Papers by Bo Xiao

SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Automated Essay Assessment (AEA) aims to judge students’ writing proficiency in an automatic way.
Approach:	They propose to use Chinese AEA system IFlyEssayAssess to evaluate essays written by native Chinese students from primary and junior schools.
Outcome:	The proposed system provides application services for essay scoring, review generation, recommendation, and explainable analytical visualization.

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Wei Shi, Shuang Li, Kerun Yu, Jinglei Chen, Zujie Liang, Xinhui Wu, Yuxi Qian, Feng Wei, Bo Zheng, Jiaqing Liang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao

Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks.
Approach:	They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently.
Outcome:	The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks.

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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar

Multimodality

Challenge:	Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning.
Approach:	They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database.
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods.

The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)

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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance.

FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Full-Pipeline Financial Management with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Junzhe Jiang, Chang Yang, Aixin Cui, Sihan Jin, Yujing Zhang, Yilin Xiao, Ruiyu Wang, Bo Li, Xiao Huang, Danny Dongning Sun, Xinrun Wang

DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering in Disaster Management (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks lack domain-specific data, realistic workflow-level task design, and standardized workflow- level evaluation.
Approach:	a new benchmark evaluates large language models on financial management workflows . the global financial services market is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 .
Outcome:	a new benchmark for large language models on financial management workflows reveals critical capability gaps . accuracy drops from 90% on basic tasks to 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning . the global financial services market reached $25.8 trillion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 .

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Zhitong Chen, Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong, Chengkai Liu, Xiangpeng Li, Bo Li, Junwei Ma, Yiming Xiao, Ali Mostafavi, James Caverlee

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for question answering (QA) are lacking in a high-stakes environment.
Approach:	They propose a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions . they propose 'keypoint-based evaluation protocol' emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity .
Outcome:	Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose models such as MMLU-Pro.

Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multidisciplinary Professional Videos (2026.acl-long)

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Kairui Hu, Penghao Wu, Fanyi Pu, Wang Xiao, Xiang Yue, Bo Li, Yuanhan Zhang, Ziwei Liu

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing video benchmarks do not evaluate the knowledge acquisition capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) existing video benchmark focuses on static, general visual understanding tasks, without evaluating whether models can acquire knowledge dynamically.
Approach:	They propose a multi-modal, multi-discipline, multitrack benchmark that evaluates Large Multimodal Models’ ability to acquire knowledge from college-level, educational videos.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark reveals a substantial gap between human learners and current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and focuses on improving their learning efficiency.

Is LLM an Overconfident Judge? Unveiling the Capabilities of LLMs in Detecting Offensive Language with Annotation Disagreement (2025.findings-acl)

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Junyu Lu, Kai Ma, Kaichun Wang, Kelaiti Xiao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Bo Xu, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin

Memory-Guided Hard Data Augmentation for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models' ability to handle disagreement cases.
Approach:	They evaluate the performance of large language models in detecting offensive language at varying levels of agreement.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves detection accuracy and model alignment with human judgment by using disagreement samples in training.

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Xinyu Liu, Kai fu, Yinghan Shi, Quanyou Chu, Ming Du, Hongya Wang, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei, Yanghua Xiao, Bo Xu

Boosting Text-to-SQL through Multi-grained Error Identification (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) ignore the internal state of the target model.
Approach:	They propose a framework to repair model-specific errors by using a model-based approach . they employ cross-validation to identify model- specific Hard Data and a memory tree to induce macro-level error patterns from micro-level failures.
Outcome:	The proposed framework yields significant performance gains on Twitter and other platforms.

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Bo Xu, Shufei Li, Hongyu Jing, Ming Du, Hui Song, Hongya Wang, Yanghua Xiao

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for error identification often overlook validation of generated results . text-to-SQL is a technology that converts natural language questions into executable SQL queries .
Approach:	They propose to integrate a multi-grained error identification method into existing methods to detect SQL errors.
Outcome:	The proposed method can be integrated as a plugin into various methods, providing effective error identification and correction capabilities.

EXCEEDS: Extracting Complex Events via Nugget-based Grid Modeling in Scientific Domain (2026.acl-long)

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Yi-Fan Lu, Xian-Ling Mao, Bo Wang, Xiao Liu, Heyan Huang

MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis for Universal Multimodal Retrieval (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Extensive event extraction research has been conducted in many domains, including news, finance, and biology.
Approach:	They propose an end-to-end scientific event extraction framework for encoding nuggets into a grid matrix and simplifying complex event extraction as a nuggot-based grid modeling task.
Outcome:	The proposed framework performs well in scientific domain, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance.

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Junjie Zhou, Yongping Xiong, Zheng Liu, Ze Liu, Shitao Xiao, Yueze Wang, Bo Zhao, Chen Jason Zhang, Defu Lian

Multimodality

Challenge:	despite the growing demand for multimodal retrieval, there is a lack of training data.
Approach:	They propose a data synthesis method that leverages vision language models and open-domain images to generate high-quality data.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms baseline models on 70 more datasets and can scale up.

