-answer pairs. The CultureSynth-7 synthetic benchmark contains 19,316 entries and 4,149 manually verified entries across 7 languages. Evaluation of 14 prevalent LLMs of different sizes reveals clear performance stratification led by GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-72B. The results demonstrate that a 3B-parameter threshold is necessary for achieving basic cultural competence, models display varying architectural biases in knowledge processing, and significant geographic disparities exist across models. We believe that CultureSynth offers a scalable framework for developing culturally aware AI systems while reducing reliance on manual annotation\footnote{Benchmark is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CultureSynth-D761/}.}.

CultureSynth: A Hierarchical Taxonomy-Guided and Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Cultural Question-Answer Synthesis

While graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance across diverse graph-related tasks, their high-dimensional hidden representations render them black boxes. In this work, we propose Graph Lingual Network (GLN), a GNN built on large language models (LLMs), with hidden representations in the form of human-readable text. Through careful prompt design, GLN incorporates not only the message passing module of GNNs but also advanced GNN techniques, including graph attention and initial residual connection. The comprehensibility of GLN’s hidden representations enables an intuitive analysis of how node representations change (1) across layers and (2) under advanced GNN techniques, shedding light on the inner workings of GNNs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GLN achieves strong zero-shot performance on node classification and link prediction, outperforming existing LLM-based baseline methods.

Hello, World!': Making GNNs Talk with LLMs

Commonsense visual–question answering often hinges on knowledge that is missing from the image or the question. Small vision-language models (sVLMs) such as ViLT, VisualBERT and FLAVA therefore lag behind their larger generative counterparts. To study the effect of careful commonsense knowledge integration on sVLMs, we present an end-to-end framework (NLKI) that (i) retrieves natural language facts, (ii) prompts an LLM to craft natural language explanations, and (iii) feeds both signals to sVLMs respectively across two commonsense VQA datasets (CRIC, AOKVQA) and a visual-entailment dataset (e-SNLI-VE). Facts retrieved using a fine-tuned ColBERTv2 and an object information-enriched prompt yield explanations that largely cut down hallucinations, while lifting the end-to-end answer accuracy by up to 7 pts (across 3 datasets), making FLAVA and other models in NLKI match or exceed medium-sized VLMs such as Qwen-2 VL-2B and SmolVLM-2B. As these benchmarks contain 10–25% label noise, additional finetuning using noise-robust losses (such as symmetric cross entropy and generalised cross entropy) gains another 2.5 (in CRIC, to 5.5 in AOKVQA).

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