Papers by Chen Gong
An In-depth Study on Internal Structure of Chinese Words (2021.acl-long)
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Chen Gong, Saihao Huang, Houquan Zhou, Zhenghua Li, Min Zhang, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Nicholas Jing Yuan
| Challenge: | Unlike English letters, Chinese characters have rich and specific meanings. |
| Approach: | They propose to model Chinese words' internal structures as dependency trees with 11 labels for distinguishing syntactic relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model of Chinese word-internal structures shows it can be used to parse sentences . it shows that the model can be applied to a sentence-level task with a competitive dependency parser. |
Convolutional Interaction Network for Natural Language Inference (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Attention-based neural models have achieved great success in natural language inference (NLI). |
| Approach: | They propose a general model to capture the interaction between two sentences, which can be an alternative to the attention mechanism for NLI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture complex interactions on three large datasets. |
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
Text Embedding as Treatment: A Meta Causal Approach for Robust Sentiment Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengxiang Cheng, Chuan Zhou, Xiang Li, Haoxuan Li, Wen-li Wang, Jinkun Chen, Mingming Gong, Kun Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment classification use binary treatment of words . Existing approaches limit generalizability to novel words and low-frequency words if there is a word in a sentence that is not treated . |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-causal approach that uses a single training task to identify causal words for arbitrary words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the spurious correlation between word treatment and sentiment classification by removing words with low treatment effects from a pre-trained language model. |
APOLLO: An Optimized Training Approach for Long-form Numerical Reasoning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate reasoning programs that ignore the differences between facts treated all facts equally, leading to wrong punishment of programs that differed from the ground truth. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimized training framework for long-form numerical reasoning that incorporates a number-aware negative sampling strategy and consistency-based reinforcement learning to increase execution accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of long-form numerical reasoning on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboards. |
CPT-Agent: A Cognitive Process Theory-driven Framework for Student Simulation in Writing Development (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs model overly capable learners who over-apply feedback, resulting in pedagogically implausible behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples cognitive ability from writing proficiency and models their interaction during writing and revision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces distinguishable proficiency levels and is consistent with instructional theories. |
DynamixSFT: Dynamic Mixture Optimization of Instruction Tuning Collections (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Several studies rely on additional models to optimize mixtures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically optimizes instruction-tuning dataset mixtures by prior-scaled Boltzmann Exploration and a multi-armed bandit setup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the TÜLU-2-mixture and TÜLO-3-mixtures across 10 benchmarks while introducing minimal computational overhead over naive sampling. |
RTQA : Recursive Thinking for Complex Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current temporal knowledge graph question answering methods focus on implicit temporal constraints and lack the capability to handle complex temporal queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph question answering framework that recursively decomposes questions into sub-problems and employs multi-path answer aggregation to improve fault tolerance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multiTQ and TimelineKGQA benchmarks. |
SafeAgent: Safeguarding LLM Agents via an Automated Risk Simulator (2026.acl-long)
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Xueyang Zhou, Weidong Wang, Lin Lu, Jiawen Shi, Guiyao Tie, Xu Yongtian, Lixing Chen, Pan Zhou, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lichao Sun
| Challenge: | SafeAgent improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms closed-source models on two safety benchmarks and one real-world task. |
Velocitune: A Velocity-based Dynamic Domain Reweighting Method for Continual Pre-training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimise pretraining performance have not addressed the complexities of domain-adaptive continual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically assesses learning velocity and adjusts data proportions accordingly, favouring slower learning domains while de-emphasising faster learning ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains in math and code reasoning tasks and command-line generation benchmarks. |
Llama SLayer 8B: Shallow Layers Hold the Key to Knowledge Injection (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment pre-trained large language models require extensive computational efforts and massive data volumes, challenging the widespread accessibility of LLM research. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-pretraining strategy of selectively enhancing shallow layers while pruning less effective deep ones to augment pretrained large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on the corpus of code & math and a legal corpus and is widely applicable. |
Think Smart, Not Hard: Difficulty Adaptive Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine whether to perform reasoning lack fine-grained mechanisms to adapt reasoning length to problem complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a difficulty-adaptive reasoning method that dynamically links reasoning length to the model’s perceived problem difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces average reasoning length by 50%, achieving higher efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. |
PaddleSpeech: An Easy-to-Use All-in-One Speech Toolkit (2022.naacl-demo)
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Hui Zhang, Tian Yuan, Junkun Chen, Xintong Li, Renjie Zheng, Yuxin Huang, Xiaojie Chen, Enlei Gong, Zeyu Chen, Xiaoguang Hu, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Liang Huang
| Challenge: | PaddleSpeech is an open-source speech toolkit that supports speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Approach: | They describe the design philosophy and core architecture of PaddleSpeech to support several essential speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various speech datasets and implements the most popular methods. |
Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing power on NLP tasks. however, tuning these models for downstream tasks usually requires exorbitant costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box tuning technique that optimizes task-specific prompts without accessing gradients and hidden representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance under few-shot learning scenarios. |
