Papers by Chang Liu
Step-level Verifier-guided Hybrid Test-Time Scaling for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kaiyan Chang, Yonghao Shi, Chenglong Wang, Hang Zhou, Chi Hu, Xiaoqian Liu, Yingfeng Luo, Yuan Ge, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent training-based TTS methods, such as continued reinforcement learning, have surged in popularity, while training-free TTS approaches are gradually fading from prominence. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained sequential scaling method guided by process verification that integrates training-free TTS methods with other classical parallel scaling methods at the step level. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) show that training-free TTS methods can extend reasoning performance boundaries. |
Codec-SUPERB: An In-Depth Analysis of Sound Codec Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Haibin Wu, Ho-Lam Chung, Yi-Cheng Lin, Yuan-Kuei Wu, Xuanjun Chen, Yu-Chi Pai, Hsiu-Hsuan Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Alexander Liu, Hung-yi Lee
| Challenge: | Researchers have developed a sound codec that can be used as tokenizers for preserving audio data and minimizing data transmission latency. |
| Approach: | They propose to use codec-SUPERB to assess codec models across representative sound applications and signal-level metrics rooted in sound domain knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec-SUPERB model is evaluated on selected experimental settings. |
Towards Better Hierarchical Text Classification with Data Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve hierarchical text classification are expensive and lack high-quality labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical text classification framework that can achieve both label controllability and text diversity by extracting high-quality hierarchic label information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve label controllability and text diversity by extracting high-quality hierarchical label information. |
SUPERB-SG: Enhanced Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark for Semantic and Generative Capabilities (2022.acl-long)
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Hsiang-Sheng Tsai, Heng-Jui Chang, Wen-Chin Huang, Zili Huang, Kushal Lakhotia, Shu-wen Yang, Shuyan Dong, Andy Liu, Cheng-I Lai, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Phil Hall, Hsuan-Jui Chen, Shang-Wen Li, Shinji Watanabe, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Hung-yi Lee
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for transfer learning are limited in speech research . authors show that pre-trained models transfer well across multiple tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate pre-trained models by increasing task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark increases task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB-SG. |
Where Fact Ends and Fairness Begins: Redefining AI Bias Evaluation through Cognitive Biases (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks conflate factual correctness and normative fairness . a model may generate responses that are factually accurate but socially unfair . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to examine the boundary between fact and fair . they draw on representativeness bias, attribution bias and ingroup–outgroup bias to explain why models often misalign fact and faireness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on ten frontier models and is available on github . it is compared with a standard model that generates people of color in Nazi-era uniforms . |
Repairing Catastrophic-Neglect in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Attention-Guided Feature Enhancement (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Diffusion models generate high-quality images from textual descriptions, but they often produce images that do not fully align with the input prompts, resulting in semantic inconsistencies. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated repair approach to address catastrophic-neglect in T2I DMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 10.1%-16.3% higher Correct Rate in image generation compared to baselines. |
Ask To The Point: Open-Domain Entity-Centric Question Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | *entity-centric question generation (ECQG) is a task motivated by real-world applications such as topic-specific learning, assisted reading, and fact-checking. |
| Approach: | They propose a PLM-based framework GenCONE with two modules: content focusing and question verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and is effective and complementary in generating high-quality questions. |
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongcheng Guo, Wei Zhang, Junhao Chen, Yaonan Gu, Jian Yang, Junjia Du, Shaosheng Cao, Binyuan Hui, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work. |
Rethinking Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation: Contextualized Corpus as Better Textbook (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation use a two-stage paradigm: general distillation with a task-agnostic general corpus and task-specific distillation using augmented task- specific corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextualized corpus that contextualizes task corpus with large-scale general corpus through relevance-based text retrieval to improve student learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the GLUE benchmark and shows that it is better than generalized corpus and augmented task-specific corpus. |
Make-A-Voice: Revisiting Voice Large Language Models as Scalable Multilingual and Multitask Learners (2024.acl-long)
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Rongjie Huang, Chunlei Zhang, Yongqi Wang, Dongchao Yang, Jinchuan Tian, Zhenhui Ye, Luping Liu, Zehan Wang, Ziyue Jiang, Xuankai Chang, Jiatong Shi, Chao Weng, Zhou Zhao, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used for general-purpose interfaces across multiple tasks and languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as a general-purpose interface across multiple tasks and languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on 200K hours of 6-language data for voice generation applications. |
No Black Boxes: Interpretable and Interactable Predictive Healthcare with Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Causal Discovery (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Deep learning models lacking interpretability and interactivity, authors say . lack of interactive mechanisms prevents clinicians from incorporating their own knowledge into decision-making process. |
| Approach: | a new deep learning model is proposed to improve interpretability and interactivity . authors propose a knowledge-enhanced agent-driven causal discovery framework . |
| Outcome: | a new model improves interpretability and interactivity on EHR data . the proposed model improve interpretability through explicit reasoning and causal analysis . |
ExplainaBoard: An Explainable Leaderboard for NLP (2021.acl-demo)
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Pengfei Liu, Jinlan Fu, Yang Xiao, Weizhe Yuan, Shuaichen Chang, Junqi Dai, Yixin Liu, Zihuiwen Ye, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Using leaderboards, researchers can track the performance of various systems on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new conceptualization and implementation of NLP evaluation using a leaderboard. |
| Outcome: | The ExplainaBoard is an evaluation tool for natural language processing (NLP) it covers more than 400 systems, 50 datasets, 40 languages, and 12 tasks. |
Bridging Distance and Spectral Positional Encodings via Anchor-Based Diffusion Geometry Approximation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Molecular graph learning benefits from positional signals that capture local neighborhoods and global topology. |
| Approach: | They propose to use anchor-based distance encodings to approximate diffusion geometry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models without positional encodings on DrugBank with a shared GNP-based DDI backbone. |
More than Classification: A Unified Framework for Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event temporal relation extraction ignore meaning of relations and wipe out their intrinsic dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified event temporal relation extraction framework that transforms temporal relations into logical expressions of time points and completes the ETRE by predicting the relations between certain time points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art model on TB-Dense and MATRES by 0.3% on both datasets. |
Representation Degeneration Problem in Prompt-based Models for Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning (PF) models have shown improved performance on few-shot natural language understanding benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to alleviate anisotropy in the embedding space by aligning with pre-trained language models' training objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms mainstream methods on many NLU benchmarks. |
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external information into a given table neglect the structured nature of the table. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information into a given table by first building an augmenting table and then generating a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. |
LLM Self-Correction with DeCRIM: Decompose, Critique, and Refine for Enhanced Following of Instructions with Multiple Constraints (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Kartik Mehta, Yu-Hsiang Lin, Haw-Shiuan Chang, Shereen Oraby, Sijia Liu, Vivek Subramanian, Tagyoung Chung, Mohit Bansal, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that LLMs struggle with instructions containing multiple constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-correction pipeline that decomposes the original instruction into a list of constraints and uses a Critic model to decide when and where the LLM’s response needs refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 on RealInstruct and IFEval even with weak feedback. |
ADAM: Dense Retrieval Distillation with Adaptive Dark Examples (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve data from multiple encoders are too trivial for the teacher to distinguish, preventing the teacher from transferring abundant dark knowledge to the student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework that can better transfer the dark knowledge held in the teacher with adaptive dark examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can better transfer the dark knowledge held in the teacher with adaptive dark examples. |
Target-Sensitive Memory Networks for Aspect Sentiment Classification (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Aspect sentiment classification (ASC) is a fundamental task in sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use memory networks to deal with ASC using aspect and sentence terms and use them to classify the sentiment polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques can be implemented in a variety of contexts and their effectiveness is evaluated. |
