Papers by Bing Yang

Improving In-Context Learning with Prediction Feedback for Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing work on robustness in text or code tasks has focused on classification, while robustness for code generation tasks is an uncharted area.
Approach:	They propose a robustness evaluation benchmark for code generation models that customizes over 30 transformations specifically for code on docstrings, function and variable names, code syntax, and code format.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs better on human annotators and on SOTA models with human annnotators.

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Hongling Xu, Qianlong Wang, Yice Zhang, Min Yang, Xi Zeng, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising results in sentiment analysis through the in-context learning paradigm.
Approach:	They propose a framework that incorporates prior predictions and feedback to improve sentiment understanding by incorporating prior feedback and leveraging a feedback-driven prompt.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves on nine sentiment analysis datasets with an average improvement of 5.95% over conventional methods.

UniToolBench: A Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs in Cross-Domain, Universal Task Automation (2026.findings-eacl)

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Xiaojie Guo, Yang Zhang, Bing Zhang, Ryo Kawahara, Mikio Takeuchi, Yada Zhu

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks that focus on manually curated tool graphs lack scalability and diversity across domains.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale, cross-domain benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to reason over and utilize interconnected tools for automation.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark incorporates automated tool graph construction by formulating link prediction as a probabilistic task, instead of relying on categorical LLM outputs.

GlobeSumm: A Challenging Benchmark Towards Unifying Multi-lingual, Cross-lingual and Multi-document News Summarization (2024.emnlp-main)

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Yangfan Ye, Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Libo Qin, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin

DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Current studies focus on single-language or single-document tasks for news summarization . lack of a benchmark inhibits researchers from adequately studying this invaluable problem.
Approach:	They propose a novel task that unifies Multi-lingual, Cross-lingual and Multi-document Summarization into one task.
Outcome:	The proposed task encapsulates the real-world requirements all-in-one and is validated by extensive analysis.

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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xin Liu, Zhengyang Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Shiyang Li, Xiang He, Ruijie Wang, Bing Yin, Xiao Gu, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton

A Chain-of-Task Framework for Instruction Tuning of LLMs Based on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools .
Approach:	They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression .
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets.

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Xinpeng Liu, Bing Xu, Muyun Yang, Hailong Cao, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao, Wenpeng Lu

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing approaches to address Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) tasks are based on large scale labeled data, which leads to extremely high data annotation costs.
Approach:	They propose a Chain-of-Task framework to reduce over-correction in large language models . they propose supervised fine-tuning strategy and an algorithm for automatic dataset annotation .
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on both FCGEC (in-domain) and NaCGEC (out-of domain) test sets.

Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)

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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation"
Approach:	They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC)

Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Jiahe Guo, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu

An Empirical Study of Sentiment-Enhanced Pre-Training for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, especially for villainous characters.
Approach:	They propose safety-aware Role-Play Fine-Tuning (SaRFT) to balance role-playing capabilities and safety.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning settings.

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Yice Zhang, Yifan Yang, Bin Liang, Shiwei Chen, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu

An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge for LLM Evaluation: Fine-tuned Judge Model is not a General Substitute for GPT-4 (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) are lacking in a comprehensive evaluation and fair comparison.
Approach:	They propose to use a knowledge-mining method to build a large-scale knowledge-annotated SPT corpus and integrate sentiment knowledge into pre-training.
Outcome:	The proposed method is able to build a large-scale knowledge-annotated SPT corpus and compares with other methods.

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Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Hongli Zhou, Yingqi Qu, Jing Liu, Muyun Yang, Bing Xu, Tiejun Zhao

Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Recent studies have fine-tuned judge models based on open-source LLMs to evaluate the quality of other LLM.
Approach:	They propose to use open-source LLMs to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) their empirical results show that the models underperform GPT-4 in several dimensions .
Outcome:	The proposed models outperform GPT-4 on several dimensions including generalizability, fairness and adaptability.

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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang

Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs .
Outcome:	The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks.

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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

Efficient Shapley Values Estimation by Amortization for Text Classification (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs.
Approach:	They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 .

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Chenghao Yang, Fan Yin, He He, Kai-Wei Chang, Xiaofei Ma, Bing Xiang

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Shapley Values are often estimated with a small number of stochastic model evaluations, but this can only be mitigated by aggregating thousands of model evaluation.
Approach:	They propose to combine a model with thousands of model evaluations to estimate Shapley Values without additional model evaluation.
Outcome:	The proposed model estimates Shapley Values accurately with up to 60 times speedup compared to traditional methods and does not suffer from stability issues as inference is deterministic.

Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training (2026.acl-long)

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Yifan Yang, Bing Han, Hui Wang, Wei Wang, Ziyang Ma, Long Zhou, Zengrui Jin, Guanrou Yang, Tianrui Wang, Xu Tan, Xie Chen

MReD: A Meta-Review Dataset for Structure-Controllable Text Generation (2022.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing models for fine-grained speaking styles are limited in terms of accuracy, coverage, and naturalness.
Approach:	They propose a model that pre-trains with coarse captions and annotates with a pipeline that grounds captions in audio.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models with fine-grained style annotations . it integrates global and fine-granular supervision, enabling unified representations based on the proposed model .

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Chenhui Shen, Liying Cheng, Ran Zhou, Lidong Bing, Yang You, Luo Si

Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

Challenge:	a new text generation dataset is needed to controllable text summarization, but it lacks the domain knowledge.
Approach:	They propose to use existing text generation datasets to leverage input and control signals . they propose to annotate each meta-review sentence manually with a control signal .
Outcome:	The proposed method can be used to control the structure of a text generation dataset . it can be applied to a variety of tasks, including a task with a large number of meta-review sentences .

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Large Language Models are Not Yet Human-Level Evaluators for Abstractive Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer.
Approach:	They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios.

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Chenhui Shen, Liying Cheng, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yang You, Lidong Bing

An Iterative Emotion Interaction Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2020.coling-main)

Challenge:	ChatGPT and GPT-4 are popular as evaluation metric for complex generative tasks . however, they are not ready as human replacements due to significant limitations .
Approach:	They conduct extensive analysis to examine the stability and reliability of LLMs as automatic evaluators for abstractive summarization.
Outcome:	The proposed methods outperform the commonly used automatic metrics but are not ready for human evaluation due to significant limitations.

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Xin Lu, Yanyan Zhao, Yang Wu, Yijian Tian, Huipeng Chen, Bing Qin

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a task that aims to recognize the emotion of each utterance in conversations.
Approach:	They propose an iterative emotion interaction network which uses iterativly predicted emotion labels instead of gold emotion labels to explicitly model the emotion interaction.
Outcome:	The proposed method retains state-of-the-art performance on two datasets and achieves high accuracy.

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Question Answering Forums (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

Once Upon a Time in Graph: Relative-Time Pretraining for Complex Temporal Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing studies on aspects-based sentiment analysis focus on a single opinionated sentence.
Approach:	They propose a model to combine aspects and their sentiments for QA forums . they use cross-sentence aspect-opinion interaction modeling to align the aspect mentioned in the question and associated opinion clues in the answer.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baseline models on three real-world datasets.

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Sen Yang, Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing work focuses on strengthening the knowledge-time association between text and time-stamps, but this is insufficient for downstream tasks.
Approach:	They propose a model that explicitly connects all temporally-scoped facts by modeling the time relations between any two sentences.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baseline T5 on multiple temporal question answering datasets . it is especially good at modeling long-range complex temporal dependencies, the authors say .

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Weixiang Zhao, Yichen Zhang, Yingshuo Wang, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

Challenge:	Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks.
Approach:	They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments.
Outcome:	The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation.

MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimization (2025.acl-long)

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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Tongtong Wu, Wenxuan Zhang, Jiahe Guo, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu

BC-Prover: Backward Chaining Prover for Formal Theorem Proving (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing preference learning methods for safety alignment are monolingual and struggle with noisy multilingual data.
Approach:	They propose a multilingual reward gaP optimization approach that leverages the well-aligned safety capabilities of the dominant language to improve safety alignment across multiple languages.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments on three LLMs, LLaMA-3.1, Gemma-2 and Qwen2.5, validate MPO’s efficacy in multilingual safety alignment without degrading general multilingual utility.

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Yuhang He, Jihai Zhang, Jianzhu Bao, Fangquan Lin, Cheng Yang, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu, Wotao Yin

Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for interactive theorem proving in formal logic lack robustness and robustness.
Approach:	They propose a backward chaining framework guided by pseudo steps for proofstep generation that prioritizes pseudo steps.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves on the miniF2F benchmark.

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Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Qingyu Yin, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Heng Ji

Making LLMs Better Many-to-Many Speech-to-Text Translators with Curriculum Learning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge.
Approach:	They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities.
Outcome:	The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict.