Locate and Explain: Joint Multimodal Emotion Cause Extraction and Summarization in Conversation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on utterance-level emotion cause extraction and multimodal emotion cause generation, resulting in subjective and inconsistent annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that extracts emotion cause utterances and generates cause summaries . they propose utterrance-level emotion cause extraction and multimodal emotion cause generation tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task extracts emotion cause utterances and generates cause summaries . the proposed task establishes strong benchmark results for the proposed project . |
Temp-R1: A Unified Autonomous Agent for Complex Temporal KGQA via Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhaoyan Gong, Zhiqiang Liu, Songze Li, Xiaoke Guo, Yuanxiang Liu, Xinle Deng, Zhizhen Liu, Lei Liang, Huajun Chen, Wen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on fixed workflows and expensive closed-source APIs, limiting flexibility and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal reasoning agent that trains on difficult questions first . they expand the action space with specialized internal actions alongside external action . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves 19.8% over baselines on complex questions and multi-tasks. |
AgentCourt: Simulating Court with Adversarial Evolvable Lawyer Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Guhong Chen, Liyang Fan, Zihan Gong, Nan Xie, Zixuan Li, Ziqiang Liu, Chengming Li, Qiang Qu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing legal language models struggle with dynamic courtroom interactions, resulting in overfitting to standardized legal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new adversarial evolutionary approach for agents that performs dynamic knowledge learning and evolution through structured adversarials in a simulated courtroom program. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLM-based models in three critical dimensions: cognitive agility, professional knowledge, and logical rigor. |
CoBa: Convergence Balancer for Multitask Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-task learning approaches for large language models fall short due to computational intensive or lack of simultaneous task convergence. |
| Approach: | They propose a new multi-task learning approach that dynamically adjusts task weights during the training process, ensuring that the validation loss of all tasks progresses towards convergence at an even pace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models by up to 13% compared to the second-best approaches. |
Training LLMs for Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning Elevates Test-Time Scalability (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zhenghao Lin, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Yeyun Gong, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their strictly sequential nature constrains test-time scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework to enhance LLMs' DAC-style reasoning capacity by decomposing a problem into subproblems and solving them sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses CoT by 8.6% and 6.3% on competition-level benchmarks and is available at the [github.com/MasterVito/DAC-RL]. |
PlotCoder: Hierarchical Decoding for Synthesizing Visualization Code in Programmatic Context (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Creating effective visualizations is a challenge given the myriad of parameters that users need to provide. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize visualization programs from natural language utterances and programmatic context using PlotCoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture models both the code context and the input utterance. |
Bridging the Gap between Language Models and Cross-Lingual Sequence Labeling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train cross-lingual pre-trained language models have shown great success in cross-linguistic sequence labeling tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual language informative span masking task to eliminate the objective gap between pre-training and fine-tuning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks even with limited pre-training data. |
UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Chunyu Qiang, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin, Yuzhe Liang, Yuxin Guo, Teng Ma, Ziyu Zhang, Tianrui Wang, Cheng Gong, Yushen Chen, Ruibo Fu, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Generative audio modeling has been fragmented into specialized tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), text- to-music (TTM), and text-ta (TTA) specialized models require reference audio for timbre cloning and strict phoneme alignment, whereas TTA models generate unstructured textures from open-ended captions. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, sound effects . they propose 'token injection mechanism' that projects unstructured environmental sounds into structured temporal latent space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS and TTM while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. |
CortexDebate: Debating Sparsely and Equally for Multi-Agent Debate (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the reasoning performance of LLMs suffer from two major shortcomings: too lengthy input contexts and overconfidence dilemma. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to debating among LLM agents using a sparse debator graph . they use a module called McKinsey-based Debate Matter to optimize the debators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been well demonstrated across eight datasets from four task types. |
Sentiment-Aware Word and Sentence Level Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis (2022.emnlp-main)
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Shuai Fan, Chen Lin, Haonan Li, Zhenghao Lin, Jinsong Su, Hang Zhang, Yeyun Gong, JIan Guo, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language representation models (PLMs) capture sentiment information from word-level while under-considering sentence-level information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sentiment-aware pre-trained language model with combined Word-level and Sentence-level Pre-training tasks that enhance the PLM’s knowledge about sentiment words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on various sentence-level and aspect-level sentiment classification benchmarks. |
ASTRA: Adaptive Semantic Tree Reasoning Architecture for Complex Table Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing serialization methods fail to capture explicit hierarchies and lack schema flexibility . Existing tree-based approaches suffer from limited semantic adaptability . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the global semantic awareness of LLMs to reconstruct tables into Logical Semantic Trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on complex table benchmarks. |
Automatic Prompt Engineering for Scalable Prompt Inversion in Text-to-Image Ad Generation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | PRISM-DUEL is a black-box framework that formalizes prompt optimization as Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) PRIMS-DUEl is motivated by advertising workflows requiring low-latency, diverse variants faithful to a human-designed ad. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box framework that formalizes prompt optimization as Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) they obtain label-free pairwise preferences and rationales from an LLM judge over pairs of generated images and use a dueling-bandit optimizer to optimize a prompt for generating controlled variations while matching the reference ad's visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves visual similarity and semantic faithfulness while increasing diversity. |
