Papers by Chao Li
EAGLE-2: Faster Inference of Language Models with Dynamic Draft Trees (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a new technique of context-aware dynamic draft tree into drafting modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves speedup ratios of up to **5x**, which is 1.3x that of EAGLE. |
Graph Reasoning for Question Answering with Triplet Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to answer complex questions require reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) state-of-the-art methods constrain retrieved knowledge in local subgraphs and discard more diverse triplets that are disconnected but useful for question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve the most relevant triplets from KGs and then rerank them, which are then concatenated with questions to be fed into language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on commonsenseQA and OpenbookQA datasets with 4.6% absolute accuracy. |
DisCo_Speech: Controllable Zero-Shot Speech Generation with A Disentangled Speech Codec (2026.acl-long)
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Tao Li, Wenshuo Ge, Zhichao Wang, Zihao Cui, Yong Ma, Yingying Gao, Chao Deng, Shilei Zhang, Junlan Feng
| Challenge: | DisCo-Speech is a zero-shot controllable text-to-speech framework . standard codecs entangle timbre and prosody, which hinders independent control in continuation-based LMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a disentangled speech codec and an LM-based generator to solve this problem . they propose fusion and reconstruction that merges content and prosody into unified tokens . |
| Outcome: | DisCo-Speech achieves competitive voice cloning and superior zero-shot prosody control. |
Doc2SoarGraph: Discrete Reasoning over Visually-Rich Table-Text Documents via Semantic-Oriented Hierarchical Graphs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on document visual question answering fails to capture the differences and correlations between elements of a document and associated questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-visual question-answering challenge that exploits element-level semantics and employs hierarchical Graph structures to capture differences and correlations between elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art method and large language model in terms of Exact Match (EM) metric, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness. |
Boosting Multi-modal Keyphrase Prediction with Dynamic Chain-of-Thought in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qihang Ma, Shengyu Li, Jie Tang, Dingkang Yang, null Chenshaodong, Yingyi Zhang, Chao Feng, Ran Jiao
| Challenge: | Multi-modal keyphrase prediction (MMKP) aims to produce concise, informative phrases that capture the essence of cross-modal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models to generate conclusive phrases using multiple modalities of input information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods on absence and unseen scenarios and overestimate model capability due to overlap in training tests. |
Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Introducing **MARK**, a framework for cultural value survey simulation . based on type dynamics theory, it improves accuracy and interpretation of models . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates psychological theory into cultural value survey simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the World Values Survey by 10% accuracy and reduces divergence between model predictions and human preferences. |
Beyond Token Length: Step Pruner for Efficient and Accurate Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods for large reasoning models suffer from excessive verbosity, known as "overthinking." Existing models penalize generated tokens to promote conciseness, but these methods encounter two challenges: they may develop hacking behavior in later stages of training by discarding reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that steers large reasoning models toward more efficient reasoning . they prioritize correctness while imposing penalties for redundant steps . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by 69.7% on AIME24. |
Do LLMs Catch Their Own Mistakes? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Reflective Tool Use LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate planning and execution success, overlooking the self-reflective dimension of tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs’ self-reflective reasoning in tool-augmented multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 10 domains with 88 distinct APIs and 968 annotated dialogues, systematically injecting diverse error types arising from both user and assistant behavior. |
Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Cognitive science and symbolic AI research suggest that event causality provides vital information for story understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for event causality identification that leads to material improvements in story understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves story understanding on the COPES dataset . it achieves 4.1-10.9% increase on Clip Accuracy and 4.2-13.5% increase on Sentence IoU . |
PLATO-Ad: A Unified Advertisement Text Generation Framework with Multi-Task Prompt Learning (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Zeyang Lei, Chao Zhang, Xinchao Xu, Wenquan Wu, Zheng-yu Niu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Yi Yang, Shuanglong Li
| Challenge: | Online advertisement text generation models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality text ads, but some challenges remain, such as low-resource scenarios and training efficiency for multiple ad tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified text ad generation framework with multi-task prompt learning to tackle low-resource ade generation problem and a multi-step prompt learning mechanism to efficiently solve multiple aed generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on offline and online metrics. |
Enhancing Dialogue Summarization with Topic-Aware Global- and Local- Level Centrality (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on three public dialogue summarization datasets: CSDS, MC, and SAMSUM. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-aware global-local centrality model to help select the salient context from all sub-topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three public dialogue summarization datasets: CSDS, MC, and SAMSUM. |
Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion from Hierarchical Perspective (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models require only a few associative triples to complete a relationship. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform data augmentation from two perspectives to solve the FKGC problem by inferring new triple facts from existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a number of existing models. |
Rethinking Personality Assessment from Human-Agent Dialogues: Fewer Rounds May Be Better Than More (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing personality assessment datasets based on natural language do not consider interactivity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dataset to study the effects of different interaction rounds and agent personalities on personality assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 1260 interaction rounds between humans and agents with different personalities. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Type-Driven Multi-Turn Corrections for Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on data augmentation to combat exposure bias . but data augmented models lack the ability to recognize the procedure of gradual corrections . |