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Yexing Du, Youcheng Pan, Ziyang Ma, Bo Yang, Yifan Yang, Keqi Deng, Xie Chen, Yang Xiang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies on English-centric translation tasks have focused on multimodal large language models, but the exploration of many-to-many translation is limited by the scarcity of parallel data.
Approach:	They propose a three-stage curriculum learning strategy that leverages the machine translation capabilities of large language models and adapts them to S2TT tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed strategy achieves state-of-the-art average performance in 1514 language pairs, requiring fewer than 10 hours of speech data per language to achieve competitive results.

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Pei Chen, Hongye Jin, Cheng-Che Lee, Rulin Shao, Jingfeng Yang, Mingyu Zhao, Zhaoyu Zhang, Qin Lu, Kaiwen Men, Ning Xie, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Han Li, Lingyun Wang

A Generative Model for End-to-End Argument Mining with Reconstructed Positional Encoding and Constrained Pointer Mechanism (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	LongLeader aims to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . long-constext comprehension is a key bottleneck for many use cases .
Approach:	They propose a leaderboard to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . they offer open-source access to the benchmarks and maintain a dedicated website .
Outcome:	The proposed model assesses different LLMs on selected benchmarks and provides open-source access to the benchmarks.

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Jianzhu Bao, Yuhang He, Yang Sun, Bin Liang, Jiachen Du, Bing Qin, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu

A Diffusion Model for Event Skeleton Generation (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Argument mining (AM) is a challenging task as it requires recognizing complex argumentation structures involving multiple subtasks.
Approach:	They propose a generative framework where expected outputs of AM are framed as a simple target sequence.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on two AM benchmarks.

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Fangqi Zhu, Lin Zhang, Jun Gao, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu, Haiqin Yang

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for event schema generation are noise-sensitive and error-accumulating, e.g., inability to correct errors while generating schema.
Approach:	They propose a novel diffusion event graph model that embeds and roundes event graphs into learnable latent representations and a denoising process to maintain the model's robustness.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves better results than existing state-of-the-art models on three IED bombing datasets.

CLAIM: Mitigating Multilingual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models with Cross-Lingual Attention Intervention (2025.acl-long)

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Zekai Ye, Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Libo Qin, Yichong Huang, Baohang Li, Kui Jiang, Yang Xiang, Zhirui Zhang, Yunfei Lu, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin

Improving Large Language Models Function Calling and Interpretability via Guided-Structured Templates (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have impressive multimodal abilities but remain prone to multilingual object hallucination.
Approach:	They propose a cross-lingual attention intervention method to mitigate multilingual object hallucination in LVLMs by aligning attention patterns.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves 13.56% (up to 30%) on the POPE and 21.75% on the hallucination subsets across languages.

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Hy Dang, Tianyi Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Tao Yang, Pei Chen, Zhengyang Wang, Helen Wang, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang

PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent.
Approach:	They propose a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function calls.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces tool-use errors and improves interpretability and transparency of tool-using agents.

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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei

Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios.
Outcome:	The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics.

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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li

Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization .
Approach:	They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume.
Outcome:	Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency.

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Weixiang Zhao, Zhuojun Li, Shilong Wang, Yang Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Chen Wei, Bing Qin

Sentiment Word Aware Multimodal Refinement for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with ASR Errors (2022.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a key concept in the field of human intelligence.
Approach:	They propose a method to enhance EI of large language models by naive fine-tuning on EI-related tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves EI of two LLM-based assistants without compromising GI.

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Yang Wu, Yanyan Zhao, Hao Yang, Song Chen, Bing Qin, Xiaohuan Cao, Wenting Zhao

MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for multimodal sentiment analysis are limited in their capacity to be deployed in the real world.
Approach:	They propose a model that can dynamically refine erroneous sentiment words by leveraging multimodal sentiment clues.
Outcome:	The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art models on three datasets.

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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

ObfusLM: Privacy-preserving Language Model Service against Embedding Inversion Attacks (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths.
Approach:	They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages.

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Yu Lin, Ruining Yang, Yunlong Mao, Qizhi Zhang, Jue Hong, Quanwei Cai, Ye Wu, Huiqi Liu, Zhiyu Chen, Bing Duan, Sheng Zhong

Math-LLaVA: Bootstrapping Mathematical Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Recent studies show that obfuscation techniques for MLaaS are susceptible to embedding inversion attacks (EIAs).
Approach:	They propose a model obfuscation framework that protects client inputs from embedding inversion attacks by obliviously obbing models.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing works in utility by 10% with a nearly 80% resistance rate against embedding inversion attacks.