AV-Dialog: Spoken Dialogue Models with Audio-Visual Input (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | AV-Dialog uses audio and visual cues to track the target speaker, predict turn-taking, and generate coherent responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dialog framework that uses both audio and visual cues to track the target speaker. |
| Outcome: | AV-Dialog outperforms audio-only models under interference, reducing transcription errors, improving turn-taking prediction and human-rated dialogue quality. |
KAPA: A Deliberative Agent Framework with Tree-Structured Knowledge Base for Multi-Domain User Intent Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiakai Tang, Shiqi Shen, ZhipengWang ZhipengWang, Gong Zhi, Xueyang Feng, Zexu Sun, Haoran Tan, Xu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on the use of LLMs for estimating user intents are either too far from real human thought processes or require labeled samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative agent framework that leverages human thought process to build high-level domain knowledge and a tree-structured knowledge base to store refined experience and data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to build high-level domain knowledge and efficiently store it across multiple steps. |
Beyond Logits: Aligning Feature Dynamics for Effective Knowledge Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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Guoqiang Gong, Jiaxing Wang, Jin Xu, Deping Xiang, Zicheng Zhang, Leqi Shen, Yifeng Zhang, JunhuaShu JunhuaShu, ZhaolongXing ZhaolongXing, Zhen Chen, Pengzhang Liu, Ke Zhang
| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) compresses large language models into lightweight versions called student models. |
| Approach: | They propose to align the entire feature dynamics between teacher and student models by using two additional loss terms to achieve this. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches the entire feature dynamics between teacher and student models rather than just the final states. |
Contextual Fine-to-Coarse Distillation for Coarse-grained Response Selection in Open-Domain Conversations (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Bolun Yao, Zhongyu Wei, Zhihao Fan, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over baseline methods on two datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus compared with baseline methods. |
ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing sequence-to-sequence models are optimized for future n-gram prediction and n stream self-attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised objective called future n-gram prediction and the proposed n stream self-attention mechanism to optimize the model for sequence-to-sequence learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus. |
Breaking the Corpus Bottleneck for Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Cross-Task Pre-training (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale document-level parallel corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale parallel datasets and source-side monolingual documents to improve context-aware neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to translate both sentences and documents on four translation tasks. |
What’s Missing in Screen-to-Action? Towards a UI-in-the-Loop Paradigm for Multimodal GUI Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI reasoning methods rely on direct screen-based decision-making, which lacks interpretability and overlooks a comprehensive understanding of UI elements, ultimately leading to task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI reasoning paradigm that treats the GUI reasoning task as a cyclic ***Screen-UI elements-Action** process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves state-of-the-art UI understanding performance while yielding superior results in GUI reasoning tasks. |
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Bowen Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Liwen Shi, Chen Yang, Peng He, Yue Ma, Haochen Han, Wenhao Li, Tiao Tan, Yongjian Li, Fangming Liu, Gong Yifan, Sheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios. |
Mining Word Boundaries from Speech-Text Parallel Data for Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) have focused on the cross-domain scenarios, but there is a high cost of manually annotating high-quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly mine word boundaries from parallel speech-text data by using the Montreal Forced Aligner toolkit to perform character-level alignment on speech- text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on character-level alignment on speech-text data and a robust complete-then-train (CTT) strategy. |
PRAM: An End-to-end Prototype-based Representation Alignment Model for Zero-resource Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to address the named entity recognition problem are limited and lack explicit optimization specific to the task. |
| Approach: | They propose a prototype-based representation alignment model for a cross-lingual named entity recognition task using labeled source language data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in some challenging scenarios. |
Joint Generator-Ranker Learning for Natural Language Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation train the generator and ranker individually . existing methods neglect the mutual feedback that could enhance the quality of outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint training algorithm that integrates the generator and ranker in a single framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm surpasses existing methods on four public datasets across three common generation scenarios. |
MODDP: A Multi-modal Open-domain Chinese Dataset for Dialogue Discourse Parsing (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmark datasets for discourse parsing are domain-specific and contain only textual modality . this makes it difficult to accurately understand the dialogue without multi-modal clues . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal Chinese discourse parsing dataset based on open-domain dialogues . they propose to integrate multi-modality into the original textual unimodal DDP model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves on the existing unimodal model by adding multimodalities to the model. |
XY-Tokenizer: Mitigating the Semantic-Acoustic Conflict in Low-Bitrate Speech Codecs (2026.acl-long)
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Yitian Gong, Luozhijie Jin, Kuangwei Chen, Dong Zhang, Ruifan Deng, Xiaogui Yang, Xin Zhang, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance these objectives at low bitrates . XY-Tokenizer achieves stronger semantic alignment than representative semantic-distillation codec . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-bitrate speech codec that aligns discrete speech representations with text while preserving fine-grained acoustic details for reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing low-bitrate speech codecs in speech understanding and generation tasks. |
COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use a similarity metric to measure semantic similarity between test samples and referents, but their performance is limited due to the label scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to learn a similarity metric for measuring the semantic similarity between test samples and referents, where each referent represents an entity class. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models with a significant margin in most cases. |