Towards Comprehensive Description Generation from Factual Attribute-value Tables (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for comprehensive descriptions for factual attribute-value tables might suffer from missing key attributes and groundless information problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a force attention method to encourage the generator to pay more attention to uncovered attributes to avoid potential key attributes missing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on automatic and human evaluation. |
Can Large Language Models Always Solve Easy Problems if They Can Solve Harder Ones? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities, but still suffer from inconsistency issues. |
| Approach: | They develop a ConsisEval benchmark to evaluate LLMs' inconsistency . they find that LLM models can paradoxically fail at easier problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves highest consistency score but inconsistent to specific questions due to distraction by redundant information, misinterpretation of questions, etc. |
LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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Bofei Gao, Zefan Cai, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Ce Zheng, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Dayiheng Liu, Chang Zhou, Wen Xiao, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Existing mathematical verifiers are trained with binary classification labels, which are not informative enough for the model to accurately assess the solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language feedback-enhanced verifier that can validate the correctness of response generated by policy models by constructing automatically generated training data and a two-stage training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verifier significantly improves in verification and reinforcement learning and alleviates data-demanding problems of the reward model. |
A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust and Secure LLM Watermarking (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking algorithms rely on heuristic green/red token lists . however, these lists are inconsistent and can be compromised . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for robust and secure LLM watermarking using reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art trade-off across all criteria with notable improvements in resistance to spoofing attacks without degrading other criteria. |
Hierarchical Curriculum Learning for AMR Parsing (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to translate sentences to semantic representation with a hierarchical structure, but there is a gap between their flat training objective and the hierarchic structure, which limits the model generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Curriculum Learning framework with Structure-level (SC) and Instance-level curricula (IC) that aims to translate sentences to semantic representation with a hierarchical structure. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on AMR2.0, AMR3.0, structure-complex and out-of-distribution situations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
Analyzing Sentence Fusion in Abstractive Summarization (D19-54)
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Logan Lebanoff, John Muchovej, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Seokhwan Kim, Walter Chang, Fei Liu
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization systems struggle to combine information from multiple sources, resulting in poor grammar and incorrect facts. |
| Approach: | They analyze the outputs of five abstractive summarization systems and examine their grammatical accuracy and faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed summarization systems are able to combine information from multiple sources, but they often fail to remain faithful to the original document. |
A Cascade Approach to Neural Abstractive Summarization with Content Selection and Fusion (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that perform content selection and surface realization are not able to provide sufficient training data for news summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a cascade architecture to perform content selection and surface realization together to generate abstracts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms or outranks existing systems in terms of content selection and surface realization. |
MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Junfeng Fang, Shuai Zhang, Chang Wu, Zhengyi Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Sihang Li, Kun Wang, Wenjie Du, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
Improving Radiology Summarization with Radiograph and Anatomy Prompts (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on automatic impression generation, but this task is time-consuming and in high demand. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an anatomy-enhanced multimodal model to generate automatic impressions by combining radiology images with textual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets and compares with existing models. |
SYNTHIA: Novel Concept Design with Affordance Composition (2025.acl-long)
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Hyeonjeong Ha, Xiaomeng Jin, Jeonghwan Kim, Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Khanh Duy Nguyen, Ansel Blume, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies on concept design using text-to-image models have enabled rapid ideation of novel visual concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating novel, functionally coherent designs based on desired affordances by decomposing concepts into parts and affordance . they also develop a curriculum learning scheme that fine-tunes T2I models to progressively learn affordance composition while maintaining visual novelty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models for novelty and functional coherence in human evaluation. |
MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Weiwen Xu, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou, Chang Liu, Yujia Hu, Xing Xie, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Chaojun Wang, Long Li, Rui Liu, Huiyao Liu, Koji Inoue, Ryuichi Sumida, Tatsuya Kawahara, Fan Xu, Lingyu Ye, Wei Tian, Dongjun Kim, Jimin Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Pham Minh Duc, Ojasva Saxena, Palash Nandi, Xiyan Tao, Wiwik Karlina, Tuan Luong, Keertana Arun Vasan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech . |
BioGen: Generating Biography Summary under Table Guidance on Wikipedia (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for summarizing text have not captured the salient information from an article. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-guided abstractive biography summarization that utilizes factual tables to capture important information and generate a summary of a biography. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is the first large-scale biography summarization dataset with tables. |
From Implicit Graph Encoding to Explicit Evidence: A Training-Free LLM Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Guo Tang, Ke Cheng, Huiming Fan, Heng Chang, Wenxiang Zheng, Xianhao Ou, Junjia Xiang, Ming Liu, Yujun Zhou, Li Lanyu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with implicit modality alignment and suboptimal graph linearization. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, test-time adaptive framework that reframes TKG prediction as explicit evidence-driven reasoning. |
| Outcome: | ExE-LLM outperforms fully trained graph neural networks on four benchmarks . it achieves SOTA performance in inductive settings, significantly outperforming fully trained neural networks . |
McBE: A Multi-task Chinese Bias Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets on bias evaluation for large language models focus on English and North American culture and are limited to one task. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate Chinese language models' biases from multiple perspectives using a multi-task Chinese Bias Evaluation Benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers 12, 82 subcategories and 5 evaluation tasks covering a wide range of categories and content diversity. |
MedEval: A Multi-Level, Multi-Task, and Multi-Domain Medical Benchmark for Language Model Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical datasets require high quality domain-specific datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level, multi-task, and multi-domain medical benchmark to facilitate the development of language models for healthcare. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides granular potential usage and supports a wide range of tasks. |
VENUS: A VLLM-driven Video Content Discovery System for Real Application Scenarios (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Minyi Zhao, Yi Liu, Jianfeng Wen, Boshen Zhang, Hailang Chang, Zhiheng Ouyang, Jie Wang, Wensong He, Shuigeng Zhou
| Challenge: | Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify specific videos defined by a pre-specified text policy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Vision-Language Large Model-driven video content discovery system called VENUS to solve these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality, VCD-specific data for model training and extends it to support it better. |
Hybrid Alignment Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with instructions and preferences are conflicting . et al., 2023b) show that hybrid alignment training can outperform baselines . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid alignment training approach based on alternating alignment and modified elastic weight consolidation methods to achieve better collaboration between different alignment tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline alignment training methods on summarization and dialogue tasks. |
Reciprocal Learning of Knowledge Retriever and Response Ranker for Knowledge-Grounded Conversations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on grounding dialogue agents with knowledge documents has sparked increased attention . hand-labeling data to that end is time-consuming and many datasets lack knowledge annotations . |
| Approach: | They propose a reciprocal learning approach to optimize a knowledge retriever and a response ranker for knowledge-grounded response retrieval without ground-truth knowledge labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on two public benchmarks. |
Outcome Accuracy is Not Enough: Aligning the Reasoning Process of Reward Models (2026.acl-long)
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Binghai Wang, Yantao Liu, Yuxuan Liu, Tianyi Tang, Shenzhi Wang, Chang Gao, Chujie Zheng, Yichang Zhang, Le Yu, Shixuan Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Bowen Yu, Fei Huang, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies observe a phenomenon where reward models achieve high accuracy on static datasets but fail to generalize effectively during RLHF. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines rationale consistency with outcome accuracy to improve performance on RM-Bench and JudgeBench. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines on RM-Bench and JudgeBench by an average of 5% and improves creative writing tasks by 7%. |
CASA: Causality-driven Argument Sufficiency Assessment (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to assess the sufficiency of arguments are laborious and inconsistent due to subjective criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a causality-driven argument sufficiency assessment framework that uses the probability of sufficience to estimate the probability that a premise event would lead to a conclusion when both premise and conclusion events are absent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies insufficient arguments and improves them in a writing aid application. |