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Wenhao Shi, Zhiqiang Hu, Yi Bin, Junhua Liu, Yang Yang, See-Kiong Ng, Lidong Bing, Roy Lee

Multimodal Prompt Learning for Product Title Generation with Extremely Limited Labels (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing image instruction fine-tuning datasets do not fully exploit visual information to enhance multimodal reasoning capabilities of Large language models (LLMs).
Approach:	They propose a LLaVA-based model fine-tuned with MathV360K to bridge this gap by collecting 40K high-quality images with question-answer pairs from 24 existing datasets and synthesizing 320K new pairs.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves the multimodal reasoning capabilities of LLaVA-1.5 and demonstrates enhanced generalizability on the MMMU benchmark.

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Bang Yang, Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Chenyu You, Bing Yin, Yuexian Zou

Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to generate informative titles for products with limited labels are inadequate for novel products.
Approach:	They propose a prompt-based approach to generate attractive titles for novel products . they use multimodal prompts to preserve characteristics and writing styles of novel products.
Outcome:	The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on novel product categories with limited labels.

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Alexander Bukharin, Shiyang Li, Zhengyang Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Bing Yin, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Tuo Zhao, Haoming Jiang

MuSC: Improving Complex Instruction Following with Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent studies have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities.
Approach:	They propose an algorithm to control diversity and quality of instruction tuning datasets and validate it.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm significantly improves worst and average case performance on large scale instruction tuning datasets.

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Hui Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Bing Xu, Conghui Zhu, Muyun Yang, Tiejun Zhao

EMTIR-GRPO: Efficient Multi-Tool Augmented Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for complex instruction-following with elaborate constraints rely on a weaker model, especially GPT-4, limiting their application.
Approach:	They propose a Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training framework to improve instruction alignment without relying on a stronger model.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves instruction-following with elaborate constraints without external supervision on coarse and fine granularity.

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Shixin Jiang, Zhihao Zhu, Jiafeng Liang, Yang Wu, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

SentBS: Sentence-level Beam Search for Controllable Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables large language models to invoke external tools for tasks beyond their internal capacity but often suffers from tool overuse.
Approach:	They propose an algorithm that uses a composite reward to model tool costs and tool efficiency.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm models heterogeneous tool costs and encourages more cost-effective tool-use strategies.

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Chenhui Shen, Liying Cheng, Lidong Bing, Yang You, Luo Si

Face-Sensitive Image-to-Emotional-Text Cross-modal Translation for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Structure-controlled summarization is a useful and interesting research direction . current structure-controlling methods have limited effectiveness in enforcing the desired structure.
Approach:	They propose a sentence-level beam search generation method to select suitable sentences for subsequent generations.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly reduces structural discrepancies by 68% on a structure-controlled dataset.

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Hao Yang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin

MCGA: A Multi-task Classical Chinese Literary Genre Audio Corpus (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing models focus on utilizing semantic information in the image but ignore using visual emotional cues.
Approach:	They propose a face-sensitive image-to-emotional-text translation method that captures visual emotional cues through facial expressions and selectively matches and fuses with the textual content.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017 datasets.

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Yexing Du, Kaiyuan Liu, Bihe Zhang, Youcheng Pan, Bo Yang, Liangyu Huo, Xiyuan Zhang, Jian Xie, Daojing He, Yang Xiang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

A Text-Centered Shared-Private Framework via Cross-Modal Prediction for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced Chinese Classical Studies (CCS) but the audio dimension of CCS remains underexplored due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific audio corpora.
Approach:	They propose a 119-hour audio corpus comprising 22,000 audio samples to bridge this gap . it encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks .
Outcome:	The proposed corpus encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT), Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC), Spoken Question Answering ( SQA), Speech Understanding (SU), and Speech Reasoning (SR).

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Yang Wu, Zijie Lin, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Li-Nan Zhu

One for All: Update Parameterized Knowledge Across Multiple Models with Once Edit (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies treat all three modal features equally and implicitly explore the interactions between different modalities.
Approach:	They propose a text-centered shared-private framework for multimodal fusion . they propose modalities that can provide shared and private semantics .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the MOSEI and MOSI datasets.

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Weitao Ma, Xiyuan Du, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Yichong Huang, Huiyi Zhang, Xiaoliang Yang, Baohang Li, Xiachong Feng, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

Decomposing Argumentative Essay Generation via Dialectical Planning of Complex Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for modifying large language models focus on individual models, resulting in errors and hallucinations.
Approach:	They propose an ensemble-based approach that employs a plug-in model as the editing module and a dynamic weight mechanism to enhance its effectiveness.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms existing methods while achieving superior editing efficiency.