| Approach: | They propose a type-driven multi-turn corrections approach that uses multiple training instances to train dominant models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art single-model performance on English GEC benchmarks. |
An Effective Pronunciation Assessment Approach Leveraging Hierarchical Transformers and Pre-training Strategies (2024.acl-long)
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Bi-Cheng Yan, Jiun-Ting Li, Yi-Cheng Wang, Hsin Wei Wang, Tien-Hong Lo, Yung-Chang Hsu, Wei-Cheng Chao, Berlin Chen
| Challenge: | Existing attempts to quantify a second language learner’s pronunciation proficiency in a target language often sideline the hierarchy of linguistic units and relatedness among the pronunciation aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical automatic pronunciation assessment method that models the intrinsic structures of an utterance while considering the relatedness among the pronunciation aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to quantify a second language learner’s pronunciation proficiency in a target language by providing fine-grained feedback with multiple pronunciation aspect scores at various linguistic levels. |
Step Guided Reasoning: Improving Mathematical Reasoning using Guidance Generation and Step Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve mathematical reasoning require extensive datasets for training or depend on few-shot methods that compromise computational accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free adaptation framework that efficiently equips general-purpose pre-trained language models with enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen2.5-72B-Math-Instruct on MMLU-STEM with a score of 90.9%, compared to 87.3%. |
Reinforced Product Metadata Selection for Helpfulness Assessment of Customer Reviews (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a helpful review is largely concerned with the metadata of its target product . a selector learns from both the key-value product metadata and one of its reviews to take an action . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses product metadata to assess helpfulness of free-text reviews . they use two real-world datasets from amazon.com and Yelp.com to test the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art performance with substantial improvements . it uses two real-world datasets from Amazon.com and Yelp.com . |
Automated Fine-Grained Mixture-of-Experts Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures is inadequate for model compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures . they find that expert networks exhibit distinctive channel-wise outlier distributions ." |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the Mixtral-8x7b-v0.1 architecture while maintaining minimal computational overhead. |
Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, William Wang, Xiaodan Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AVE are limited on rare attributes due to poor generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage pretraining and transfer learning to address weaknesses in existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without pretraining on rare attributes with limited training resources. |
ProgGen: Generating Named Entity Recognition Datasets Step-by-step with Self-Reflexive Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable adaptability across domains, but they are often not suitable for structured knowledge extraction tasks such as named entity recognition (NER). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that instructs LLMs to self-reflect on the specific domain and generates domain-relevant attributes for creating attribute-rich training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces NER datasets in domains with domain-relevant attributes and generates entity terms and NER context data around these entities. |
S2G-RAG: Structured Sufficiency and Gap Judging for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented QA (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation grounds language models in external evidence, but multi-hop question answering remains difficult . iterative pipelines must control what to retrieve next and when evidence is adequate. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative framework with an explicit controller, S2G-Judge . they map structured gap items into the next retrieval query to produce stable retrieval trajectories . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on TriviaQA, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA show that S2G-RAG improves multi-hop QA performance and robustness under multi-turn retrieval. |
Med-SRAF: A Multi-Agent Framework for Medical Reasoning via Semantic Routing and Agentic Fusion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods suffer from a two-part problem: semantic drift and concatenation fallacy . et al.: rapid development of Large Language Models has led to a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent retrieval augmentation framework guided by medical domain knowledge to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing general RAG baselines on five widely used medical benchmarks. |
Hierarchical Attention Generates Better Proofs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in formal theorem proving, but their token-level processing often fails to capture the inherent hierarchical nature of mathematical proofs. |
| Approach: | They propose a regularization method that aligns LLMs’ attention mechanisms with mathematical reasoning structures and establishes a five-level hierarchy from foundational elements to high-level concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves proof success rates by 2.05% on miniF2F and 1.69% on ProofNet while reducing proof complexity by 23.81% and 16.50% respectively. |
Calibrated Speculative Decoding: Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection for Efficient Inference (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a powerful and efficient way to accelerate autoregressive generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification . they use online correction memory and Semantic Consistency Gating to analyze rejections . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. |
SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Agentic SQL is a framework for multiturn agent learning, but it is limited to single-turn paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a universal two-tiered reward mechanism for credit assignment . they propose 'Aggregated Trajectory Reward' to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models. |
MCS: An In-battle Commentary System for MOBA Games (2022.coling-1)
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Xiaofeng Qi, Chao Li, Zhongping Liang, Jigang Liu, Cheng Zhang, Yuanxin Wei, Lin Yuan, Guang Yang, Lanxiao Huang, Min Li
| Challenge: | In-battle commentary is an important component of live streaming of e-sports competitions and is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like combat information analysis and live streaming. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games and propose 'transform' method to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on real-time match statistics and events and can be used for live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis. |
Seeking Patterns, Not just Memorizing Procedures: Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models memorize procedures from context and rely on shallow heuristics to solve MWPs. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning approach where the neural network perceives the divergence of patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method greatly improves performance in monolingual and multilingual settings. |