Skeletons Matter: Dynamic Data Augmentation for Text-to-Query (2025.emnlp-main)

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Yuchen Ji, Bo Xu, Jie Shi, Jiaqing Liang, Deqing Yang, Yu Mao, Hai Chen, Yanghua Xiao

Semantic Parsing

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on a single query language, resulting in limited generalizability . a new task paradigm is proposed to unify semantic parsing tasks across different query languages .
Approach:	They propose a task paradigm that unifies parsing tasks across query languages . they identify query skeletons as a shared optimization target of Text-to-Query tasks .
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance using only a small amount of synthesized data.

Knowledge Graph Unlearning with Schema (2025.coling-main)

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Yang Xiao, Ruimeng Ye, Bo Hui

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Unlearning on knowledge graphs has not been extensively studied.
Approach:	They propose a new unlearning method based on schema for knowledge graph (KG) they update the representation of the deleted element’s neighborhood with an unlearning object that regulates the affinity between the affected neighborhood and the instances within the same schema.
Outcome:	The proposed method is evaluated on various KG embedding models with benchmark datasets.

VISTA: Visualized Text Embedding For Universal Multi-Modal Retrieval (2024.acl-long)

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Junjie Zhou, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao, Bo Zhao, Yongping Xiong

PILOT: Planning via Internalized Latent Optimization Trajectories for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for multimodal retrieval are mostly text-oriented, which lack the capability to process visual information.
Approach:	They propose a multi-modal multi-text embedding model VISTA which extends a powerful text encoder with the image understanding capability by introducing visual token embedds.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves superior performance across a variety of multi-modal retrieval tasks in zero-shot and supervised settings.

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Haoyu Zheng, Yun Zhu, Yuqian Yuan, Bo Yuan, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao

Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models lack the capacity to formulate global strategies due to latency and availability constraints.
Approach:	They propose a framework to internalize the strategic oversight of large models into intrinsic Latent Guidance by synthesizing a query-conditioned Latent Guide.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on mathematical and coding benchmarks with negligible inference latency.

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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions?
Approach:	They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values.
Outcome:	The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure.

Sensitivity-LoRA : Low-Load Sensitivity-Based Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Hao Zhang, Bo Huang, Zhenjia Li, Xi Xiao, Hui Yi Leong, Zumeng Zhang, Xinwei Long, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu

HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a promising approach to adapting LLMs to specialized tasks . existing rank allocation techniques remain computationally inefficient and unstable .
Approach:	They propose a low-rank adapted model that approximates model weight updates using low-ranked decomposition.
Outcome:	The proposed method is limited by its uniform rank allocation to each incremental matrix . it leverages the second-order derivatives of the loss function to capture weight sensitivity .

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Hao Zhang, Zhenjia Li, Yifan Gao, Xi Xiao, Heng Zhang, Shuyang Zhang, null Xiaoxincc, Bo Huang, Yuhang Wu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu

MoE-I2: Compressing Mixture of Experts Models through Inter-Expert Pruning and Intra-Expert Low-Rank Decomposition (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) assumes a uniform rank r for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across modules and layers.
Approach:	They propose a framework that allows for faster convergence of low-rank adaptive models . they use a hypernetwork to prune the outputs of the hypernetworks to generate parameters .
Outcome:	The proposed framework accelerates convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork.

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Cheng Yang, Yang Sui, Jinqi Xiao, Lingyi Huang, Yu Gong, Yuanlin Duan, Wenqi Jia, Miao Yin, Yu Cheng, Bo Yuan

Dynamic Prefix-Tuning for Generative Template-based Event Extraction (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	emergence of Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs has significantly advanced the development of language models.
Approach:	They propose a two-stage compression method tailored for Mixture of Experts to reduce the model size and decrease the computational cost.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces model size and improves inference efficiency while maintaining performance in various zero-shot tasks.

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Xiao Liu, Heyan Huang, Ge Shi, Bo Wang

Exploring Label Hierarchy in a Generative Way for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.coling-1)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that our model achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art classification-based model OneIE on ACE 2005.
Approach:	They propose a generative template-based event extraction method with dynamic prefix . they integrate context information with type-specific prefixes to learn a context-specific name for each context .
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art model OneIE on ACE 2005 and performs well on ERE.

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Wei Huang, Chen Liu, Bo Xiao, Yihua Zhao, Zhaoming Pan, Zhimin Zhang, Xinyun Yang, Guiquan Liu

Text Classification

Challenge:	Existing methods for hierarchical text classification are lacking in the field of natural language processing.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchy-aware T5 model with path-adaptive attention mechanism to exploit hierarchical dependency across different levels.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models especially in Macro-F1 and low Macro.

AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)

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Jianlyu Chen, Nan Wang, Chaofan Li, Bo Wang, Shitao Xiao, Han Xiao, Hao Liao, Defu Lian, Zheng Liu

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains.
Approach:	They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data.

CoMeT: Collaborative Memory Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)

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Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yujin Yuan, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng

Easy Samples Are All You Need: Self-Evolving LLMs via Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity is a major barrier to long-context processing.
Approach:	They propose a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity.
Outcome:	The proposed architecture can handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity.