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Yuhang He, Jianzhu Bao, Yang Sun, Bin Liang, Min Yang, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu

Learning with Noisy Labels for Sentence-level Sentiment Classification (D19-1)

Challenge:	Argumentative Essay Generation (AEG) is a challenging task in computational argumentation, where detailed logical reasoning and effective rhetorical skills are essential.
Approach:	They propose an argumentative planning strategy for prompting large language models to generate high-quality essays by sketch planning and dialectical planning.
Outcome:	The proposed method generates more dialectical and persuasive essays with higher diversity compared to baselines.

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Hao Wang, Bing Liu, Chaozhuo Li, Yan Yang, Tianrui Li

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing research on learning with noisy labels dates back to the 1980s, but it is still vibrant today.
Approach:	They propose a novel DNN model called NetAb to deal with noisy labels during training and train the networks using their respective loss functions in mutual reinforcement.
Outcome:	The proposed model can fit training data with noisy labels and predict clean labels.

SEQZERO: Few-shot Compositional Semantic Parsing with Sequential Prompts and Zero-shot Models (2022.findings-naacl)

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Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Qingyu Yin, Danqing Zhang, Bing Yin, Diyi Yang

SmartTrim: Adaptive Tokens and Attention Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Recent research shows promising results on combining pretrained language models with canonical utterance for few-shot semantic parsing.
Approach:	They propose a few-shot semantic parsing method that decomposes a problem into a sequence of sub-problems, which correspond to the sub-clauses of the formal language.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves SOTA performance of BART-based models on GeoQuery and EcommerceQuery, which are two few-shot datasets with compositional data split.

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Zekun Wang, Jingchang Chen, Wangchunshu Zhou, Haichao Zhu, Jiafeng Liang, Liping Shan, Ming Liu, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Bing Qin

Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that SmartTrim accelerates the original model by 2-3 times with minimal performance degradation.
Approach:	They propose an adaptive acceleration framework which prunes redundant token representations and attention heads within each layer of the original model.
Outcome:	The proposed framework accelerates the original model by 2-3 times with minimal performance degradation across vision-language tasks.

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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton

Chain of Strategy Optimization Makes Large Language Models Better Emotional Supporter (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options.
Approach:	They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks.

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Weixiang Zhao, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yang Deng, Yulin Hu, Jiahe Guo, Libo Qin, Qianyun Du, Shijin Wang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) fails to address these issues, as it trains models on single gold-standard responses without modeling nuanced strategy trade-offs.
Approach:	They propose a two-stage framework that optimizes strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn.

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Liang Zhao, Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

Look Beyond Feeling: Unveiling Latent Needs from Implicit Expressions for Proactive Emotional Support (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to enhance length extrapolation of large language models have been developed, but a systematic survey is lacking.
Approach:	They propose to examine the effects of positional encoding on length extrapolation.
Outcome:	The proposed methods improve the extrapolation of large language models, but they are still lacking a systematic survey.

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Xing Fu, Haozhen Li, Bichen Wang, Hao Yang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) are gaining popularity as scalable tools for mental health support . however, nearly half of individuals do not receive timely support due to limited selfawareness or reluctance to seek help.
Approach:	They propose a proactive emotional support framework that leverages principles of active listening to uncover implicit user needs.
Outcome:	The proposed model elicits implicit emotional needs and delivers empathetic support compared to baselines .

Multi-perspective Coherent Reasoning for Helpfulness Prediction of Multimodal Reviews (2021.acl-long)

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Junhao Liu, Zhen Hai, Min Yang, Lidong Bing

m3P: Towards Multimodal Multilingual Translation with Multimodal Prompt (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing review helpfulness prediction tasks rely on text and image modalities to analyze review helpfuliness.
Approach:	They propose a task to analyze review helpfulness from text and visual modalities and propose 'multi-perspective coherent reasoning' method to combine coherence between product and review is proposed.
Outcome:	The proposed method can lead to performance increase of 8.5% compared to the best performing text-only model.

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Jian Yang, Hongcheng Guo, Yuwei Yin, Jiaqi Bai, Bing Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xinnian Liang, LinZheng Chai, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li

UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing multimodal neural machine translation models focus on bilingual translation, but experimental results show that they outperform the text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin.
Approach:	They propose a framework to leverage the multimodal prompt to guide the Multimodal Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (m3P) this framework aligns the representations of different languages with the same meaning and generates the conditional vision-language memory for translation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms previous text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin.