Scaling Parameter-Constrained Language Models with Quality Data (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Ernie Chang, Matteo Paltenghi, Yang Li, Pin-Jie Lin, Changsheng Zhao, Patrick Huber, Zechun Liu, Rastislav Rabatin, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Scaling laws in language modeling quantify training loss as a function of dataset size and model parameters, but neglect the critical role of data quality in model generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use effective training tokens as a combination of text diversity and syntheticity as measured by a teacher model to calculate scaling laws. |
| Outcome: | The proposed term effective training tokens is a combination of two readily-computed indicators of text diversity and syntheticity as measured by a teacher model. |
Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing by POS-Guided Word Reordering (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual dependency parsing rely on large corpus size and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual dependency parsing approach based on word reordering . they propose to train a model that transfers knowledge learned in one or multiple languages to target languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline approach in Hindi and Latin by 15.3% and 6.7%. |
Bypassing Neural Evaluations for Fast Audio Editing via Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaoqian Liu, Zhengkun Ge, Jianjin Wang, Haoran Zhang, Yuan Ge, Kaiyan Chang, Chen Xu, Tong Xiao, Zhengtao Yu, Linfeng Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity. |
Play Guessing Game with LLM: Indirect Jailbreak Attack with Implicit Clues (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks primarily utilize scenario camouflage techniques, however their explicit mention of malicious intent will be easily recognized and defended by LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an indirect jailbreak attack approach, Puzzler, which can bypass LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can bypass the LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
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Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
From Specific-MLLMs to Omni-MLLMs: A Survey on MLLMs Aligned with Multi-modalities (2025.findings-acl)
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Shixin Jiang, Jiafeng Liang, Jiyuan Wang, Xuan Dong, Heng Chang, Weijiang Yu, Jinhua Du, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | MLLMs are able to integrate multiple modalities into a single model to tackle complex tasks in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive survey of Omni-MLLMs to address the challenges and opportunities of multimodal modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can integrate multiple modalities into a single model and provide novel perspectives. |
JarviX: A LLM No code Platform for Tabular Data Analysis and Optimization (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Shang-Ching Liu, ShengKun Wang, Tsungyao Chang, Wenqi Lin, Chung-Wei Hsiung, Yi-Chen Hsieh, Yu-Ping Cheng, Sian-Hong Luo, Jianwei Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data analysis is an important application task of large language models, but advanced models are not yet on par with expert level performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to employ Large Language Models to facilitate an automated guide and execute high-precision data analyzes on tabular datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on large language models and an automated machine learning pipeline for predictive modeling. |
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)
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Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Yiding Liu, Yue Xing, Han Xu, Jie Ren, Yi Chang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG. |
| Approach: | They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data. |
Few-Shot Intent Detection via Contrastive Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jianguo Zhang, Trung Bui, Seunghyun Yoon, Xiang Chen, Zhiwei Liu, Congying Xia, Quan Hung Tran, Walter Chang, Philip Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods address few-shot intent detection tasks from two perspectives: data augmentation and task-adaptive training with pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot intent detection schema using contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under 5-shot and 10-shot settings. |
Multi-Granularity Structural Knowledge Distillation for Language Model Compression (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer knowledge to a small model are not enough to represent the rich semantics of a text. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill the knowledge to a student hierarchically across layers using a large teacher-student framework. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms distillation methods on GLUE benchmark. |
Incremental Prompting: Episodic Memory Prompt for Lifelong Event Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve lifelong event detection performance are limited by the limited stored examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Episodic Memory Prompts to explicitly retain the learned task-specific knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to update a model with new event types while retaining the capability on previously learned types. |
CollagePrompt: A Benchmark for Budget-Friendly Visual Recognition with GPT-4V (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in generative AI have suggested that by taking visual prompts, GPT-4V can demonstrate significant proficiency in visual recognition tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a collage prompting task that collages multiple images into a single visual prompt and makes GPT-4V perform visual recognition on several images simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reduces the cost associated with GPT-4V's visual recognition . the proposed task group images of the same category together leads to better visual recognition results . |
Divergent Thinking: Escape the Homogeneity Trap in Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Generative commonsense reasoning requires models to synthesize coherent narratives that satisfy lexical constraints and commonsensical logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for deep semantic diversity rather than surface-level lexical variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves over 10% improvement in overall accuracy on NoRa and SPICE score on CommonGen-Lite. |
CORE: Cooperative Training of Retriever-Reranker for Effective Dialogue Response Selection (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train retrieval-based dialogue systems are suboptimal . existing methods to optimize retrieval and rerank modules are sub-optimal, causing sub-optimum performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based dialogue system with a fast retriever and a smart response reranker that combine the best of both worlds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn from each other and evolve together . it can be used in industrial applications and has powered industrial applications. |
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Junxian He, Jun Liu, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM reasoning rely on supervisory signals . current methods rely heavily on outcome supervision and auxiliary reward models . |
| Approach: | They propose a gen-eralizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework to enhance LLM reasoning without supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM reasoning without supervision without external supervision. |
COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation (2021.naacl-demos)
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Qingyun Wang, Manling Li, Xuan Wang, Nikolaus Parulian, Guangxing Han, Jiawei Ma, Jingxuan Tu, Ying Lin, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Weili Liu, Aabhas Chauhan, Yingjun Guan, Bangzheng Li, Ruisong Li, Xiangchen Song, Yi Fung, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han, Shih-Fu Chang, James Pustejovsky, Jasmine Rah, David Liem, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Clare Voss, Cynthia Schneider, Boyan Onyshkevych
| Challenge: | a new framework to digest relevant biomedical knowledge is needed to combat COVID-19 . quantity of research results is a bottleneck, and false information promoted in publications . |
| Approach: | a team of researchers has developed a framework to extract multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature to combat COVID-19. |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature . it provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence . the framework is based on a case study of drug repurposing . |
Learn from Relation Information: Towards Prototype Representation Rectification for Few-Shot Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Few-shot Relation Extraction focus on implicitly introducing relation information to constrain the prototype representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-less method to promote few-shot relation extraction . they use a prototype rectification module to rectify original prototypes by relation information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on fewRel 1.0 and 2.0 datasets. |
Length-Adaptive Distillation: Customizing Small Language Model for Dynamic Token Pruning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to accelerate inference speed are model compression and dynamic computation (e.g., dynamic token pruning). |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that produces a customized small language model for dynamic token pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can make the small language model more customized for dynamic token pruning and achieve better speed-performance trade-off. |
Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Large Language Models via Inference-Time Activation Energy (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Weixuan Ou, Run Liu, Shengyuan Pang, Guancheng Wan, Ranjie Duan, Wei Dong, Kai-Wei Chang, XiaoFeng Wang, Ying Nian Wu, Xinfeng Li
| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment techniques prioritize mitigating harmful responses at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly refuse benign requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning free framework to improve safety and reduce false refusals by dynamic, inference-time intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework raises compliance on the ORB-H benchmark from 57.3% to 82.6% while maintaining the baseline safety performance. |
StreamHover: Livestream Transcript Summarization and Annotation (2021.emnlp-main)
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Sangwoo Cho, Franck Dernoncourt, Tim Ganter, Trung Bui, Nedim Lipka, Walter Chang, Hailin Jin, Jonathan Brandt, Hassan Foroosh, Fei Liu
| Challenge: | StreamHover is a framework for annotating and summarizing livestream transcripts . the problem is that there is n't enough annotated datasets to summarize livestreams based on the informal nature of spoken language . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for annotating and summarizing livestream transcripts using a text preview. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalizes better and improves over strong baselines. |
MHGRL: An Effective Representation Learning Model for Electronic Health Records (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Effective EHR representations are key to achieving high performance in healthcare applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal heterogeneous graph-enhanced representation learning to learn EHR representations using medical ontology and textual notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two real clinical datasets in downstream tasks. |
AgentGC: Evolutionary Learning-based Lossless Compression for Genomics Data with LLM-driven Multiple Agent (2026.findings-acl)
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Sun Hui, Ding Yanfeng, Huidong Ma, Chang Xu, Keyan Jin, Lizheng Zu, Cheng Zhong, Xiaoguang Liu, Gang Wang, Wentong Cai
| Challenge: | Lossless compression has made significant advancements in Genomics Data storage, sharing and management. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent-based GD Compressor with 3 layers with a multi-agent named Leader and Worker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing methods with low-level modeling and limited adaptability and user-unfriendly interface. |
How to Represent Context Better? An Empirical Study on Context Modeling for Multi-turn Response Selection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on building a conversational system for open domain human-machine conversation is attracting more attention . early models concatenate all utterances or independently encode each dialogue turn, which may lead to an inadequate understanding of dialogue status. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a turn-aware context modeling layer to adapt existing models . they propose to model multi-turn contexts from the perspective of sequential relationship, local relationship, and query-alike manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be adapted to several advanced response selection models. |
Learning to Compress Prompt in Natural Language Formats (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work rely on compressing long contexts into soft prompts, but soft prompt compression encounters limitations in transferability . natural language (NL) prompts are incompatible with back-propagation, and NL prompts lack flexibility in imposing length constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses long prompts into NL formatted Capsule Prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces 81.4% of the original length, decreases inference latency up to 4.5x, and saves 80.1% of budget overheads while providing transferability across diverse LLMs and different datasets. |
A Simple yet Effective Relation Information Guided Approach for Few-Shot Relation Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to introduce relation information into the model are limited by labeling and data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a direct addition approach to introduce relation information into a model by concatenating two views of relations and adding them to the original prototype. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the benchmark dataset FewRel 1.0 and shows comparable results to the state-of-the-art. |
Towards More Realistic Chinese Spell Checking with New Benchmark and Specialized Expert Model (2024.lrec-main)
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Yue Wang, Zilong Zheng, Juntao Li, Zhihui Liu, Jinxiong Chang, Qishen Zhang, Zhongyi Liu, Guannan Zhang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been gaining attention for their ability to perform a wide range of open-domain tasks . however, the performance of LLMs has yet to be comprehensively evaluated in realistic scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose RCSC task to convert Chinese text into correct text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates the performance of existing methods in Chinese text . the realistic Chinese spell checker can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the task . |
Discriminatively-Tuned Generative Classifiers for Robust Natural Language Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown advantages of generative classifiers in terms of data efficiency and robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative classifier for natural language inference (NLI) they compare it to discriminative models and large-scale pretrained models like BERT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifier outperforms discriminative and pretrained baselines across several challenging NLI experimental settings, including small training sets, imbalanced label distributions, and label noise. |
Shadow-Activated Backdoor Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Ziyi Yin, Muchao Ye, Yuanpu Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Aofei Chang, Han Liu, Jinghui Chen, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models are less applicable to open-ended conversations with users. |
| Approach: | They propose a shadow-activated backdoor attack scenario where attackers inject malicious content into the responses of MLLMs when the responses explicitly relate to the shadowed object. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the desired behaviors by constructing a poisoned dataset and implementing an attention-regularized tuning strategy. |
Document-level Event Extraction via Heterogeneous Graph-based Interaction Model with a Tracker (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level event extraction are not effective due to two challenges . existing methods fail to extract events whose arguments spread in multiple sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction model with a tracker to capture interdependency among the extracted events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large-scale dataset by 2.8 F1 . it extracts multiple correlated events and event arguments that scatter across the document . |
Premise-based Multimodal Reasoning: Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues (2022.acl-long)
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Qingxiu Dong, Ziwei Qin, Heming Xia, Tian Feng, Shoujie Tong, Haoran Meng, Lin Xu, Zhongyu Wei, Weidong Zhan, Baobao Chang, Sujian Li, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Existing work in vision language cross-modal reasoning uses binary or multi-choice classification based on source image and textual query. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a textual premise is the background presumption on each source image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a dataset of 15,360 movie screenshots and human-curated premise templates from 6 pre-defined categories. |
Keywords and Instances: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework Unifying Hybrid Granularities for Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Mingzhe Li, XieXiong Lin, Xiuying Chen, Jinxiong Chang, Qishen Zhang, Feng Wang, Taifeng Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Wei Chu, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on contrastive learning on the instance level without discriminating the contribution of each word. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism which can unify semantic meaning in the input text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on storytelling, paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks. |
QUDSELECT: Selective Decoding for Questions Under Discussion Parsing (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Question Under Discussion (QUD) uses implicit questions to reveal discourse relationships between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that selectively decodes the QUD dependency structures considering the QUC criteria. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models by 9% in human evaluation and 4% in automatic evaluation. |
DimonGen: Diversified Generative Commonsense Reasoning for Explaining Concept Relationships (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that describe concepts in everyday situations are difficult to summarize in a single sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose DimonGen, which generates sentences describing concept relationships in everyday scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of quality and diversity of generated sentences. |
MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Long Documents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal document retrieval are lacking for evaluating performance of systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates page-level and layout-level retrieval tasks . they use a rich dataset featuring 1,685 questions annotated by experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in page-level and layout-level retrieval tasks. |
Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing (2024.naacl-short)
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Jiabao Ji, Bairu Hou, Zhen Zhang, Guanhua Zhang, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks can cause LLMs to make wrong predictions on downstream tasks or generate harmful content misaligned with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose to use randomized smoothing to add noise to the input and then make predictions based on these denoised versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods in both empirical and certified robustness in defending against adversarial perturbations for both downstream tasks and human alignments (i.e., jailbreak attacks). |
Zero-Shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Tuning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to zero-shot text classification use pre-trained language models or large-scale annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised learning paradigm to solve zero-shot text classification tasks by tuning the language models with unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 7 out of 10 tasks and is less sensitive to prompt design. |
Part Represents Whole: Improving the Evaluation of Machine Translation System Using Entropy Enhanced Metrics (2022.findings-aacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine translation metrics have poor correlations with human assessments . entropy-based evaluations are often limited to a limited number of samples . |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and unsupervised approach to enhance machine translation metrics using entropy by introducing sentence-level difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing metrics on five sub-tracks in the WMT19 Metrics shared tasks. |
Understanding Points of Correspondence between Sentences for Abstractive Summarization (2020.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Using points of correspondence, fusion systems are difficult for abstractive summarizers because of their complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to model points of correspondence between disparate sentences by combining documents, source and fusion sentences, and human annotations of points of correspondance between sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between coreference resolution and summarization by using human annotations of points of correspondence between sentences. |