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Zhiyin Yu, Bo Zhang, Qibin Hou, Zhonghai Wu, Xiao Luo, Lei Bai

A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that EasyRL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines due to the substantial annotation cost and issues such as model collapse or reward hacking.
Approach:	They propose a supervised RL approach with a divide-and-conquer strategy that simulates the human cognitive acquisition curve using easy labeled data.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on mathematical and scientific benchmarks using only 10% of easy labeled data.

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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo

Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified.
Approach:	They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric.
Outcome:	The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area.

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Boxin Wang, Wei Ping, Peng Xu, Lawrence McAfee, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Bo Li, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar, Bryan Catanzaro

Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	a recent study shows that retrieval-augmented LMs can improve text generation quality and accuracy.
Approach:	They propose a model that reproduces RETRO parameters while retrieving a text corpus . they find RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with less repetition .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms standard retrieval-augmented GPT and retrieval augmented GTP on text generation and accuracy tasks.

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Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Xiaochi Wei, Ge Shi, Xiao Liu, Chong Feng, Tong Zhou, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin

Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang

Challenge:	Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art.
Approach:	They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data.
Outcome:	The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art.

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Paraphrasing

Challenge:	Copyright Detective is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs.
Approach:	They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing .
Outcome:	The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs.

Enhancing Multimodal Named Entity Recognition through Adaptive Mixup Image Augmentation (2025.coling-main)

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Bo Xu, Haiqi Jiang, Jie Wei, Hongyu Jing, Ming Du, Hui Song, Hongya Wang, Yanghua Xiao

Multimodality

Challenge:	Current named entity recognition methods struggle with text-image mismatch problem due to a lack of visual context.
Approach:	They propose an adaptive mixup image augmentation method that generates augmented images based on matching score between text and image .
Outcome:	The proposed method can be integrated into existing models and demonstrate consistent performance improvements.

SpiderFlow: Efficient Topology-Aware Scheduling for LLM Training Across Decentralized GPU Clusters (2026.acl-long)

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Zihan Chang, Shuibing He, Bo Zhou, Sheng Xiao, Siling Yang, Rui Wang, Zhe Pan

Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory for LLM Agent Planning (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to training large language models lack topologyaware task scheduling mechanisms and model parallelization strategies.
Approach:	They propose a topology-aware scheduling system specifically designed for decentralized GPU clusters . they propose heuristic methods at the inter-cluster level with ILP-based optimization within clusters.
Outcome:	The proposed system reduces job completion time by 1.2-1.3 and improves throughput by 1.12-1.25 . it also reduces scheduling overhead by 20-90 on average compared to state-of-the-art scheduling systems.

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Wei Yang, Jinwei Xiao, Hongming Zhang, Qingyang Zhang, Yanna Wang, Bo Xu

Challenge:	Existing methods to enhance LLM with offline experiences or online trajectory analysis focus on single-granularity memory derived from dynamic environmental interactions.
Approach:	They propose a framework that grounds coarse-to-fine memories with LLM to enable flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments on AlfWorld, Webshop and ScienceWorld show that the proposed framework outperforms baselines and comprehensively optimizes memory-enhanced LLM Agent system.

Different Data, Different Modalities! Reinforced Data Splitting for Effective Multimodal Information Extraction from Social Media Posts (2022.coling-1)

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Bo Xu, Shizhou Huang, Ming Du, Hongya Wang, Hui Song, Chaofeng Sha, Yanghua Xiao

Dynamics of Cognitive Heterogeneity: Investigating Behavioral Biases in Multi-Stage Supply Chains with LLM-Based Simulation (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent multimodal information extraction approaches overestimate the significance of images.
Approach:	They propose a general data splitting strategy to divide social media posts into two sets to achieve better performance under information extraction models of the corresponding modalities.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing models on two different multimodal information extraction tasks.

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Jiuyun Jiang, Yuecheng Hong, Bo Yang, Jin Yang, Guangxin Jiang, Xiaomeng Guo, Guang Xiao

Dialect-SQL: An Adaptive Framework for Bridging the Dialect Gap in Text-to-SQL (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) allow repeatable experiments in which individual characteristics can be precisely defined.
Approach:	They propose a scalable experimental paradigm using Large Language Models to simulate multi-stage supply chain dynamics.
Outcome:	The proposed model systematically replicates and validates the results of a behavioral simulation on agents in multi-stage supply chain dynamics.

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Jie Shi, Xi Cao, Bo Xu, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Jia Chen, Peng Wang, Wei Wang

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Existing Text-to-SQL research focuses on specific database systems, limiting adaptability to different dialects.
Approach:	They propose a framework that employs Object Relational Mapping (ORM) code as an intermediate language to bridge this gap.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing methods that generate SQL queries directly.

Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification with Horizontal and Vertical Category Correlations (2021.emnlp-main)

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Linli Xu, Sijie Teng, Ruoyu Zhao, Junliang Guo, Chi Xiao, Deqiang Jiang, Bo Ren