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Tao Sun, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Yuwei Yin, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li

AdaSteer: Your Aligned LLM is Inherently an Adaptive Jailbreak Defender (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin.
Approach:	They introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation of algorithm steps using conventions of programming languages.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms previous prompting methods by a large margin . the proposed model is based on a dataset of natural-language questions and code solutions .

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Weixiang Zhao, Jiahe Guo, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, An Zhang, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu

End-to-End Learnable Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Depression Detection on Social Media (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Activation steering offers training-free defense but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal protection and increased false rejections of benign inputs.
Approach:	They propose an adaptive activation steering method that dynamically adjusts model behavior based on input characteristics.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms baseline methods across multiple jailbreak attacks with minimal impact on utility.

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Bichen Wang, Yuzhe Zi, Yixin Sun, Hao Yang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin

Challenge:	Existing methods to detect depression from social media posting history are limited by frozen screening models and lack of learning.
Approach:	They propose to use a frozen screening model to train a risky post detection model with psychiatric scales to enable a learnable end-to-end learning process.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms several strong baseline methods and qualitative analysis confirms that it better captures users’ mental states than others.

Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)

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Zheng Chu, Huiming Fan, Jingchang Chen, Qianyu Wang, Mingda Yang, Jiafeng Liang, Zhongjie Wang, Hao Li, Guo Tang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a method that uses self-critique feedback to guide iterative reasoning by enabling iteration and self-evaluation of its intermediate reasoning steps.
Outcome:	The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA by 8.6% on three multi-hop reasoning datasets.

Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)

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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Kai Xiong, Zhouhao Sun, Shi Jun, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

A Knowledge Regularized Hierarchical Approach for Emotion Cause Analysis (D19-1)

Challenge:	Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs.
Approach:	They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories.
Outcome:	The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models.

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Chuang Fan, Hongyu Yan, Jiachen Du, Lin Gui, Lidong Bing, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu, Ruibin Mao

Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of SFT via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Emotion cause analysis aims to identify the reasons behind emotions . previous models focus on learning architecture with local textual information .
Approach:	They propose a method to extract emotion cause with hierarchical neural model and knowledge-based regularizations by sentiment lexicon and common knowledge.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms baselines on two public datasets in different languages and outperformed competitive baselines by 2.08%.

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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Kai Xiong, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia (2024.acl-demos)

Challenge:	Currently, LLMs learn in a data-driven schema while the instructions about complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct.
Approach:	They employ a gradient-based method to dissect the process that the Supervised Fine-tuning Process (SFT) adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns.
Outcome:	The proposed method dissects the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns.

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Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Mahani Aljunied, Zhiqiang Hu, Chenhui Shen, Yew Ken Chia, Xingxuan Li, Jianyu Wang, Qingyu Tan, Liying Cheng, Guanzheng Chen, Yue Deng, Sen Yang, Chaoqun Liu, Hang Zhang, Lidong Bing

Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2021.acl-short)

Challenge:	Existing large language models favor high-resource languages, such as English, at the expense of low-resourced and regional languages.
Approach:	They propose a series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian languages.
Outcome:	SeaLLM models outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages by large margins . linguistic disparity impedes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies for non-English-speaking populations .

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Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Yang Deng, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

Transferable End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Selective Adversarial Learning (D19-1)

Challenge:	Existing work on Aspect-based sentiment analysis ignores the rich label semantics of ABSA.
Approach:	They propose to tackle various ABSA tasks in a unified generative framework . they propose to use annotation-style and extraction-style modeling to enable training .
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four ABSA tasks across multiple benchmark datasets.

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Zheng Li, Xin Li, Ying Wei, Lidong Bing, Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang

Chinese MentalBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training on Social Media for Chinese Mental Health Text Analysis (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods to extract aspects and sentiments are limited due to lack of annotated sequence data.
Approach:	They propose a Selective Adversarial Learning method to align latent correlation vectors . they propose tagging a set of aspect boundary tags and sentiment tags to create a joint label space .
Outcome:	The proposed method can learn weights for words to achieve fine-grained adaptation.

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Wei Zhai, Hongzhi Qi, Qing Zhao, Jianqiang Li, Ziqi Wang, Han Wang, Bing Yang, Guanghui Fu

WSDPO: A Generative Word Sense Disambiguation Framework with Chain-of-Thought and Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for language analysis are inadequate for specialized domains like psychology.
Approach:	They have enriched a Chinese social media database with psychological lexicons to enhance its applicability to psychological text analysis.
Outcome:	The proposed model performed better on six public datasets and provided relevant predictions given the masked sentences.