SMASH: Improving SMAll Language Models’ Few-SHot Ability with Prompt-Based Distillation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale language models with prompts have shown remarkable performance on few-shot learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to improve SMAll language models’ few-SHot ability by training on intermediate tasks before prompt-based fine-tuning on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on sentence-pair and sentiment classification tasks by training on intermediate tasks before fine-tuning on downstream tasks. |
Scoring Sentence Singletons and Pairs for Abstractive Summarization (P19-1)
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Logan Lebanoff, Kaiqiang Song, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Seokhwan Kim, Walter Chang, Fei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for summarizing content from single sentences are inadequately understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine singletons and pairs to create a summarizing sentence . they use a dataset of human-written abstracts to examine human-writing methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on human-written abstracts from three large datasets. |
An Anchor-Based Automatic Evaluation Metric for Document Summarization (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-based evaluation metrics such as ROUGE have their own drawbacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a protocol for a reference-based automatic evaluation metric that requires the endorsement of source document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is anchored on source document and has higher correlation with human judgments. |
PRA-RAG: Provably Robust Aggregation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation against Retrieval Corruption (2026.findings-acl)
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Xue Tan, Yi Zheng, Chang Huo, Yunruo Zhang, Yu Liu, Hao Luan, Zhuyang Yu, Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, Ping Chen
| Challenge: | Existing defense mechanisms lack theoretical robustness guarantees and perform unreliably when the LLM has limited knowledge of the retrieved content. |
| Approach: | They propose a provably robust retrieval aggregation algorithm designed to defend against poisoning attacks on retrieved texts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PRA-RAG reduces the attack success rate to as low as 1% while maintaining an accuracy of 71%, significantly outperforming representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. |
A Two-Stream AMR-enhanced Model for Document-level Event Argument Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies aim at extracting event arguments from a single sentence . document-level event extraction still remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stream abstract meaning representation enhanced extraction model to extract event arguments from an entire document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art in extracting event arguments from documents by 2.54 F1 and 5.13 F1 on public RAMS and WikiEvents datasets. |
Beyond Text: Unveiling Privacy Vulnerabilities in Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) can process text, images, and audio, but they introduce privacy vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional structured prompt attack to exploit MRAG privacy vulnerabilities . they show that LMMs can generate outputs resembling retrieved content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates outputs resembling retrieved content and exposes sensitive information. |
HypoNLI: Exploring the Artificial Patterns of Hypothesis-only Bias in Natural Language Inference (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that for models trained on datasets for natural language inference (NLI), it is possible to make correct predictions by looking at the hypothesis while completely ignoring the premise. |
| Approach: | They propose to derive adversarial examples in terms of the hypothesis-only bias and explore eligible ways to mitigate such bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to mitigate the hypothesis-only bias by using down-sampling and adversarial training. |
Gradually Excavating External Knowledge for Implicit Complex Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have gained attention for their human-comparable capabilities but they may not solve open-domain implicit questions due to out-of-date domain knowledge, one-shot generation and restricted comprehensiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradual knowledge excavation framework for open-domain complex question answering using extrinsic knowledge and historical knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 78.17% accuracy with less than 6% parameters of its competitors, setting new SOTA in the 10B LLM class. |
How do Language Models Reshape Entity Alignment? A Survey of LM-Driven EA Methods: Advances, Benchmarks, and Future (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) is critical for knowledge graph (KG) integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods in three stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes methods in three key stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension (2024.acl-long)
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Qian Yang, Jin Xu, Wenrui Liu, Yunfei Chu, Ziyue Jiang, Xiaohuan Zhou, Yichong Leng, Yuanjun Lv, Zhou Zhao, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for audio-centric interaction have impeded advancements in this field . AIR-Bench evaluates LALMs' ability to understand audio signals and interact with humans . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large audio-language models to understand audio signals . they use 19 tasks with approximately 19k single-choice questions to examine single-task ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large audio-language models to understand audio signals and interact with humans in the textual format. |
EvoCoT: Overcoming the Exploration Bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) are limited by difficulty or lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving curriculum learning framework based on chain-of-thought reasoning optimization that constrains exploration space by self-generating and verifying CoT trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to solve previously unsolved problems without external supervision and is compatible with various RL fine-tuning methods. |
MatchTime: Towards Automatic Soccer Game Commentary Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing data on soccer commentary are often unsatisfactory, and the quality of existing data is often poor. |
| Approach: | They propose to manually annotate timestamps for 49 soccer matches and then use them to create a model to correct and filter existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the viewing experience of soccer and can be trained on the curated dataset. |
How Abilities in Large Language Models are Affected by Supervised Fine-tuning Data Composition (2024.acl-long)
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Guanting Dong, Hongyi Yuan, Keming Lu, Chengpeng Li, Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Wei Wang, Zheng Yuan, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a technique used to enhance multiple abilities in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to study the interplay of data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves math reasoning and code generation with increasing data amount . the proposed model size and SFT strategies can be used to learn multiple skills with different scaling patterns. |
Target-Aware Language Modeling via Granular Data Sampling (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ernie Chang, Pin-Jie Lin, Yang Li, Changsheng Zhao, Daeil Kim, Rastislav Rabatin, Zechun Liu, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Language model pretraining is the cornerstone of universal language models (LMs), creating generalpurpose representations to excel across a variety of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multi-granular tokens to sample large-scale language models for domain-specific use cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms random sampled samples on eight benchmarks with 1% of the data and performs on par with the full RefinedWeb data. |
Dynosaur: A Dynamic Growth Paradigm for Instruction-Tuning Data Curation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning do not include associating instructions with existing datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic growth paradigm for the automatic curation of instruction-tuning data . they use existing datasets to automatically construct instruction-uning datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the API cost for generating instructions and provides high-quality data. |
Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Using multiple sequence alignments (MSA) to extract evolutionary knowledge is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple sequence alignments to augment protein representations . they propose to employ Retrieved Sequence Augmentation to enhance protein representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses MSA Transformer by 5% in structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster. |
LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zechun Liu, Barlas Oguz, Changsheng Zhao, Ernie Chang, Pierre Stock, Yashar Mehdad, Yangyang Shi, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Several post-training quantization methods have been shown to perform well down to 8-bits. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-free distillation method that leverages generations produced by the pre-trained model to quantize any generative model independent of its training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SoTA PTQ and LLaMA models at low bit precision. |
Revisiting Who’s Harry Potter: Towards Targeted Unlearning from a Causal Intervention Perspective (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing and new datasets show that our approach achieves competitive performance in all of the criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task of LLM targeted unlearning where unlearning targets only the information about the unlearning target, rather than everything in the unlearned documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance on existing and new datasets without optimizing for the aforementioned criteria. |
VIEWS: Entity-Aware News Video Captioning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Hammad Ayyubi, Tianqi Liu, Arsha Nagrani, Xudong Lin, Mingda Zhang, Anurag Arnab, Feng Han, Yukun Zhu, Xuande Feng, Kevin Zhang, Jialu Liu, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing video captioning benchmarks and models produce generic captions for videos that lack specific identification of individuals, locations, or organizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of directly summarizing news videos into captions that are entity-aware . they validate the effectiveness of their approach across three video captioning models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective across three video captioning models. |
Me-Agent: A Personalized Mobile Agent with Two-Level User Habit Learning for Enhanced Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuoxin Wang, Chang Liu, Gowen Loo, Lifan Zheng, Kaiwen Wei, Huanqian Yan, Xinyi Zeng, Jingyuan Zhang, Yu Tian
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based mobile agents follow explicit user instructions without personalized needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a user preference learning strategy enhanced with a Personal Reward Model to improve personalization performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining competitive instruction execution performance. |
Continuous Relational Diffusion Driven Topic Model with Multi-grained Text for Microblog (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic models assume that there are only 0/1-state relationships between the two parties in social networks, but the relationship status in real life is more complicated. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic model that leverages unsupervised learning to mine hidden topics in document collections using multi-grained text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to microblog with multi-grained text to realize the representation of the relationship state and make up for the context and structural information lost by previous representation methods. |
Do LLMs Know and Understand Domain Conceptual Knowledge? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Concept sememe tree is a hierarchical structure that represents lexical meaning by combining sememes and their relationships. |
| Approach: | They introduce a Neighbor Semantic Structure (NSS) and a Chain-of-Thought prompting method to evaluate the effectiveness of various Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating concept sememe trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method guides LLMs through an analysis of a term’s intrinsic core concepts, essential attributes, and semantic relationships, enabling the generation of concept sememe trees. |
ATP: AMRize Then Parse! Enhancing AMR Parsing with PseudoAMRs (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) implicitly involves compound semantic annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use auxiliary tasks which are semantically or formally related to enhance AMR parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks especially in topology-related scores. |
One Shot Dominance: Knowledge Poisoning Attack on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiyuan Chang, Mingyang Li, Xiaojun Jia, Junjie Wang, Yuekai Huang, Ziyou Jiang, Yang Liu, Qing Wang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge poisoning attacks against RAG systems require multiple poisoned documents or can only function effectively on simplistic queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a more realistic knowledge poisoning attack that poisons only a single document while remaining effective for complex multi-hop questions involving complex relationships between multiple elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves success by poisoning only a single document while remaining effective for complex multi-hop questions involving complex relationships between multiple elements. |
PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain (2024.findings-acl)
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Liang Chen, Yichi Zhang, Shuhuai Ren, Haozhe Zhao, Zefan Cai, Yuchi Wang, Peiyi Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | a new multimodal decision-making benchmark evaluates the integrated capabilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal decision-making benchmark for evaluating MLLMs . they propose an automatic evaluation protocol to assess 10 prevalent ML models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves performance of multimodal large language models in three scenarios . the model is required to integrate multiple capabilities to make accurate decisions . |
DCMKC: A Dual Consistency Matching Approach for Multi-hop Question Answering in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning based on chains of thought (CoTs) fails to find logical connections between reasoning steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to match KG reasoning chains with CoTs based on semantic similarity . they use a knowledge graph to find relevant information "within" each reasoning step . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multi-answer questions with 5.1% improvement over baselines. |
Boosting LLM Agents with Recursive Contemplation for Effective Deception Handling (2024.findings-acl)
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Shenzhi Wang, Chang Liu, Zilong Zheng, Siyuan Qi, Shuo Chen, Qisen Yang, Andrew Zhao, Chaofei Wang, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant success in using LLMs as agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive framework that incorporates first-order and second-order perspective transitions into LLMs to enhance their ability to identify and counteract deceptive information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances LLMs’ ability to identify and counteract deceptive information without extra fine-tuning and data. |
Perovskite-LLM: Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models for Perovskite Solar Cell Research (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiang Liu, Penglei Sun, Shuyan Chen, Longhan Zhang, Peijie Dong, Huajie You, Yongqi Zhang, Chang Yan, Xiaowen Chu, Tong-yi Zhang
| Challenge: | a rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells has led to an exponential growth in research publications. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced system for perovskite solar cells that integrates three key components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing models in domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks. |
Learning Target-Specific Representations of Financial News Documents For Cumulative Abnormal Return Prediction (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work considers learning dense representations for news titles and abstracts . text representations can address the sparsity of discrete indicators in statistical models . |
| Approach: | They propose to use news abstracts to combine the most informative sentences in news content to learn dense representations for text elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to estimate abnormal returns of companies when compared to titles and abstracts. |
Closing the Spatial Execution Gap in Digital Whiteboards via Verifiable Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from a fundamental Spatial Execution Gap, failing to translate visual semantics into precise, schema-valid coordinate operations in interactive environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that leverages Group Relative Policy Optimization to enforce a strict Identify-Reason-Verify protocol and train on execution-verifiable rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms a state-of-the-art frontier model by 16.75% in operation accuracy. |
An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tagging tasks are limited to predefined classes and require large-scale annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose an Enhanced Span-based Decomposition method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling to generalize on emerging, resource-scare domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on two popular FSSL benchmarks, FewNERD and SNIPS, and is more robust in noisy and nested tagging scenarios. |
BOOKAGENT: Orchestrating Safety-Aware Visual Narratives via Multi-Agent Cognitive Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on illustrated storybooks decomposes this task into separate stages, limiting multi-modal grounding . et al. proposes a safety-aware multi-agent collaboration framework for high-quality, safety-conscious visual narratives . |
| Approach: | They propose a safety-aware multi-agent collaboration framework for illustrated storybooks . the framework jointly plans, scripts, illustrates, and globally corrects inconsistencies . |
| Outcome: | a novel framework outperforms existing methods in safety and coherence, and improves visual consistency . the framework is available on github at https://github.com/bogao-code/BookAgent/main . |
Open-Domain Safety Policy Construction (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Moderation layers are core component of many products built on user-generated content. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that drafts a content moderation policy based on human-written seed domain information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms definition-only and in-context learning baselines on openAI undesired content benchmarks and an in-house multimodal advertisement moderation benchmark. |
DiMo-GUI: Advancing Test-time Scaling in GUI Grounding via Modality-Aware Visual Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | DiMo-GUI is a training-free framework for GUI grounding that splits input into textual elements and iconic elements, allowing the model to reason over each modality independently using general-purpose vision-language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework for GUI grounding that leverages two core strategies: dynamic visual grounding and modality-aware optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework splits the input into textual elements and iconic elements, allowing the model to reason over each modality independently using general-purpose vision-language models. |
BLUR: A Bi-Level Optimization Approach for LLM Unlearning (2026.eacl-long)
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Hadi Reisizadeh, Jinghan Jia, Zhiqi Bu, Bhanukiran Vinzamuri, Anil Ramakrishna, Kai-Wei Chang, Volkan Cevher, Sijia Liu, Mingyi Hong
| Challenge: | Existing algorithms to unlearn knowledge and capabilities from large datasets are unclear how to best formulate the unlearning problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the hierarchical structure of the unlearning problem, where the forget problem takes priority over the retain problem, and propose an algorithm that aims to unlearn knowledge and capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms all state-of-the-art algorithms across unlearning tasks, models, and metrics. |
Writing Like the Best: Exemplar-Based Expository Text Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for expository text generation rely on extensive domain corpora and are difficult to adapt topic-specific content. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate an expository text on a new topic using an exemplar on . they propose Adaptive Imitation and a Recurrent Plan-then-Adapt framework that leverages large language models for effective adaptive imitation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing baselines in producing factual, consistent, and relevant texts for this task. |
Path Spuriousness-aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop reasoning is a common approach for query answering, but can be biased to spurious paths which coincidentally lead to the correct answer with poor explanation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that quantitatively estimates to what extent a path is spurious by a metric called Path Spuriousness (PS) they propose KG reasoning, which infers new facts along existing paths in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the agent’s ability to prevent spurious paths while keeping comparable to state-of-the-art performance. |
Learning to Control the Fine-grained Sentiment for Story Ending Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on controlling the sentiment of story endings. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic and novel framework which controls fine-grained sentiment intensity for automatic story ending generation without manually annotating sentiment labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate story endings which meet the given sentiment intensity better. |
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Context Denoising (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to ABSA use text encoders to locate important context features or remove them from input. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve ABSA with context denoising to remove noise from text . they use diffusion networks to perform denoizing process to gradually eliminate noise . paper shows that aspect-based sentiment analysis is effective for fine-grained analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves ABSA on five widely used ABSA datasets. |
How Can Synthetic Data Improve Multilingual Language Model Pretraining? A Data Quality Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages are a long-tail problem for multilingual LLMs due to limited high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that translates high-quality, knowledge-rich English data into low-resource languages . they propose SynRank, which leverages synthetic data as positive samples to train a classifier . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches handcrafted rule-based filtering by human experts and significantly improves knowledge-intensive tasks with less data. |
Learning to Fuse Sentences with Transformers for Summarization (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization systems that fuse sentences are not rewarded for correctly fusing sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the knowledge of points of correspondence between sentences to enhance their ability to fuse sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms improve the ability of the proposed summarization systems to fuse sentences and show that they can fuse sentences in a way that retains the original meaning. |
Hero-Gang Neural Model For Named Entity Recognition (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental and important task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Hero-Gang Neural structure to leverage both global and local information to promote NER by using a Transformer-based encoder and a Gang module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract local features and position information from the Hero and Gang modules, and it performs on multiple datasets. |
Sparse Progressive Distillation: Resolving Overfitting under Pretrain-and-Finetune Paradigm (2022.acl-long)
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Shaoyi Huang, Dongkuan Xu, Ian Yen, Yijue Wang, Sung-En Chang, Bingbing Li, Shiyang Chen, Mimi Xie, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Hang Liu, Caiwen Ding
| Challenge: | Conventional wisdom in pruning Transformer-based language models is that it reduces model expressiveness, but new research shows pruning increases risk of overfitting when performed at the fine-tuning phase. |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce pruning risk under pretrain-and-finetune paradigm . they propose to use knowledge distillation to improve pruning performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the leading competitors on the GLUE benchmark. |
Towards A Better Initial Policy Model For Scalable Long-CoT Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-CoT reasoning and reinforcement learning are demonstrating remarkable performance and scalability, however, there is a lack of systematic guidelines for obtaining a better initial policy model. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic guideline and a novel Re-RFT method to obtain more efficient reasoning patterns from different initial models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B model by 4.6%, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority. |
Event Detection from Social Media for Epidemic Prediction (2024.naacl-long)
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Tanmay Parekh, Anh Mac, Jiarui Yu, Yuxuan Dong, Syed Shahriar, Bonnie Liu, Eric Yang, Kuan-Hao Huang, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
| Challenge: | Social media is an easy-to-access platform providing timely updates about societal trends and events. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extract epidemic-related events from social media posts to provide early warnings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect epidemic events for three unseen epidemics of Monkeypox, Zika, and Dengue while existing models fail miserably. |
Step Potential Advantage Estimation: Harnessing Intermediate Confidence and Correctness for Efficient Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RLVR provide sparse supervision since reward arrives only after the full generation is complete. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-level reward system that extracts confidence and correctness and combines them into a Step Potential signal that explicitly estimates reasoning state at each step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks and improves accuracy while reducing response length. |
Quantification of Large Language Model Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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Sunbowen Lee, Junting Zhou, Chang Ao, Kaige Li, Xeron Du, Sirui He, Haihong Wu, Tianci Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yitao Liang, Zhoufutu Wen, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | Existing studies have revealed the robustness degra-dation caused by data distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation . they aim to identify identity cognition contradictions and analyse multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information; (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
PuzzleGPT: Emulating Human Puzzle-Solving Ability for Time and Location Prediction (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | PuzzleGPT is a modular and iterative puzzlesolving method for predicting time and location from images. |
| Approach: | They propose to formalize this ability into core skills and implement it using different modules in an expert pipeline called PuzzleGPT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large VLMs and finetuned models on TARA and WikiTilo and rivals or surpasses finetuned models. |
Global and Local Hierarchical Prompt Tuning Framework for Multi-level Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods to recognize hierarchical discourse relations without explicit connectives are inefficient and ignore the utilization of the output probability distribution information of the verbalizer. |
| Approach: | They propose a global and local hierarchical prompt tuning framework which leverages top-up propagated probability as the global hierarchy to inject it into multi-level verbalizer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive results on two benchmacks. |
Incorporating Glosses into Neural Word Sense Disambiguation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural networks for Word Sense Disambiguation rely on labeled data and lexical knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a gloss-augmented WSD neural network which integrates context and glosses of the target word into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art systems on several English all-words WSD datasets. |
Proximity-Based Multi-Turn Optimization: Practical Credit Assignment for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing group-based policy optimization methods rely on statistical deviation within discrete batches, misallocating credit when task difficulty fluctuates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-turn LLM agents that integrates global context . they propose GRPO, which integrates success-rate-aware modulation and proximity-based soft aggregation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields performance gains over existing baselines with negligible computational cost. |
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Yiming Liang, Leo Jin, Junting Zhou, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Mingshan Chang, Tianyu Zheng, Xincheng Zhang, Nuo Ma, Zekun Moore Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Haihong Wu, Hongquan Lin, Wenhao Huang, Jiajun Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Jie Fu, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for Chinese instruction tuning are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese instruction tuning datasets to improve instruction fine-tuning for Chinese users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that Chinese models achieve competitive performance in diverse benchmarks. |
Knowledge Control for Responsible Generative AI: Bridging Academia, Industry, and Society (2026.acl-tutorials)
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Zheyuan Liu, Yixin Wan, Kai-Wei Chang, Meng Jiang, Jieyu Zhao, Nouha Dziri, Yuning Mao, Jia-Chen Gu, Jindong Gu
| Challenge: | This tutorial introduces the foundations of post-training knowledge control and showcases recent frontier methods. |
| Approach: | This tutorial introduces the foundations of post-training knowledge control and showcases recent frontier methods. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial introduces the foundations of post-training knowledge control and showcases recent frontier methods . key motivations and failure modes, harmful generation and stereotype reinforcement, are addressed . core methods such as machine unlearning, knowledge editing, and inference-time interventions are also included . |
RouteLMT: Learned Sample Routing for Hybrid LLM Translation Deployment (2026.acl-industry)
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Yingfeng Luo, Hongyu Liu, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Chenglong Wang, Bei Li, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing routing strategies rely on heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to capture whether the large model provides a worthwhile improvement over the small one. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget allocation problem for routing large model to large model . they propose heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to determine the optimal signal for budgeted decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms heuristics, quality/difficulty estimation baselines and achieves a superior quality–budget Pareto frontier. |
𝜙-Decoding: Adaptive Foresight Sampling for Balanced Inference-Time Exploration and Exploitation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference-time optimization strategies address the shortsightedness of auto-regressive generation, but the vast search space leads to excessive exploration and insufficient exploitation. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy that approximates two distributions via foresight and clustering to provide an efficient estimation of step value. |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoding strategy outperforms strong baselines in performance and efficiency. |
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries (2026.acl-long)
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Ki Sen Hung, Xi Yang, Chang Liu, Haoran Li, Kejiang Chen, Changxuan Fan, Tsun On Kwok, Weiming Zhang, Xiaomeng Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a goal of LLM alignment is to balance usefulness with harmlessness, but this conflictes when knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines safety-research contexts with adversarial interactions to exploit a vulnerability in Jargon queries. |
| Outcome: | a framework outperforms existing methods in analyzing Jargon queries, a study shows . it achieves 93% of attacks across seven models, while remaining useful, the authors say . |
Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Suyuchen Wang, Jinlin Wang, Xinyu Wang, Shiqi Li, Xiangru Tang, Sirui Hong, Xiao-Wen Chang, Chenglin Wu, Bang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fidelity to contexts rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches without improving utilization of the given context. |
| Approach: | They propose a native retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that integrates in-context evidence with the model’s own retrieval capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation methods, and external retrieval solutions on multiple real-world and counterfactual QA benchmarks. |
Asclepius: A Spectrum Evaluation Benchmark for Medical Multi-Modal Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Liu, Wenxuan Wang, Su Yihang, Jingyuan Huang, Yudi Zhang, Cheng-Yi Li, Wenting Chen, Xiaohan Xing, Kao-Jung Chang, Linlin Shen, Michael R. Lyu
| Challenge: | Medical Multi-Modal Large Language Models (Med-MLLMs) are a promising new form of artificial general intelligence due to their ability to tackle complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that comprehensively assesses medical multi-modal large language models in terms of distinct medical specialties and different diagnostic capacities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers 15 medical specialties and different diagnostic capacities, and excludes overlap with existing VQA dataset. |
LANTERN in the Event Stream: Training-Free Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting by Balancing Inertia and Shifts (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Temporal knowledge graph forecasting (TKGF) uses long-window strengthscores and short-windowed novelty scores to predict missing entities in future queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-freeprompting framework that uses two perspectives of history to predict missing entities in future queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselineAnRe framework in ICEWS14, ICEW05-15, and GDELT. |
Decompose, Fuse and Generate: A Formation-Informed Method for Chinese Definition Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing definition generation methods take the source word as an indecomposable semantic unit, but in parataxis languages like Chinese, word meanings can be composed using the word formation process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use word formation features to enhance Definition Generation (DG) in Chinese to generate an explanatory text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enhances Definition Generation (DG) in Chinese by decomposing the word meaning into different semantic components. |
POSQA: Probe the World Models of LLMs with Size Comparisons (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Embodied language comprehension emphasizes that language understanding is not only mental processing in the brain but also involves interactions with the physical and social environment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a physical object size question to examine the extremity of large language models to test their embodied comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that even the largest LLMs perform poorly under the zero-shot setting. |
ProphetChat: Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Simulation of Future Conversation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | generative dialogue models use dialogue histories to generate the response . however, generating a response based on the historical information is not easy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes simulated dialogue futures to enhance response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate better responses over strong baselines on two open-domain dialogue datasets. |
Attend, Select and Eliminate: Accelerating Multi-turn Response Selection with Dual-attention-based Content Elimination (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models can be used to perform multi-turn response selection, but they can be expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework and a strategy that progressively selects and eliminates unimportant content under context-response dual-attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can effectively speed-up SOTA models without much performance degradation and shows a better trade-off between speed and performance than previous methods. |
BIPEFT: Budget-Guided Iterative Search for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Pretrained Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning are limited by computational and storage requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget-guided iterative search strategy to disentangle binary module and rank dimension search spaces and early selection strategies based on parameter budgets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves search efficiency on public benchmarks. |
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, but many benchmarks suffer from systematic biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to avoid Type-I errors by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark avoids Type-I errors while maintaining reliability of MCQ evaluations. |
Are LLMs Capable of Data-based Statistical and Causal Reasoning? Benchmarking Advanced Quantitative Reasoning with Data (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Quantitative reasoning with data is a critical skill to analyze data, yet the assessment of such ability remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a quantitative reasoning with data benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' ability in statistical and causal reasoning with real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model GPT-4 achieves an accuracy of 58%, while open-source model Deepseek-coder-instruct gets the highest accuracy of 37%. |
DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade (2024.naacl-long)
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Zefan Cai, Xin Zheng, Tianyu Liu, Haoran Meng, Jiaqi Han, Gang Yuan, Binghuai Lin, Baobao Chang, Yunbo Cao
| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language understanding are based on a well-defined intent 1 ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrain the natural language understanding model as new data from real users are merged into existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that the semantically entangled intents can be recognized with an automatic workflow. |
R-LoRA: Randomized Multi-Head LoRA for Efficient Multi-task Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) improves performance in multi-task learning by diversifying the head matrices through Multi-Head Dropout and Multi-head Random Initialization. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptive approach to fine-tune large language models by approximating weight updates through low-ranked matrices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance in multi-task learning while reducing memory usage and training time. |
Transferring General Multimodal Pretrained Models to Text Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text recognition rely on large-scale pretraining on human-annotated or synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transfer multimodal pretrained models to text recognition using image captioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Chinese text recognition benchmark. |
Leveraging Gloss Knowledge in Neural Word Sense Disambiguation by Hierarchical Co-Attention (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for Word Sense Disambiguation use labeled data, but lack gloss knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-attention mechanism to generate co-dependent representations for context and gloss . they propose to incorporate gloss knowledge into neural networks for Word Sense Disambiguation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on standard English all-words WSD datasets. |
Towards Unified Representations of Knowledge Graph and Expert Rules for Machine Learning and Reasoning (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical study shows superiority of proposed method over time-tested knowledge-driven and data-driven methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive knowledge graph that unifies expert rules and relational facts as the substrate of machine learning and reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show the proposed method superior to time-tested methods . the proposed model can perform both learning and reasoning with labeled data . |
SEARCH-R: Structured Entity-Aware Retrieval with Chain-of-Reasoning Navigator for Multi-hop Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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FU Yuqing, Yimin Deng, Wanyu Wang, Yuhao Wang, Yejing Wang, Hongshi Liu, Yiqi Wang, Xiao Han, Maolin Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Yi Chang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering lack effective control over reasoning paths, leading to astray results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-hop question answering that trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator . it is able to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model . |
Surfer100: Generating Surveys From Web Resources, Wikipedia-style (2022.lrec-1)
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Irene Li, Alex Fabbri, Rina Kawamura, Yixin Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jaesung Tae, Chang Shen, Sally Ma, Tomoe Mizutani, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Recent work on Wikipedia page generation focuses on generating the initial leading paragraph of a page, while recent pretrained language models improve upon both extractive and abstractive steps of previous models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained language model that can be combined to generate Wikipedia-style summaries with sections using 100 reference human-collected surveys. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with existing methods with 100 human-collected surveys. |
Unlocking the Black Box of Latent Reasoning: An Interpretability-Guided Approach to Intervention (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) lack a coherent representation of reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of latent reasoning interventions that enable latent thinking and decode-time interventions that refine the latent process by imposing the identified geometric and semantic priors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models unlock latent capabilities and improve reasoning accuracy without any parameter updates. |
Enhancing Agentic Textual Graph Retrieval with Synthetic Stepwise Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Ge Chang, Jinbo Su, Jiacheng Liu, Pengfei Yang, Yuhao Shang, Huiwen Zheng, Hongli Ma, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating textual graphs with LLMs are limited by symbolic inference and high annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual graph reasoning framework that integrates textual diagrams with large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 15.6% accuracy and 17.2% in F1 score on three common datasets. |