Speech-to-Speech Translation for a Real-world Unwritten Language (2023.findings-acl)
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Peng-Jen Chen, Kevin Tran, Yilin Yang, Jingfei Du, Justine Kao, Yu-An Chung, Paden Tomasello, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk, Hongyu Gong, Hirofumi Inaguma, Sravya Popuri, Changhan Wang, Juan Pino, Wei-Ning Hsu, Ann Lee
| Challenge: | a new study examines speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another . the research area for unwritten languages remains a research area with little exploration due to the lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that translates speech from one language into another . they use Taiwanese Hokkien as an example of an unwritten language . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be used to train models in languages without standard writing systems. |
Finding the Dominant Winning Ticket in Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pre-trained language models show that they can fine-tune parameters but achieve good downstream performance. |
| Approach: | They find that a dominant winning ticket takes up 0.05% of the parameters and is transferable across different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve comparable performance with the full-parameter model, the authors show . the dominant winning ticket takes up 0.05% of the parameters, and the model is transferable across tasks, they show - the authors conclude . |
Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data (2022.naacl-main)
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Ann Lee, Hongyu Gong, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk, Peng-Jen Chen, Changhan Wang, Sravya Popuri, Yossi Adi, Juan Pino, Jiatao Gu, Wei-Ning Hsu
| Challenge: | Existing text-based speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded approach . text-to text translation systems require text generation and a single input to generate output . |
| Approach: | They propose a textless speech-to-speech translation system that can translate speech from one language into another without the need of text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can translate speech from one language into another without text data. |
Akan Cinematic Emotions (ACE): A Multimodal Multi-party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Movie Dialogues (2025.findings-acl)
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David Sasu, Zehui Wu, Ziwei Gong, Run Chen, Pengyuan Shi, Lin Ai, Julia Hirschberg, Natalie Schluter
| Challenge: | Akan Cinematic Emotions (AkaCE) is the first multimodal emotion dialogue dataset for an African language . it contains 385 emotion-labeled dialogues and 6162 utterances across audio, visual, and textual modalities, along with word-level prosodic prominence annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AkaCE to analyze African cinematic emotions using word-level prosodic prominence annotations. |
| Outcome: | The Akan Cinematic Emotions (AkaCE) dataset addresses the significant lack of resources for low-resource languages in emotion recognition research. |
Toward Safe and Human-Aligned Game Conversational Recommendation via Multi-Agent Decomposition (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for conversational recommender systems (CRS) have strong results in movies, but games present distinct challenges . MATCHA framework provides specialized agents for intent parsing, tool-augmented retrieval, multi-LLM ranking, and stronger safety. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for conversational recommender systems that assigns specialized agents for intent parsing, tool-augmented retrieval, multi-LLM ranking and risk control. |
| Outcome: | MATCHA outperforms baselines on real user request dataset, improves Hit@5 by 20%, reduces popularity bias by 24%, and achieves 97.9% adversarial defense. |
HICD: Hallucination-Inducing via Attention Dispersion for Contrastive Decoding to Mitigate Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate hallucinations, producing outputs that are contextually inaccurate or factually incorrect. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that selects attention heads crucial to the model's prediction as inducing heads and induces hallucinations by dispersing attention of these inducers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on tasks requiring contextual faithfulness, reading comprehension, and question answering. |
R.R.: Unveiling LLM Training Privacy through Recollection and Ranking (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy attacks focus on membership inference or data extraction, but reconstructing specific personally identifiable information (PII) in training data remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-step privacy stealing attack that enables attackers to reconstruct PII entities from scrubbed training data where the PI I entities have been masked. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack can reconstruct PII entities from scrubbed training data where the PI I entities have been masked. |
FairSteer: Inference Time Debiasing for LLMs with Dynamic Activation Steering (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based debiasing methods exhibit instability due to sensitivity to prompt changes . fine-tuning-based techniques incur substantial computational overhead and catastrophic forgetting . |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework that encodes fairness-related features into separable directions in the hidden activation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs inference-time debiasing without requiring retraining or prompt design . it detects bias signatures in activations and then computes debiased steering vectors . the proposed framework is available to download in the u.s. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
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Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
An Empirical Investigation of Implicit and Explicit Knowledge-Enhanced Methods for Ad Hoc Dataset Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ad hoc dataset retrieval are lexical and cannot capture semantic similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose to implement and evaluate a set of implicit and explicit knowledge-enhancement retrieval methods on two test collections to find semantic matches for ad hoc dataset retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are compared with existing methods on two test collections and reveal the unique features of the task and suggest an interpolation of different kinds of methods as the current best practice. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Large Language Models as an Indirect Reasoner: Contrapositive and Contradiction for Automated Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on improving the ability of Large Language Models to perform complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Direct-Indirect Reasoning method that integrates DR and IR as parallel reasoning paths that are merged to derive the final answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on four datasets related to logical reasoning and proof. |
SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on approximating model rankings, but such benchmarks fail to provide users and developers with a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of a specific model’s capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables detailed characterization of LLM capabilities through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables detailed characterization of large language models through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
ALLSH: Active Learning Guided by Local Sensitivity and Hardness (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that labeling in crowdsourcing annotations is not an annotation artifact but rather a core linguistic phenomenon. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve unlabeled data with a local sensitivity and hardness-aware acquisition function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent gains over the commonly used active learning strategies in various classification tasks. |
AdaLoGN: Adaptive Logic Graph Network for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and limitations for machine reading comprehension are insufficient for logical reasoning over text. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic approach which passes messages over a graph representing logical relations between text units to predict an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on ReClor and LogiQA. |
Pre3: Enabling Deterministic Pushdown Automata for Faster Structured LLM Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Junyi Chen, Shihao Bai, Zaijun Wang, Siyu Wu, Chuheng Du, Hailong Yang, Ruihao Gong, Shengzhong Liu, Fan Wu, Guihai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for structured generation of outputs are inefficient under large inference batches. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based method that parses LR(1) grammars into a pushdown automaton and exploits deterministic pushdown automation to optimize the constrained LLM decoding efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves time per output token (TPOT) by 40% and throughput by 36% . |
Self-Correction Makes LLMs Better Parsers (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various natural language processing tasks, but they still face challenges in performing fundamental NLP tasks, such as syntactic parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages grammar rules from existing treebanks to guide LLMs in correcting previous errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on in-domain and cross-domain datasets. |
Towards Tool Use Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on tool use with LLMs focus on enhancing tool-calling ability of LLM . e.g., LLM should not answer unsafe tool use relevant instructions or insecure tool responses to ensure reliability and harmlessness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine-tuning and preference learning to align LLMs with H2A principle for tool use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model demonstrates that LLMs can generate truthful and helpful responses while remaining harmless. |
Multimodal Coreference Resolution for Chinese Social Media Dialogues: Dataset and Benchmark Approach (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal coreference resolution (MCR) aims to identify mentions referring to the same entity across different modalities, such as text and visuals. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese multimodal coreference dataset based on Douyin short-video platform to help researchers understand multimodal content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset pairs short videos with corresponding textual dialogues from user comments and includes manually annotated coreference clusters for person mentions in the text and the coreferential person head regions in the corresponding video frames. |
FastSeq: Make Sequence Generation Faster (2021.acl-demo)
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Yu Yan, Fei Hu, Jiusheng Chen, Nikhil Bhendawade, Ting Ye, Yeyun Gong, Nan Duan, Desheng Cui, Bingyu Chi, Ruofei Zhang
| Challenge: | Transformer-based models have made tremendous impact in natural language generation, but inference speed is still a bottleneck due to large model size and intensive computing involved in auto-regressive decoding process. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention cache optimization, an efficient algorithm for detecting repeated n-grams, and an asynchronous generation pipeline with parallel I/O to accelerate sequence generation without loss of accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can accelerate the sequence generation by 4x to 9x with a simple one-line code change for a set of widely used and diverse models. |
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark (2021.findings-acl)
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Dayiheng Liu, Yu Yan, Yeyun Gong, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Weizhu Chen, Jie Fu, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Pengcheng Wang, Jiusheng Chen, Daxin Jiang, Jiancheng Lv, Ruofei Zhang, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Multi-task benchmarks focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on GLUE and Su-perGLUE for English and several other languages. |
BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Baitao Gong, Yingfa Chen, Xu Han, Guoyang Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Yanxu Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to compress medium-sized models for specific tasks have limited results. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic compression toolkit for big models that implements quantization, pruning, distillation and MoEfication methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool improves performance on a model with 3 billion parameters by 12x . it also outperforms the original model on three typical NLP benchmarks. |
CoG: Controllable Graph Reasoning via Relational Blueprints and Failure-Aware Refinement over Knowledge Graphs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models often exhibit cognitive rigidity, causing reasoning stagnation. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that mimics the interplay between intuition and deliberation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on three benchmarks. |
For-Value: Efficient Forward-Only Data Valuation for finetuning LLMs and VLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Wenlong Deng, Qi Zeng, Jiaming Zhang, Minghui Chen, Zixin Ding, Christos Thrampoulidis, Boying Gong, Xiaoxiao Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data valuation rely on gradient computations, making them prohibitive for billion-parameter models. |
| Approach: | They propose a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data while achieving significant efficiency improvements. |
RikiNet: Reading Wikipedia Pages for Natural Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using Wikipedia pages to answer open-domain questions remains challenging in natural language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which reads Wikipedia pages for natural question answering . it uses a dynamic paragraph dual-attention reader and a cascaded answer predictor . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the human model on the Natural Questions dataset . it achieves 74.3 F1 and 57.9 F1 on long-answer and short-answer tasks . |
Multi-grained Chinese Word Segmentation with Weakly Labeled Data (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on single-grained word segmentation (SWS) focuses on segmenting a sentence into multiple word sequences to preserve all words of different granularities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a graph-based parser to accommodate weakly labeled data for MWS by employing a simple yet competitive graph-basic parsers with local loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on weakly labeled data on a high-quality dataset from canonical newswire (NEWS) and non-canonical web (BAIKE) data. |
Alleviating Over-smoothing for Unsupervised Sentence Representation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn better unsupervised sentence representations have been successful . over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentences reduces the capacity of powerful PLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve the over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentence representations by combining negatives from PLMs intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on different strong baselines on Semantic Textual Similarity and Transfer datasets. |
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergy (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has proposed to improve relevance modeling by having large language models actively involved in retrieval, i.e., to guide retrieval with generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to have large language models actively involved in retrieval to guide retrieval with generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method synergizes retrieval and generation in an iterative manner, and can generate better results in subsequent iterations. |
From Language to Driving: A Dual-Loop SLM-Enhanced Framework for Multi-Planner Scheduling via a Domain-Specific Language (2026.acl-long)
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Jiawei Liu, Xun Gong, Muli Yang, Xingrui Yu, Fen Fang, Xulei Yang, Ivor Tsang, Yunfeng hu, Hong Chen, Qing Guo
| Challenge: | Recent large language model-based AD research offers new avenues to address this challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a small language model (SLM) for high-level semantic reasoning and schedule generation, while an inner loop performs low-level, high-frequency schedule execution and vehicle control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction completion rates while maintaining high safety and compliance relative to multiple baselines. |
A Layer-wise Analysis of Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning ignore depth-dependent heterogeneity of instruction-following . a critical gap remains in understanding where these changes occur across the model's depth and which layers are essential for instruction- following. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which selectively updates critical intermediate layers . they show that effective alignment is architecturally localized rather than distributed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard LoRA up to 10.2% on GSM8K with reduced parameter overhead. |
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks. |
Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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Yu Zou, Yan Chen, Lida He, Qi Zhou, Xiaorui Zhou, Aixi Zhong, Yi Wang, Wei Li, Qingyu Wang, Jiatao Li, Wei Gong, Jialei Zeng, Jingmei Zhao, Ke Jiang, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics and uses snippets to enrich hierarchical lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based benchmarks on FinTierQA Gold. |
LLM Factoscope: Uncovering LLMs’ Factual Discernment through Measuring Inner States (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) produce outputs that deviate from factual reality, especially in sensitive applications such as medical consultation and legal advice. |
| Approach: | They propose a Siamese network-based model that leverages LLMs’ inner states for factual detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves over 96% accuracy on a custom-collected factual detection dataset. |
Structural Contrastive Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train multilingual language models using pretraining tasks like mask language modeling have yielded promising results on a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to align the structural words in a parallel sentence, enhancing models’ ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves model's ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations by increasing the frequency of negative pairings. |
Textless Acoustic Model with Self-Supervised Distillation for Noise-Robust Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent expressive speech-to-speech translation systems have achieved impressive expressivity preservation performances by cascading unit-to speech (U2S) generator to the speech- to-unit translation model. |
| Approach: | They propose a textless acoustic model with a self-supervised distillation strategy for noise-robust expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) They aim to address this limitation by incorporating a distillation with no label (DINO) self-controlled training strategy into the model’s pretraining process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improved the expressive speech-to-speech translation system in noisy environments while maintaining competitive performance in clean environments. |
Vector Calligrapher: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics via Structured Linguistic Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate SVG-based fonts struggle with semantic ambiguity and inefficiency . edward mcginley: generic text tokenizers fragment coordinate-dense SVG XML into excessively long sequences . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that treats SVG generation as a conditional language modeling task . they propose linguistic supervision framework that decomposes typographic style into interpretable linguistic dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves CLIP score by +23% while reducing geometric error by 48% and boosts generation efficiency by 18% Command-per-Token (C/T) ratio. |
Improving Chinese Named Entity Recognition with Multi-grained Words and Part-of-Speech Tags via Joint Modeling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (CNER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a tree parsing approach for jointly modeling Chinese named entity recognition (CNER) with multi-grained word segmentation (MWS) and POS tagging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves better or comparable performance with current methods. |
KVFKT: A New Horizon in Knowledge Tracing with Attention-Based Embedding and Forgetting Curve Integration (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge tracing models do not incorporate forgetting features to improve the learning and answering processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach in knowledge tracing with attention-based embedding and forgetting curve integration using four real-world datasets to test the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing knowledge tracing models and eliminates the need for artificial engineering features. |
Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on developing powerful large language models for mathematical reasoning within monolingual languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation to build powerful multilingual math reasoning models . they propose different training strategies to build xMR LLMs that outperform open-source LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source LLMs and surpasses ChatGPT in few-shot scenarios. |
ChatCoT: Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Chat-based Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have excellent performance in evaluation benchmarks, but struggle in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning framework for chat-based LLMs . they model chain- of-thoughting reasoning as multi-turn conversations to utilize tools . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on complex reasoning tasks. |
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. |
Be Cautious When Merging Unfamiliar LLMs: A Phishing Model Capable of Stealing Privacy (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Model merging is a widespread technology in large language models that integrates multiple task-specific LLMs into a unified one. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging approach that trains a phishing model capable of stealing privacy using a privacy phish instruction dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model cloaking method mimics a specialized capability to conceal attack intent, luring users into merging the phishing model. |
Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) however, the reasoning chains of demonstrations are observed to be prone to errors, which can lead to incorrect reasoning during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative bootstrapping technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) by generating a series of reasoning steps to obtain the answer, and using the reasoning chains as exemplars to demonstrate the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of Large language models (LLMs) on three reasoning tasks on ten datasets. |
Data Augmentation for Cross-domain Parsing via Lightweight LLM Generation and Tree Hybridization (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for constituency parsing are expensive and lack high-quality labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method via lightweight large language model (LLM) generation and tree hybridization to generate a large number of structurally diverse instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements on five target domains with a lightweight LLM generation cost. |
Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Geometry Solving with Efficient Heuristic Auxiliary Constructions (2026.acl-long)
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Boyan Duan, Xiao Liang, Shuai Lu, Yaoxiang Wang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Mao Yang, Weizhu Chen, Yeyun Gong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for geometry theorem proving in Euclidean geometry are challenging and require a neural network to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for adding auxiliary points in geometry that runs on CPUs without relying on neural network-based inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves silver-medal-level human performance on IMO-30 benchmark. |
Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Sensen Gao, Shanshan Zhao, Xu Jiang, Lunhao Duan, Yong Xien Chng, Qing-Guo Chen, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Jia-Wang Bian, Mingming Gong
| Challenge: | Document understanding is critical for applications from financial analysis to scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy based on domain, retrieval modality, and granularity and review advances involving graph structures and agentic frameworks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables holistic retrieval and reasoning across all modalities, unlocking comprehensive document intelligence. |
MuCPAD: A Multi-Domain Chinese Predicate-Argument Dataset (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that shallow semantic role labeling (SRL) performance drops under out-of-domain setting. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a multi-domain Chinese predicate-argument dataset using a frame-free annotation methodology and strict double annotation for improving data quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is compared with a dataset from six different domains. |
Does Theory of Mind Improvement Really Benefit Human-AI Interactions? Empirical Findings from Interactive Evaluations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks measure ToM capability improvement through story-reading, multiple-choice questions from a third-person perspective, while ignoring the first-person, dynamic nature of human-AI interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm of interactive ToM evaluation with both perspective and metric shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of four representative LLM enhancement techniques using real-world datasets and a user study. |
CodeRetriever: A Large Scale Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Code Search (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xiaonan Li, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Xipeng Qiu, Hang Zhang, Bolun Yao, Weizhen Qi, Daxin Jiang, Weizhu Chen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing code pre-training approaches often adopt (masked) language modeling as the training objective which targets on learning to predict (macked) tokens in a given code context. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-text contrastive learning model which learns function-level code semantic representations through large-scale code corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art with significant improvement over existing pre-trained models on eleven domain/language-specific code search tasks with six programming languages in different code granularity. |
GUI0: Self-Evolving Foundational GUI Agents in Super App Ecosystems (2026.acl-long)
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Xinyi Wang, Wei Dai, Kyle Qiao, Ke Wang, Peng Chen, Gang Cao, null Kangqin, Zhongpu Wang, Xiaode Zhang, Yanming Liu, Jihao Gu, Jingtao Xu, Gong Zhi
| Challenge: | Automated interaction with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is central to general artificial intelligence, but remains challenging within Super App ecosystems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework synergizing autonomous data synthesis with dual-agent co-evolution . GUI0 establishes a domain-aware foundation model via synthesized corpora and employs curriculum-driven reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-2.5-Pro and Claude-4-Sonnet in the SuperAPP benchmark and has universal efficacy across base models. |
Soft-Labeled Contrastive Pre-Training for Function-Level Code Representation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaonan Li, Daya Guo, Yeyun Gong, Yun Lin, Yelong Shen, Xipeng Qiu, Daxin Jiang, Weizhu Chen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for contrastive pre-training ignore the relevance between codes in large code corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a Soft-labeled contrastive pre-training framework with positive sample construction methods to learn functional-level code representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can obtain fine-grained soft-labels through an iterative adversarial manner and use them to learn better code representation. |
A Review of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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Zizhou Liu, Ziwei Gong, Lin Ai, Zheng Hui, Run Chen, Colin Wayne Leach, Michelle R. Greene, Julia Hirschberg
| Challenge: | a holistic review systematically integrating psychology across the LLM lifecycle remains missing. |
| Approach: | They examine how psychological theories can inform stages of LLM development . they highlight current trends and gaps in how psychological theory is applied . |
| Outcome: | The authors highlight current trends and gaps in how psychological theories are applied . they argue that psychological insights have shaped pivotal NLP breakthroughs . |
Chinese Metaphorical Relation Extraction: Dataset and Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Metaphor identification is a core task in metaphor processing, which involves recognizing and analyzing metaphorical expressions in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a new formulation of metaphor identification as a relation extraction problem . they use a dataset to analyze metaphorical relations between two spans, a target and a source . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture the properties of the target and source in Chinese sentences. |
Recurrent Chunking Mechanisms for Long-Text Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to machine reading comprehension (MRC) on long texts typically chunk text into equally-spaced segments without considering information from other segments. |
| Approach: | They propose to let a model learn to chunk in a more flexible way via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts a text span from document and query as answer . previous models can only take a fixed-length (e.g., 512) text as input . |
Leveraging Unimodal Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for audio-visual speech recognition use extra data to increase performance . a recent study shows that the use of unimodal self-supervised learning improves performance on multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unimodal self-supervised learning to train AVSR models on unlabelled unilateral data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on lip reading sentences 2 by 30% even without an external language model. |
CodeV: Issue Resolving with Visual Data (2025.findings-acl)
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Linhao Zhang, Daoguang Zan, Quanshun Yang, Zhirong Huang, Dong Chen, Bo Shen, Tianyu Liu, Yongshun Gong, Huang Pengjie, Xudong Lu, Guangtai Liang, Lizhen Cui, Qianxiang Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded to more complex repository-level tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a first approach to leveraging visual data to enhance the issue-resolving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) they demonstrate the effectiveness of CodeV and provide valuable insights into leveraging visualization to resolve GitHub issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the issue-resolving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using visual data. |
Competition-Level Problems are Effective LLM Evaluators (2024.findings-acl)
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Yiming Huang, Zhenghao Lin, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Shuai Lu, Fangyu Lei, Yaobo Liang, Yelong Shen, Chen Lin, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet there is ongoing debate about their capabilities and the potential data contamination problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in solving recent competition-level programming problems in Codeforces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has experienced a cliff-like decline in problems after September 2021, which shows the potential data contamination and the challenges for any existing LLM to solve unseen complex reasoning problems. |
Transferable and Efficient: Unifying Dynamic Multi-Domain Product Categorization (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce platforms are encountering increasingly complex product categorization scenarios . multiple business domains correspond to different category taxonomies, with different depths and distinct literal expressions of category names. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy-agnostic framework that calculates semantic relatedness between product titles and category names in the vector space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselineson three dynamic multi-domain product categorization tasks. |
Harnessing and Evaluating the Intrinsic Extrapolation Ability of Large Language Models for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) have advanced their application in autonomous vehicle research. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages LLMs’ built-in extrapolation capabilities for vehicle trajectory prediction, enabling them to understand traffic agents' behavior and interactions over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables off-the-shelf, frozen LLMs to achieve competitive trajectory prediction performance with qualitative analyses revealing their enhanced understanding of complex, multi-agent traffic scenarios. |
Unsupervised Speech-text word-level alignment with Dynamic Programming (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Word-level alignment in speech-text pretraining models is limited by word-level annotated data . authors propose an iterative training method for USDP that reduces the dependency on scarce annotation resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an Unsupervised Speech-text word-level alignment with Dynamic Programming (USDP) this method uses Dynamic programming principles to iteratively refine temporal alignment predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on speech-text pretraining tasks compared to existing methods. |
DialogVED: A Pre-trained Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Dialog Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Song Wang, Bolun Yao, Weizhen Qi, Zhongyu Wei, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Yi Mao, Weizhu Chen, Biao Cheng, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained dialog models shed light on various downstream tasks in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a dialog pre-training framework that introduces latent variables into the enhanced encoder-decoder pre-train framework to increase relevance and diversity of responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on personaChat, DailyDialog, and DSTC7-AVSD datasets. |
ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Zheng Gong, Lixin Yang, Zhuohao Yu, Zhipeng Chen, Jingyuan Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent years have featured a trend towards Transformer based pretrained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use four evaluation dimensions to evaluate ten widely-used PLMs . they find that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests . |
| Outcome: | The results show that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests and have excellent transferability between tasks. |
Chinese Spoken Named Entity Recognition in Real-world Scenarios: Dataset and Approaches (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current Chinese Spoken NER datasets are laboratory-controlled and are limited in topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese Spoken NER datasets to extract entities from speech to help voice assistants better grasp the intent behind user's questions and instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve on self-training-asr and mapping then distilling, and even compared with GPT4.0, they achieve better results. |
Ensuring Safe and High-Quality Outputs: A Guideline Library Approach for Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Yi Luo, Zhenghao Lin, YuHao Zhang, Jiashuo Sun, Chen Lin, Chengjin Xu, Xiangdong Su, Yelong Shen, Jian Guo, Yeyun Gong
| Challenge: | Guide-Align is a guideline-oriented approach to augment the safety and quality of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a guideline-oriented method to augment the safety and quality of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three benchmarks and shows significant improvements in security and quality. |
Tell Me How to Ask Again: Question Data Augmentation with Controllable Rewriting in Continuous Space (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation techniques for natural language processing tasks are difficult to design. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable rewriting based question data augmentation method for machine reading comprehension, question generation and question-answering natural language inference tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates high-quality, high-quality question data samples on machine reading comprehension, question generation, and question-answering natural language inference tasks. |