A Novel Matching Paradigm: Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM with Prompt Compression for Relevance Learning (2026.acl-industry)
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Guoliang Zhao, Zixin Cui, Chao Ye, Dengwu He, Fei Huang, Yubo Liu, Shuanglong Li, Tzungren Kuo, Bin Ding, Shuang Zhang, null KunhongZhu, Zhi Guo, Liu Lin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to matching use Large Language Models as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a matching paradigm that integrates two-tower, single-towing, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance and strong practical value in an industrial search engine. |
Read, Listen, and See: Leveraging Multimodal Information Helps Chinese Spell Checking (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous characters for usergenerated text in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese spell checker that leverages multimodal Chinese characters' information to predict the correct output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the SIGHAN benchmarks by a large margin. |
Iron Sharpens Iron: Defending Against Attacks in Machine-Generated Text Detection with Adversarial Training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing MGT detectors are vulnerable to simple perturbations and adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial framework for training a robust machine-generated text detector called GREedy Adversary PromoTed DefendER. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) by 0.67% compared with SOTA defense methods. |
Handling Ambiguity in Emotion: From Out-of-Domain Detection to Distribution Estimation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that incorporating utterances without majority-agreed labels into an additional class reduces the classification performance of the other emotion classes. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine utterances without majority-agreed labels into an additional class . they propose to quantify uncertainty in emotion classification using evidential deep learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method retains classification accuracy while effectively detects ambiguous emotion expressions. |
TAG: Gradient Attack on Transformer-based Language Models (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Jieren Deng, Yijue Wang, Ji Li, Chenghong Wang, Chao Shang, Hang Liu, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Caiwen Ding
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that publicly shared gradients in the training process can reveal the private training data to a third-party. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient attack algorithm to reconstruct the local training data using GLUE benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 1.5x recover rate and 2.5x ROUGE-2 over previous methods without the need of ground truth label. |
Confidence Should Be Calibrated More Than One Turn Deep (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on confidence estimation and calibration focuses on single-turn settings . existing work on multi-turn calibration ignores the risks and potential of multi-turned conversations . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn calibration task that reframes calibration from a static property into a dynamic challenge central to reliable multi- turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model minimizes ECE@T and leverages ConfChat to improve confidence . the proposed model preserves and even enhances model performance in multi-turn interactions. |
Multi-Stage LLM Fine-Tuning with a Continual Learning Setting (2025.findings-naacl)
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Changhao Guan, Chao Huang, Hongliang Li, You Li, Ning Cheng, Zihe Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jian Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in knowledge-intensive applications, but they may face a multi-stage continuous learning scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage continuous learning paradigm that includes a preference-based learning bias to identify potential knowledge conflicts and a self-distillation-based data augmentation strategy to expand and enrich the training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm achieves a significant improvement in accuracy after 7 stages of fine-tuning compared to previous methods while preserving general knowledge. |
Universally Empowering Zeroth-Order Optimization via Adaptive Layer-wise Sampling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models are slow and lack of performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Zeroth-Order optimization framework that uses forward passes to fine-tune Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.7 to 3.0 wall-clock acceleration on LLaMA and OPT models. |
Bit-by-Bit: Progressive QAT Strategy with Outlier Channel Splitting for Stable Low-Bit LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Binxing Xu, Hao Gu, Lujun Li, Hao Wang, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Xintong Yang, Chao Li, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training LLMs at ultra-low precisions suffer from convergence instability and substantial training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive QAT framework with outlier channel splitting to address these issues . they use nested structure of integer quantization grids to enable a "train once, deploy any precision" paradigm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on both Llama2/3 and W2A16, with an 11 speedup over BF16. |
MADS: Multi-Agent Dialogue Simulation for Diverse Persuasion Data Generation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that LLM-based agents exhibit superior moral and emotional language performance compared to humans, raising expectations for their deployment in persuasive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating persuasive multi-turn dialogues via agent self-play using user agents designed to simulate diverse persona-driven behaviors, a Dialog Agent executing task-oriented persuasion strategies and an Optimization Agent evaluating and refining dialogue outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improved the persuasion capacity of small LLMs, increasing the organic traffic conversion rate by 22.4% (from 1.83% to 2.24%) . |
Do LLMs Behave as Claimed? Investigating How LLMs Follow Their Own Claims using Counterfactual Questions (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks rely on curated datasets that, once public, may be accessed by newer LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates counterfactual questions and answers from existing evaluation datasets and uses them to evaluate LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework reduces the risk of data leakage by allowing the LLMs to respond to counterfactual questions and verify their claims. |
Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhijun Wang, Jiahuan Li, Hao Zhou, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They investigate the existence of code-switching in the pre-training corpus and categorize it into four types within two quadrants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across benchmarks and representation space. |
HyperIDP: Customizing Temporal Hypergraph Neural Networks for Multi-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on information diffusion prediction have focused on both macroscopic and microscopic scales. |
| Approach: | They propose a hypergraph-based model that manages both macroscopic and microscopic diffusion predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on both macroscopic and microscopic tasks. |
Can LLMs Learn Uncertainty on Their Own? Expressing Uncertainty Effectively in A Self-Training Manner (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit excessive, random, and uninformative uncertainty rendering them unsuitable for decision-making in human-computer interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose an uncertainty-aware instruction tuning method that aligns LLMs’ perception with the probabilistic uncertainty of the generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' performance by 45.2%, with reasonably good out-of-domain generalization capabilities. |
Improving Consistency for Text Summarization with Energy Functions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Qi Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Sreyashi Nag, Zhengyang Wang, Bing Yin, Heng Ji, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Current abstractive summarization models generate inconsistent content due to the inherently noisy dataset and the discrepancy between maximum likelihood estimation based training objectives and consistency measurements. |
| Approach: | They propose a new consistency taxonomy that categorizes inconsistent content into faithfulness, factuality, and self-supportiveness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on XSUM and CNN/DM datasets show that EnergySum mitigates the trade-off between accuracy and consistency. |
Training Language Model to Critique for Better Refinement (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianshu Yu, Chao Xiang, Mingchuan Yang, Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Cunxiang Wang, Jiale Cheng, Li Zhang, Xinyu Mu, Chuxiong Sun, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable evaluation and critique capabilities, providing insightful feedback and identifying flaws in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train critic models using refinement signals to generate feedback loops where critiques guide the model in refining its responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods and open-source models in terms of critique quality and refinement outcomes. |
Speech-Text Pre-training for Spoken Dialog Understanding with Explicit Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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Tianshu Yu, Haoyu Gao, Ting-En Lin, Min Yang, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing speech-text pre-training methods are limited to one or two specific tasks, despite their success in speech-language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal position prediction task to capture the speech-text alignment . they use a textual dialog pre-training task to generalize a response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior in learning speech-text alignment and multi-turn dialog context. |
ReSel: N-ary Relation Extraction from Scientific Text and Tables by Learning to Retrieve and Select (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Our proposed method extracts N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decomposes the task into two stages . they propose modal query and modal entity selection . their results show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three scientific information extraction datasets. |
Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Alexander Bukharin, Shiyang Li, Zhengyang Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Bing Yin, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Tuo Zhao, Haoming Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to control diversity and quality of instruction tuning datasets and validate it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm significantly improves worst and average case performance on large scale instruction tuning datasets. |
Can LMs Generalize to Future Data? An Empirical Analysis on Text Summarization (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization benchmarks overlap in time with pre-training corpora and fine-tuning datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal generalization benchmark that contains data samples from 2010 to 2022 to understand the temporal ability of abstractive summarization models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark analyzes data samples from 2010 to 2022 to understand the temporal generalization ability of abstractive summarization models. |
VisAidMath: Benchmarking Visual-Aided Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Multi-modal Models lack a robust visual processing capability that is often masked by evaluation metrics that prioritize final-answer accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-layer evaluation framework that scrutinizes the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps on state-of-the-art models. |
Idea23D: Collaborative LMM Agents Enable 3D Model Generation from Interleaved Multimodal Inputs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing 3D AIGC methods don’t fully unleash human creativity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates 3D content from multimodal inputs . they propose 198 multimodal text inputs for 3D generation tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates 3D content from multimodal inputs without human intervention. |
Towards Modeling Role-Aware Centrality for Dialogue Summarization (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialogue summarization consider roles separately where interactions among different roles are not fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel role-aware centrality model to capture role interactions by involving role prompts to control what kind of summary to generate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two public benchmark datasets, CSDS and MC. |
How to Leverage Demonstration Data in Alignment for Large Language Model? A Self-Imitation Learning Perspective (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models are not suitable for task-dependent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized self-imitation learning framework which aligns large language models with offline demonstration data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in many challenging benchmarks . it is available on github.com/tengxiao1/GSIL . |
Assessing Logical Puzzle Solving in Large Language Models: Insights from a Minesweeper Case Study (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in language understanding and have been successfully applied to a variety of real-world tasks through task-specific fine-tuning or prompt engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that challenges LLMs to identify the locations of mines based on numerical clues provided by adjacent cells. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task requires an understanding of each cell’s state, discerning spatial relationships between clues and mines, and strategizing actions based on logical deductions drawn from the arrangement of the cells. |
Reasoning in the Dark: Interleaved Vision-Text Reasoning in Latent Space (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal reasoning methods depend on explicit reasoning steps that require labor-intensive vision-text annotations and inherently introduce significant inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates visual and visual information into the reasoning process to improve the performance of multimodal LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average performance increase of 5.45% while achieving a speed increase of over 5 times compared to existing methods. |
ConsistTL: Modeling Consistency in Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing transfer learning methods for low-resource NMT are static, which simply transfer knowledge from a parent model to a child model once via parameter initialization. |
| Approach: | They propose a transfer learning method that can continuously transfer knowledge from the parent model during the training of the child model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transfer knowledge from the parent model to the child model during the training of the child. |
RU22Fact: Optimizing Evidence for Multilingual Explainable Fact-Checking on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify factuality of claims do not provide sufficient evidence for explainable fact-checking systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and a novel multilingual explainable fact-checking dataset on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and generate explanations in 16 languages. |
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Qin Lu, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Puyang Xu, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
| Challenge: | Existing work on reinforcement learning has focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns directly from online interactions by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, guided by binary rewards depending on task success. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark show that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models. |
BERTifying the Hidden Markov Model for Multi-Source Weakly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing NER models are supervised by a large number of training sequences, each pre-annotated with token-level labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional hidden Markov model which can effectively infer true labels from multi-source noisy labels in an unsupervised way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised NER models on four benchmarks from various domains. |
DEPN: Detecting and Editing Privacy Neurons in Pretrained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that pretrained language models memorize and regurgitate a significant portion of training data, including atypical data points that appear only once in the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to locate and erase risky neurons in order to eliminate the impact of privacy data in the model in batches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the impact of privacy data in the model in batches without affecting the model's performance. |
End-to-End Optimization of LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Search Systems via Heterogeneous-Group-Based Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods depend on large critic networks to evaluate joint actions, leading to instability and high memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize large language models for agent-specific roles . they propose combining agent-based frameworks with retrieval-augmented generation . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that multi-agent group policy optimization outperforms baselines in task performance and computational efficiency. |
DORM: Preference Data Weights Optimization for Reward Modeling in LLM Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rongzhi Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Liang Qiu, Haoming Jiang, Yuchen Zhuang, Qingru Zhang, Hyokun Yun, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Tuo Zhao, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences are noisy and varying in importance of preference samples. |
| Approach: | a new method enhances reward modeling by learning to dynamically weigh preference data. |
| Outcome: | a new method improves the performance of large language models with human preferences . it initializes data importance and iteratively refines them to maximize validation performance. |
UrbanLLM: Autonomous Urban Activity Planning and Management with Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | UrbanLLM is a fine-tuned large language model designed to tackle diverse urban problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuned large language model to tackle diverse urban problems . UrbanLLM decomposes urban-related queries into manageable sub-tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in urban planning and management tasks. |
Denoising Multi-Source Weak Supervision for Neural Text Classification (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of deep neural networks (DNNs) for text classification problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a label denoiser which estimates the source reliability using a conditional soft attention mechanism and reduces label noise by aggregating rule-annotated weak labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on sentiment, topic, and relation classifications and achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods even without labeled data. |
GenDis: Generative-Discriminative Dual-View Co-Training for Generalized Category Discovery (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on one-hot discriminative supervision, leading to overfitting on seen classes and poor generalization to unseen ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative–Discriminative Dual-View Co-Training framework that unifies discriminative classification and semantic label generation within an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five benchmarks on the generalized category discovery (GCD) task. |
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuanfu Wang, Pengyu Wang, Chenyang Xi, Bo Tang, Junyi Zhu, Wenqiang Wei, Chen Chen, Chao Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Yijun Niu, Keming Mao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang
| Challenge: | Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%. |
TranSHER: Translating Knowledge Graph Embedding with Hyper-Ellipsoidal Restriction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods restrict entities on hyper-ellipsoid surfaces, resulting in suboptimal knowledge graph completion. |
| Approach: | They propose a score function that leverages relation-specific translations between head and tail entities to relax constraints on hyper-ellipsoid surfaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on link prediction and generalizes well to datasets in different domains and scales. |
Extracting Shopping Interest-Related Product Types from the Web (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing e-commerce products are limited in their ability to assist customers in interest-oriented shopping. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract PTs from Web pages containing hand-crafted PT recommendations for SIs . they propose to use tree-transformer encoders for node classification to improve inter-node dependency modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best baseline model by 2.37 F1 points on a WebPT dataset. |
Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Bowen Li, Haiyang Yu, Jinyang Li, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Nevin Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) rely on general pre-trained language models without a tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures causal relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a causally-complete dataset construction strategy for developing million-scale DocGD pre-training corpora and a perturbation-based strategy to capture causality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy yields significant and consistent improvements in fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. |
MMAD:Multi-modal Movie Audio Description (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods of creating accessible movies rely on manual work, resulting in high costs and limited scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal movie audio description pipeline that generates narrations of information that is not accessible through unimodal hearing in movies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses existing baselines in performance on widely used datasets. |
AiM: Taking Answers in Mind to Correct Chinese Cloze Tests in Educational Applications (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct handwritten assignments are to use OCR to recognize characters and compare them to answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach to correct handwritten Chinese characters by combining the visual information of students' handwriting with the encoded representations of answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. |
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yudong Yang, Jimin Zhuang, Guangzhi Sun, Changli Tang, Yixuan Li, Peihan Li, Yifan Jiang, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information. |
Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) models can be used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a more practical and universal attack that does not require the presence of a target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses both text and image safety checkers while preserving high semantic alignment with the target prompt. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, but they introduce safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified benchmark to assess the trustworthiness of Large Reasoning Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates truthfulness, safety and efficiency on 26 models. |
GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval methods neglect the explicit legal logic that underpins legal relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates retrieval as an inference process over latent legal variables. |
| Outcome: | GLIER outperforms strong baselines like SAILER and KELLER in a legal case-based retrieval task . the framework exhibits exceptional data efficiency even when trained with only 10% of the data . |
To Code or not to Code? Adaptive Tool Integration for Math Language Models via Expectation-Maximization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools that integrate chain-of-thought reasoning and code execution lack metacognitive awareness to integrate tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergizes structured exploration with off-policy RL optimization to create a cycle between metacognitive tool-use decisions and evolving capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over 11% on MATH500 and 9.4% on AIME without o1-like CoT. |
Fact-based Text Editing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact-based text editing are not suitable for all situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for automatically generating a dataset with a draft text, revised text, and several facts represented in triples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the encoder-decoder approach on two datasets and shows that it conducts inference faster than the encoded-decoding approach. |
Can Reasoning Path still be Effective as Input? Bridging Post-Reasoning to Chain-of-Thought Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing work on reducing CoT generation in reasoning impairs the necessary information for deriving the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning paradigm that takes CoT as a part of context to simplify the reasoning task for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the generation length of LLMs, but its effectiveness hinges on the efficiency and reliability of the contextual CoT generation. |
Document Graph for Neural Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level NMT methods fail to leverage contexts beyond a few set of previous sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent a document as a graph that connects relevant contexts regardless of distances. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on IWSLT English–French, Chinese-English, WMT English–German and Opensubtitle English–Russian show that using document graphs can significantly improve translation quality. |
kNN-TL: k-Nearest-Neighbor Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Transfer learning is an effective technique for enhancing low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) however, these methods do not make use of the parent knowledge during the child inference, which may limit the translation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a k-Nearest-Neighbor Transfer Learning approach which leverages the parent knowledge throughout the entire developing process of the child model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines on four low-resource translation tasks. |
Zero-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities of Large Language Models Iteratively without Gold Labels (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have demonstrated remarkable performance through supervised fine-tuning or in-context learning using gold labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm termed zero-to-strong generalization that prompts LLMs to annotate unlabeled data and retain high-quality labels by filtering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms pre-trained language models on extensive classification and reasoning tasks on multiple model sizes. |
Harnessing Pre-Trained Neural Networks with Rules for Formality Style Transfer (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies normalize informal sentences with rules, but they introduce noise if we use them in a naive way. |
| Approach: | They propose to harness rules into a state-of-the-art neural network that is typically pretrained on massive corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to generate a state-of-the-art on a small dataset. |
Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Qingyu Zhou, Zhongli Li, Li Yangning, Shulin Huang, Ruiyang Liu, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which renders Chinese Spell Checking model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework renders the CSC model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
On the Representation Geometry of LoRA Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning focus on globally shared structure . combining SVD with CUR improves performance of LoRA model merging . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that combines SVD and CUR decomposition to improve LoRA merging performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure improves on vision and language benchmarks. |
3AM: An Ambiguity-Aware Multi-Modal Machine Translation Dataset (2024.lrec-main)
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Xinyu Ma, Xuebo Liu, Derek F. Wong, Jun Rao, Bei Li, Liang Ding, Lidia S. Chao, Dacheng Tao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that visual information in existing MMT datasets is insufficient, causing models to disregard it and overestimate their capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 3AM to create an ambiguity-aware multimodal machine translation dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes more ambiguity and a greater variety of captions and images than other MMT datasets. |
LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, but are resource-intensive and require large curated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the behavioral divergence between a stronger expert model and a weaker amateur model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by up to 28.1% while reducing time consumption by 90% and tuning token usage by 99%. |
Formality Style Transfer with Shared Latent Space (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for formality style transfer use neural networks for sentence generation, but the dataset for formal style transfer is considerably smaller than translation corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach for formality style transfer using shared latent space and two auxiliary losses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines in various settings, especially when limited data is available. |
DASA-Trans-STM: Adaptive Efficient Transformer for Short Text Matching using Data Augmentation and Semantic Awareness (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have shown impressive versatility across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adaptive Transformer for Chinese short text matching using data augmentation and semantic awareness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can deal with word ambiguity in Chinese on four available datasets. |
A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Structured Language Model Output for Information Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have impressive abilities in generating unstructured natural language . performance inconsistent when tasked with producing text that adheres to structured formats . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate unstructured natural language using intermediate responses . they use the intermediate responses to organize the output into the desired structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on NER and RE tasks with minimal effort. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
RoChBert: Towards Robust BERT Fine-tuning for Chinese (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zihan Zhang, Jinfeng Li, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Xiangyu Liu, Rong Zhang, Hui Xue, Donghong Sun, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) have been proved vulnerable to adversarial texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse Chinese phonetic and glyph features into pre-trained models by using a more comprehensive adversarial graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in significant ways on a wide range of tasks while remaining accurate on benign texts. |
SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tokenizers fail to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a tokenizer that integrates spiking neurons to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer leverages historical tokenization results, but does not selectively leverage history based on contextual relevance. |
Towards Statistical Factuality Guarantee for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in image-conditioned text generation, but hallucinated outputs pose a major barrier to their use in safety-critical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a conformal-prediction-based framework that achieves finite-sample distribution-free statistical guarantees to the factuality of LVLM output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the error rate of LLaVa-1.5 claims from 87.8% to 10.0% while ensuring that the output is accurate. |
Does DetectGPT Fully Utilize Perturbation? Bridging Selective Perturbation to Fine-tuned Contrastive Learning Detector would be Better (2024.acl-long)
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Shengchao Liu, Xiaoming Liu, Yichen Wang, Zehua Cheng, Chengzhengxu Li, Zhaohan Zhang, Yu Lan, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect MGT from human-written texts are inadequate . existing methods are fine-tuned and zero-shot metric-based, but they can be more accurate. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-tuned detector that can detect MGT from human-written texts by contrastive learning on selective perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.20% on four public datasets. |
Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bohao Yang, Dong Liu, Chenghao Xiao, Kun Zhao, Chen Tang, Chao Li, Lin Yuan, Yang Guang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
Improving BERT with Syntax-aware Local Attention (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that attention-based models benefit from more focused attention over local regions. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-aware local attention which restrains attention over syntactically relevant words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on all benchmark datasets, including sentence classification and sequence labeling tasks. |
Revisiting a Pain in the Neck: A Semantic Reasoning Benchmark for Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Semantic phrases (SP) are lexical combinations whose meanings or usages may not be fully derived from their individual components. |
| Approach: | They propose to consolidate existing multiword expression resources into a unified testbed to assess language models in semantic phrase processing tasks. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite covers idiomatic expressions, noun compounds, and verbal constructions. |
LongDocURL: a Comprehensive Multimodal Long Document Benchmark Integrating Understanding, Reasoning, and Locating (2025.acl-long)
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Chao Deng, Jiale Yuan, Pi Bu, Peijie Wang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Jian Xu, Xiao-Hui Li, Yuan Gao, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding benchmarks only handle a small number of pages . existing models are limited to handling only a limited number of documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a long document understanding benchmark that integrates three primary tasks and 20 sub-tasks based on different primary tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on open-source and closed-source models . the model outpersforms other models on more than 33,000 pages of documents . |
Migician: Revealing the Magic of Free-Form Multi-Image Grounding in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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You Li, Heyu Huang, Chi Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Chao Huang, Zonghao Guo, Zhiyuan Liu, Jinan Xu, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs still struggle to achieve precise grounding in multi-image scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Thought framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension to address this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in multi-image grounding tasks by 24.94% and surpasses larger 70B models. |
LoRAExit: Empowering Dynamic Modulation of LLMs in Resource-limited Settings using Low-rank Adapters (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, but deployment on resource-limited settings remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic inference architecture that leverages low-rank adaptors for efficient deployment of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture significantly improves performance when deployed on resource-limited settings. |
MessToClean: Evidence-Grounded Structure-Preserving Reconstruction for Real-World Degraded Exam Paper Images (2026.acl-long)
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Jiayi Tuo, Cheng Tang, Zihan Wang, Chenyue Zhou, Yao Li, Yanbiao Ma, Chao Wang, Wei Dai, Mingxuan Wang, Shitong Qin, Ziwei Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) fail under RDEI, leading to disrupted structure and evidence-unsupported hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a backbone-agnostic, evidence-driven pipeline that treats off-the-shelf MLLMs as interchangeable components to improve stem consistency and figure consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves stem consistency by 1.01-3.18%, figure consistency by 0.50-49.16%, and refusal F1 by 1.06-10.88% across question types. |
Self-Adjust Softmax (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Guoxuan Chen, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Xiaozhe Ren, Chao Huang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Usually, tokens with larger attention scores are important for the final prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify softmax(z) to z softmax and its normalized variant to improve the Transformer attention mechanism by making minor adjustments to the softmax function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides enhanced gradient properties compared to the vanilla softmax function. |
Diversity and Consistency: Exploring Visual Question-Answer Pair Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks to generate question-answer pairs from visual images are under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that targets question-answer pair generation from visual images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse or consistent QAPs on two benchmarks. |
Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models have advanced the previous state-of-the-art by learning mappings between sequences via neural networks and attention mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use layer normalization to pass the combination of previous layers to the next layer to improve the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the shallow Transformer-Big/Base baseline model on English-German and Chinese-English tasks by 0.4-2.4 BLEU points. |
POLYIE: A Dataset of Information Extraction from Polymer Material Scientific Literature (2024.naacl-long)
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Jerry Cheung, Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Pranav Shetty, Wantian Zhao, Sanjeev Grampurohit, Rampi Ramprasad, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | SciIE datasets for polymer materials are lacking for this class of materials . POLYIE is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a SciIE dataset for polymer materials that uses entity annotations from 146 full-length articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles . it presents challenges due to diverse lexical formats of entities and ambiguity between entities . |
LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Liyao Li, Jiaming Tian, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Evaluating 52 LLMs reveals that only the strongest models maintain robust performance under increasing context lengths and format diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating long-context reasoning over semi-structured tables across diverse formats, tasks, and domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms compression-based approaches on tasks requiring semantic integration. |
MoEC: A Memory-Routed Mixture-of-Experts Controller for Adaptive Minecraft Control (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on a monolithic policy to execute subgoals across varying contexts, causing inconsistent outcomes and scaling only partially mitigates. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-routed mixtureof-experts controller for Adaptive Minecraft Control that routes via a subgoal-indexed expert memory and regulates capacity through failure-triggered expert growth and redundancy-aware consolidation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed controller shows significant gains in adaptability, robustness, and execution consistency over strong baselines. |
Do You Know What You Are Talking About? Characterizing Query-Knowledge Relevance For Reliable Retrieval Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhuohang Li, Jiaxin Zhang, Chao Yan, Kamalika Das, Sricharan Kumar, Murat Kantarcioglu, Bradley Malin
| Challenge: | Language models suffer from poor interpretability and transparency, as well as the intrinsic risk of hallucination and misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical framework that assesses how well a query can be answered by an RAG system by capturing the relevance of knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses how well a query can be answered by an RAG system by capturing the relevance of knowledge. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |
Semantic Map-based Generation of Navigation Instructions (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to navigation instruction generation use a sequence of panorama images as visual input. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to navigation instruction generation using semantic maps as visual input and frame it as an image captioning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a dataset of a human vision and language navigation task and human subjects are asked to manually assess the quality of the generated instructions. |
How Far Does BERT Look At: Distance-based Clustering and Analysis of BERT’s Attention (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on multi-head attention mechanism shows heuristics and clues in analyzing various aspects of the mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose to cluster attention heatmaps into significantly different patterns through unsupervised clustering on top of a set of proposed features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed features can explain and calibrate different attention heads in Transformer models. |
StablePT : Towards Stable Prompting for Few-shot Learning via Input Separation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on prompt tuning have shown that language models can be effective few-shot learners with prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose to treat the hard prompt and soft prompt as separate inputs to mitigate noise brought by prompt initialization. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.97% in accuracy and reduces the standard deviation by 1.92 on average. |
STRIDE-ED: A Strategy-Grounded Stepwise Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Dialogue Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empathetic dialogue requires not only recognizing a user’s emotional state but also making strategy-aware, context-sensitive decisions throughout response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a STRategy-grounded, interpretable, and DEep reasoning framework that models Empathetic Dialogue through structured, strategy-conditioned reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on automatic metrics and human evaluations. |
Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Using a multimodal model, GUI agents can ground from language instructions to target elements . relying on HTML or AXTree inputs is a challenge for GUI agents . |
| Approach: | They propose a large multimodal model specifically designed for GUI grounding that adopts a pure vision approach instead of auxiliary inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vision-only and AXTree-reliant models on offline and online agents. |
The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking (2022.findings-acl)
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Yinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou, Yangning Li, Zhongli Li, Ruiyang Liu, Rongyi Sun, Zizhen Wang, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors, which are caused by the phonological or visual similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Error-driven COntrastive Probability Optimization framework to refine the knowledge representations of pre-trained language models to avoid predicting common characters. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on SIGHAN datasets demonstrate that ECOPO is simple yet effective. |