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Kunpeng Kang, Shuaimin Li, Kaiyuan Zhang, Luyang Zhang, Jiasheng Si, Bing Xu, Kehai Chen, Muyun Yang, Wenpeng Lu

In-context Learning for Few-shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental task in natural language processing.
Approach:	They propose a training framework for generative WSD with chain-of-thought (CoT) and preference optimization.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves significant performance gains on rare and unseen settings and exhibits strong generalization in standard evaluation settings.

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Chenran Cai, Qianlong Wang, Bin Liang, Bing Qin, Min Yang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu

PeerDA: Data Augmentation via Modeling Peer Relation for Span Identification Tasks (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for named entity recognition are time-consuming and laborintensive.
Approach:	They propose a few-shot multimodal named entity recognition task that uses few examples to locate and identify named entities for a text-image pair.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines under several few-shot settings.

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Weiwen Xu, Xin Li, Yang Deng, Wai Lam, Lidong Bing

UCS-SQL: Uniting Content and Structure for Enhanced Semantic Bridging In Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Experimental results on ten datasets across seven domains demonstrate the effectiveness of PeerDA.
Approach:	They propose a new approach which uses span pairs with the PR relation as the augmentation data for training.
Outcome:	The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on ten datasets across seven domains.

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Zhenhe Wu, Zhongqiu Li, JieZhangChinaTele JieZhangChinaTele, Zhongjiang He, Jian Yang, Yu Zhao, Ruiyu Fang, Bing Wang, Hongyan Xie, Shuangyong Song, Zhoujun Li

Self-Evaluation of Large Language Model based on Glass-box Features (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods overlook the challenge of effectively transforming structure information from NL to SQL.
Approach:	They propose a text-to-SQL framework that unites content and structure pipes to bridge the gap between NL and SQL.
Outcome:	The proposed framework bridges the gap between natural language questions and SQL by combining content and structure pipes.

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Hui Huang, Yingqi Qu, Jing Liu, Muyun Yang, Bing Xu, Tiejun Zhao, Wenpeng Lu

Neuro-Symbolic Integration Brings Causal and Reliable Reasoning Proofs (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation methods rely on external evaluators, focusing on training and prompting strategies, but model-aware glass-box features are overlooked.
Approach:	They propose to use model-aware glass-box features to evaluate an LLM's output.
Outcome:	The proposed model-aware features are reliable quality indicators for self-evaluation on public benchmarks.

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Sen Yang, Xin Li, Leyang Cui, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

Explainability & Interpretability in NLP

Challenge:	a new framework for complex reasoning with LLMs is developed to improve reasoning proof accuracy and interpretability.
Approach:	They propose to use LLMs to generate search logs that can be interpreted into human-readable reasoning proofs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves reasoning accuracy but lacks interpretability due to black-box nature of the solvers.

A Hierarchical Encoding-Decoding Scheme for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Chenhui Shen, Liying Cheng, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yang You, Lidong Bing

Large Language Models Are Still Misled by Simple Bias Ensembles (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Pre-trained language models have been used for abstractive single-document summarization (SDS) but they may not be suitable for multi-document summary (MDS)
Approach:	They propose to enforce hierarchy on both encoder and decoder to facilitate multi-document interactions for MDS.
Outcome:	Xiao et al. (2019) outperforms or is competitive with the previous best models.

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Zhouhao Sun, Zhiyuan Kan, Xiao Ding, Li Du, Bibo Cai, Yang Zhao, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

MADAWSD: Multi-Agent Debate Framework for Adversarial Word Sense Disambiguation (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for large language models are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias.
Approach:	They propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark shows that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating compounded biases.

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Kaiyuan Zhang, Qian Liu, Luyang Zhang, Chaoqun Zheng, Shuaimin Li, Bing Xu, Muyun Yang, Xinxiao Qiao, Wenpeng Lu

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental yet challenging task in natural language processing.
Approach:	a novel multi-agent Debate framework for adversarial word Sense disambiguation is proposed . the framework simulates a real-world debate environment where multiple agents engage in discussions about ambiguous words in the context of adversarials.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates with existing LLMs and improves models in Chinese language . it shows that it can be used to improve models in the Chinese language and improve performance .

FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Zhaowei Liu, Hanyang Cao, Zhi Yang, Zhiqiang Liu, Sizhe Wang, Jinyi Niu, Chuqi Wang, Yanhui Wang, Xiaolong Liang, Xiaoming Huang, Bing Zhu, Zhongyu Wei, Yun Chen, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang

Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored.
Approach:	They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark evaluates large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities.

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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Liang Zhao, Yuchun Fan, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin

Extending Context Window of Large Language Models from a Distributional Perspective (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Teaching large language models to generate text with citations to evidence sources requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive.
Approach:	They propose a framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of large language models (LLMs) by attributing output to verifiable sources.
Outcome:	Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets show that START improves in aggregating information across multiple sources.

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Yingsheng Wu, Yuxuan Gu, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin

SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing scaling methods for extending context window rely on empirical approaches and lack understanding of the internal distribution within RoPE resulting in suboptimal performance.
Approach:	They propose to optimize the context window extending task from the view of rotary angle distribution by minimizing disturbance between rotary angles to maintain consistency with the pre-training phase.
Outcome:	The proposed approach reduces by up to 72% of the distributional disturbance when extending LLaMA2’s context window to 8k, and reduces it by up 32% when extending to 16k.

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Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song

Bayes-enhanced Lifelong Attention Networks for Sentiment Classification (2020.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used.
Approach:	They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history.

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Hao Wang, Shuai Wang, Sahisnu Mazumder, Bing Liu, Yan Yang, Tianrui Li

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing deep learning paradigms focus on learning a model from training data of a single task and the learned model is also tested on the same task.
Approach:	They propose a Bayes-enhanced lifelong attention network to learn attention knowledge from a sequence of sentiment classification tasks and build lifelong ones.
Outcome:	The proposed model is able to learn attention knowledge from a set of sentiment classification tasks and build lifelong attentions.

Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Xin Li, Yifei Yuan, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

CFSP: An Efficient Structured Pruning Framework for LLMs with Coarse-to-Fine Activation Information (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on predicting the four elements in one shot, instead of predicting them all.
Approach:	They propose a task to jointly detect all sentiment elements in quads for a given opinionated sentence.
Outcome:	The proposed method can generate the semantics of the sentiment elements in the natural language form.

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Yuxin Wang, MingHua Ma, Zekun Wang, Jingchang Chen, Shan Liping, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

Boosting LLM Translation Skills without General Ability Loss via Rationale Distillation (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing LLM pruning works focus on unstructured pruning, which typically requires special hardware support for a practical speed-up.
Approach:	They propose a network pruning framework that leverages both coarse and fine-grained activation information as an importance criterion to guide pruning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing pruning methods on diverse models across sparsity budgets.

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Junhong Wu, Yang Zhao, Yangyifan Xu, Bing Liu, Chengqing Zong

MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous NLP tasks, but fine-tuning them for Machine Translation (MT) often introduces catastrophic forgetting, compromising the broad general abilities of LLMs and introducing potential security risks.
Approach:	They propose a method that harnesses the strong generative capabilities of Large Language Models to create rationales for training data, which are then "replayed" to prevent forgetting.
Outcome:	The proposed approach harnesses the strong generative capabilities of LLMs to create rationales for training data, which are then “replayed” to prevent forgetting.

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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model.

Learn to Cross-lingual Transfer with Meta Graph Learning Across Heterogeneous Languages (2020.emnlp-main)

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Zheng Li, Mukul Kumar, William Headden, Bing Yin, Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang

SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing mPLM-based methods focus on designing costly model pre-training while ignoring equally crucial downstream adaptation.
Approach:	They propose a meta graph learning method that extracts meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences to learn to cross-lingual transfer.
Outcome:	The proposed method can learn to cross-lingual transfer by extracting meta-knowledge from historical CLT experiences (tasks) it can also capture intrinsic language relationships to explicitly guide cross-linguistic transfer.

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Weixiang Zhao, Shilong Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Wanxiang Che

MPR-GUI: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multilingual Perception and Reasoning in GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer in large language models (LLMs) ignore potential of aligning the two modules to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfers simultaneously.
Approach:	They propose a Shared Attentive Learning & Selection module to align the PET learning and selection modules to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer simultaneously.
Outcome:	Experiments on two CL benchmarks show that the proposed framework is superior when scaled to different model sizes, different model architectures and unseen tasks.

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Ruihan Chen, Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Xiaoliang Yang, Yuxuan Gu, Zekun Zhou, Yunfei Lu, Haoyu Ren, Kun Chen, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin