Papers by Chen Li
Towards Reward Fairness in RLHF: From a Resource Allocation Perspective (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | if rewards are imperfect, they can adversely affect the alignment of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a bias-agnostic method to address the issue of reward unfairness from a resource allocation perspective without specifically designing for each type of bias . they apply methods Fairness Regularization and Fairness Coefficient to achieve fairness in rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves fairness in rewards while minimizing biases . it can be applied to verification and reinforcement learning scenarios . |
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yufei He, Ruoyu Li, Alex Chen, Yue Liu, Yulin Chen, Yuan Sui, Cheng Chen, Yi Zhu, Luca Luo, Frank Yang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
End-to-End Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction with Graph Convolutional Network (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) aims to extract emotion expressions and their corresponding causes in a document simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose to model pair-level contexts so that to capture dependency information among local neighborhood candidate pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts emotion-cause pairs and their causes from documents . it is based on a benchmark Chinese emotion-case pair extraction corpus . |
UniCodec: Unified Audio Codec with Single Domain-Adaptive Codebook (2025.acl-long)
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Yidi Jiang, Qian Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yu Xi, Wen Wang, Chong Zhang, Xianghu Yue, ShiLiang Zhang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing neural audio codecs are not capable of handling multi-domain audio data . et al., 2023) integrate speech modality with text-based large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified audio codec with a single codebook to support multi-domain audio data . they propose combining a mix-of-experts strategy and a partitioned domain-adaptive codebook method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing codecs on acoustic and semantic representation capabilities. |
Say What You Mean! Large Language Models Speak Too Positively about Negative Commonsense Knowledge (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been studied for their ability to store and utilize positive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a constrained keywords-to-sentence generation task and a Boolean question answering task to probe large language models on negative commonsense knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks show that LLMs fail to generate valid sentences grounded in negative commonsense knowledge, yet they can correctly answer yes-or-no questions. |
ThinkPersona: Thinking with Persona Graphs for Faithful Individualized Role-Playing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models are increasingly utilized as role-playing agents to simulate personas in interactive settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing agent trained to explicitly ground responses in individual identity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can generate persona-consistent responses in long-context dialogues while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
TeleMelody: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with a Template-Based Two-Stage Method (2022.emnlp-main)
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Zeqian Ju, Peiling Lu, Xu Tan, Rui Wang, Chen Zhang, Songruoyao Wu, Kejun Zhang, Xiang-Yang Li, Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu
| Challenge: | a new lyric-to-melody generation system bridges the gap between lyrics and melodies . previous generation systems lack paired data and lack of control on generated melodie. |
| Approach: | They develop a lyric-to-melody generation system with music template to bridge the gap between lyrics and melodies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system bridges the gap between lyrics and melodies by using music template. |
WavLLM: Towards Robust and Adaptive Speech Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shujie Hu, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Lingwei Meng, Hongkun Hao, Jing Pan, Xunying Liu, Jinyu Li, Sunit Sivasankaran, Linquan Liu, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their scope to encompass multimodal functions. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and adaptive speech large language model with dual encoders . they validate the model on universal speech benchmarks and apply it to specialized speech-question-answer datasets based on a CoT approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size. |
Meta-Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we propose to extend the recently introduced model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the recently introduced meta-learning algorithm for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) they frame low-Resource translation as a meta- learning problem where we learn to adapt to low-REsource languages based on multilingual high-resourced language tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed meta-learning algorithm outperforms the multilingual, transfer learning based approach and can train a competitive NMT system with only a fraction of training examples. |
UniVocal: Unified Speech-Singing Code-Switching Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems cannot automatically determine when to switch between modes based on text content. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that implicitly infers vocal modes from text context to pioneer SCS Synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework infers vocal modes solely from text context to pioneer SCS Synthesis. |
Towards Explainable Computerized Adaptive Testing with Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on minimizing the number of questions required to assess ability, lacking clear and reliable explanations for the question selection process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to enhance computer adaptive testing (CAT) by providing human-like interpretability and explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent-based CAT performs comparably or superior to traditional CAT methods in accuracy and significantly improves student trust and satisfaction. |
CACL: Community-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Social Media Bot Detection (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for social media bot detection neglect community structure and poor model generalization due to the relatively small scale of the dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs social networks as heterogeneous graphs and uses community-aware modules to mine hard positive and hard negative samples for supervised graph contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on three social media bot benchmarks. |
CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating role-playing capabilities in large language models is challenging due to complex dynamics involved in role-playering. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulation sandbox that generates situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories to enhance LLM performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories to enhance performance. |
Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation, but Text-to-SQL datasets often include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. |
| Approach: | They found that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is crucial for unlocking DPO's potential by augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on Text-to-SQL datasets. |
Incentivizing In-depth Reasoning over Long Contexts with Process Advantage Shaping (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing LLMs’ short-context reasoning but falters in long-contemporal scenarios requiring precise grounding and multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs high-difficulty, multi-hop long-context QA pairs with inherent reasoning chains to overcome this bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms RLVR baselines and matches frontier LLMs while using far fewer parameters. |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
Uncertainty Quantification for Clinical Outcome Predictions with (Large) Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) have significant potential for clinical prediction tasks . however, unreliable decisions can result in significant costs due to compromised patient safety and ethical concerns . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine ensembling and multi-tasking approaches to reduce uncertainty in EHRs by using multi-tapping methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces model uncertainty in white-box and black-box settings, and improves model transparency in both settings. |
Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Jiang, Jiahao Chen, Zhenghao Xiang, Zhixiong Yang, Hanchen Wang, Jiabao Zhuang, Xinmeng Che, Jiajun Sun, Hui Li, Yifei Cao, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Junjie Ye, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, but academic research remains non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning that includes a licensed synthetic dataset and a song generation model, Muse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. |
SP3: Enhancing Structured Pruning via PCA Projection (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Structured pruning is a widely used technique for reducing the size of pre-trained language models, but current methods overlook the potential of compressing the hidden dimension d in PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning approach that projectes features into a space defined by principal components before masking the hidden dimension d in pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on benchmarks show that SP3 can reduce d by 70%, compress 94% of the BERTbase model, and maintain over 96% accuracy. |
Full-Step-DPO: Self-Supervised Preference Optimization with Step-wise Rewards for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve long-chain mathematical reasoning focus on the first erroneous step, but ignore all other steps and rely heavily on external signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a DPO framework that leverages step-wise rewards from the entire reasoning chain instead of optimizing only the first erroneous step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for natural language generation are pre-trained on text-only corpora, resulting in visual commonsense. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that makes pre-trained language models learn to imagine for visually-augmented natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with Transformer-based architecture. |
Enhancing Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Modeling with End-to-End Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech-to speech (S2S) dialogue systems face key challenges in incorporating external knowledge into their models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly retrieves relevant textual knowledge from speech queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of end-to-end speech-tospeech dialogue systems while achieving higher retrieval efficiency. |
Deceptive Semantic Shortcuts on Reasoning Chains: How Far Can Models Go without Hallucination? (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and unfaithful reasoning due to keyword/entity biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a new probing method and benchmark to quantify this phenomenon by using a keyword/entity biases-based probing technique called EUREQA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 62% accuracy on multi-hop and complex QA benchmarks. |
Are U a Joke Master? Pun Generation via Multi-Stage Curriculum Learning towards a Humor LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Yang Chen, Chong Yang, Tu Hu, Xinhao Chen, Man Lan, Li Cai, Xinlin Zhuang, Xuan Lin, Xin Lu, Aimin Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing research has demonstrated that the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate humorous sentences is limited to producing 25 unique jokes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage curriculum preference learning framework to optimize both pun structure preferences and humor preferences by a Chinese Pun dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baseline models on Chinese and English benchmark datasets. |
Word Graph Guided Summarization for Radiology Findings (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on introducing salient word information to general text summarization framework to guide selection of key content in radiology findings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for automatic impression generation using word graphs and a Word Graph guided Summarization model to capture critical words and their relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated on two datasets, OPENI and MIMIC-CXR. |
A Survey of LLM-based Agents in Medicine: How far are we from Baymax? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming healthcare through their ability to understand and assist with medical tasks. |
| Approach: | They analyze system profiles, clinical planning, medical reasoning frameworks, and external capacity enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The findings highlight the future directions in medical reasoning, physical system integration, and training simulations. |
Penetrating Linguistic Disguises: A Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework for Fine-Grained Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Flexible word boundaries and linguistic obfuscation, particularly slang, challenge precise span-level hate speech detection in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework that maps slang to explicit hate semantics and uses task-specific branches to mitigate feature interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ambiguity by mapping obscure slang to explicit hate semantics. |
Graph-GRPO: Stabilizing Multi-Agent Topology Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Yueyang Cang, Xiaoteng Zhang, Erlu Zhao, Zehua Ji, Yuhang Liu, Yuchen He, Zhiyuan Ning, Chen Yijun, Wenge Que, Li Shi
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to optimize communication topology rely on single-sample policy gradients with absolute rewards. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology optimization framework that integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed topology optimization framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on reasoning and code generation benchmarks. |
S2S-Arena: Evaluating Paralinguistic Instruction Following in Speech-to-Speech Models (2026.acl-long)
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Feng Jiang, Zhiyu Lin, Yiyang Liu, Liumeng Xue, Fan Bu, Yuhao Du, Xiangying Chen, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks rely heavily on text-based evaluation and largely ignore paralinguistic cues such as prosody, emotion, and speaker traits. |
| Approach: | They propose a speech-native benchmark for evaluating instruction-following S2S models with explicit assessment of both semantic understanding and paralinguistic expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system enables more natural, robust, and human-aligned speech agents. |
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. |
CogBERT: Cognition-Guided Pre-trained Language Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods fine-tune pre-trained models on cognitive data, ignoring the semantic gap between texts and cognitive signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into pre-trained language models by adaptively adjusting the weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into BERT by adaptively adjusting weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
Topology Imbalance and Relation Inauthenticity Aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks for Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect fake news focus on mining lexical and syntactic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology imbalance and Relation inauthenticity aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks to identify fake news on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets. |
Lattice-Based Transformer Encoder for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) takes deterministic sequences for source representations. However, word-level or subword-level segmentation has multiple choices to split a source sequence with different word segmentors or different subword vocabulary sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose lattice-based encoders to explore effective word or subword representations in an automatic way during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoders can explore effective word or subword representation in an automatic way during training. |
Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Ting-En Lin, Ang Lv, Yuchuan Wu, Xin Gao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Despite the advances in large language models, they still face difficulties with multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought to improve model accuracy by 5% over standard supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy by 5% over standard fine-tuning with a few codes modified. |
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming to overcome this limitation by leveraging LLMs' superior ability in understanding both natural language and programming language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on time-sensitive question answering datasets by 14.5% over baselines. |
DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning in Dentistry (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenyang Cai, Jiaming Zhang, Junjie Zhao, Ziyi Zeng, Yanchao Li, Liang Jingyi, Junying Chen, Yunjin Yang, Jiajun You, Shuzhi Deng, null Xieruiqiii, Yuanting Chen, Xiangyi Feng, Jianquan Li, Liangyi Chen, Junwen Wang, Shan Jiang, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show limited understanding of dental images. |
| Approach: | They propose a dental-specialized multimodal large language model trained via staged multimodal alignment and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on disease classification and dental VQA tasks. |
DGST: a Dual-Generator Network for Text Style Transfer (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on text style transfer focus on altering sentiment words to preserve attribute-independent information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Generator network architecture for text Style Transfer using two generators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models on Yelp and IMDb datasets. |
AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of autonomous agents capable of executing complex, multi-turn tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for agentic reinforcement learning that integrates turn-level tree search with tree search to address key challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses key challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
GUARD: Glocal Uncertainty-Aware Robust Decoding for Effective and Efficient Open-Ended Text Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuanhao Ding, Esteban Garces Arias, Meimingwei Li, Julian Rodemann, Matthias Aßenmacher, Danlu Chen, Gaojuan Fan, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang
| Challenge: | GUARD is a self-adaptive decoding method that balances coherence with diversity in open-ended text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-adaptive decoding method that balances coherence and diversity . they combine global entropy estimates with local entropic deviations to integrate uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | GUARD achieves a good balance between diversity and coherence while exhibiting significant improvements in generation speed. |
TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data Consistency (2025.acl-long)
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Henry Peng Zou, Zhengyao Gu, Yue Zhou, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Yibo Wang, Yangning Li, Kay Liu, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Test-time computing approaches that leverage additional computational resources during inference have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearly scaling approach that leverages local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data to improve test-time predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as prompting and self-consistency across eight datasets and performs robustly across embedding models. |
Dual-Axis Generative Reward Model Toward Semantic and Turn-taking Robustness in Interactive Spoken Dialogue Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Zhengqing Liu, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Ziqing Wang, Yangzhuo Li, Tianle Liang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved text- and vision-language models, but its application in SDMs is hindered. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-axis Generative Reward Model that provides semantic quality and interaction timing for SDMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on interaction-quality assessment across a wide spectrum of datasets. |
Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Wanlong Liu, Li Zhou, DingYi Zeng, Yichen Xiao, Shaohuan Cheng, Chen Zhang, Grandee Lee, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
| Challenge: | mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring correlations among multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-event argument argument extraction model which extracts arguments from all events simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on four public datasets while saving time. |
Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization (2025.acl-long)
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Lingwei Meng, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Bing Han, Shujie Hu, Yanqing Liu, Jinyu Li, Sheng Zhao, Xixin Wu, Helen M. Meng, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | MELLE is a novel language modeling approach for text-to-speech synthesis that generates continuous tokens from text . authors demonstrate that it reduces the need for vector quantization and improves model robustness . |
| Approach: | They propose to autoregressively generate continuous mel-spectrogram frames directly from text condition, bypassing vector quantization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance across multiple metrics and is more streamlined. |
Chat Vector: A Simple Approach to Equip LLMs with Instruction Following and Model Alignment in New Languages (2024.acl-long)
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Shih-Cheng Huang, Pin-Zu Li, Yu-chi Hsu, Kuang-Ming Chen, Yu Tung Lin, Shih-Kai Hsiao, Richard Tsai, Hung-yi Lee
| Challenge: | Despite the rapid development of large language models, the language capabilities of most open-source LLMs are primarily focused on English due to data constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a chat vector to equip pre-trained language models with instruction following and human value alignment via simple model arithmetic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be extended to include various languages, base models, and chat vectors. |
Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxiang Chen, Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Boyang Hong, Jiazheng Zhang, Nijun Li, Tao Gui, Yun Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing processes that reward for each step are one-directional and lack a mechanism to model the distance to the final target. |
| Approach: | They propose a process supervision model that evaluates the correctness of previous steps and the probability of future success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing supervision models like ORM and PRM on reasoning tasks and improves solution re-design. |
The Role of Data Curation in Image Captioning (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing image captioning models treat all samples equally, neglecting mismatched data . Several other techniques have relied on curriculum learning strategies to adapt learning to the difficulty of the task. |
| Approach: | They propose to actively curate difficult samples in datasets using curriculum learning strategies to improve captioning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing models on the Flickr30K and COCO datasets. |
FC-KBQA: A Fine-to-Coarse Composition Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) suffer from generalization issues due to coarse-grained modeling of the logical expression. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-to- coarse-grained framework for KBQA to ensure generalization and executability of the logical expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework derives new state-of-the-art performance on GrailQA and WebQSP, and runs 4 times faster than baseline. |
Event Ontology Completion with Hierarchical Structure Evolution Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection require predefined schemas, but manual defining is expensive and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to achieve event clustering, hierarchy expansion and type naming . they propose 'neighbor Contrastive Clustering' module and a Hierarchy-Aware Linking module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
Advancing Zero-shot Text-to-Speech Intelligibility across Diverse Domains via Preference Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot text-to-speech systems struggle in challenging scenarios such as tongue twisters, repeated words, code-switching, and cross-lingual synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that leverages preference alignment techniques to improve performance . they also extend the Direct Preference Optimization framework to accommodate diverse TTS architectures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves intelligibility, similarity, and audio quality for multiple models across domains. |
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. |
RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Bingxian Wu, Yu Zhang, Zonghao Guo, Tang Liu, Chen Qian, Yuxiang Lu, Xingbo Du, Yanghao Li, Yidan Zhang, Chi Chen, Ling Yao, Chenghu Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution . |
Hardware-Aware Parallel Prompt Decoding for Memory-Efficient Acceleration of LLM Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Mark Chen, Wayne Luk, Yiu Ka Fai Cedric, Rui Li, Konstantin Mishchenko, Stylianos Venieris, Hongxiang Fan
| Challenge: | Auto-regressive decoding of Large Language Models results in significant overheads in hardware performance . a novel parallel prompt decoding approach is proposed to overcome these limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel prompt decoding that uses a single model for speculation and verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach speeds up auto-regressive decoding of large language models 2.49 times . it can be used on mobileLlama to Vicuna-13B on a wide range of benchmarks . |
Logit Space Constrained Fine-Tuning for Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based recommender systems rely on standard fine-tuning methodologies, often ignoring hallucination issues during the fine-uning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a logit space constraint-based fine-tuning framework to mitigate hallucination in LLM-based recommenders by incorporating Kullback–Leibler divergence into the training objective. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two recommendation models with distinct LLM backbones and four real-world datasets show that LCFT reduces hallucination and enhances recommendation performance. |
ACCEPT: Adaptive Codebook for Composite and Efficient Prompt Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prompt Tuning has been a popular fine-tuning method for large-scale pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows all soft prompts to share a set of learnable codebook vectors in each subspace, with each prompt differentiated by a number of adaptive weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance on 17 diverse natural language tasks including natural language understanding (NLU) and question answering (QA) tasks by tuning only 0.3% of parameters of the PLMs. |
SmartBench: Is Your LLM Truly a Good Chinese Smartphone Assistant? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for Large Language Models focus on objective tasks like mathematics and coding in English, which do not reflect the practical use cases of on-device LLMs in real-world mobile scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities of on-device Large Language Models in Chinese mobile contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates on-device LLMs and MLLMs in Chinese . it provides a standardized framework for evaluating LLM performance on real smartphones . |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
CodeScope: An Execution-based Multilingual Multitask Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Code Understanding and Generation (2024.acl-long)
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Weixiang Yan, Haitian Liu, Yunkun Wang, Yunzhe Li, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Tingyu Lin, Weishan Zhao, Li Zhu, Hari Sundaram, Shuiguang Deng
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of Large Language Models are insufficient . existing benchmarks focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose an execution-based, multilingual, multitask evaluation benchmark for LLMs . they evaluate coding performance from three dimensions: length, difficulty, efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 43 programming languages and eight coding tasks. |
VideoEraser: Concept Erasure in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that VideoEraser outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in erasure, celebrity erasion, and explicit content erasing tasks. |
Calibration Meets Explanation: A Simple and Effective Approach for Model Confidence Estimates (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve confidence calibration of pre-trained language models are still a mystery. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages model explanations to make models less confident with non-inductive attributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves confidence calibration in all settings and reduces calibration errors when combined with temperature scaling. |
Achieving Stronger Generation via Simple Contrastive Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for contrastive decoding to enhance instruction-tuned models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance without additional data or computational resources. |
Joint Representation Learning of Cross-lingual Words and Entities via Attentive Distant Supervision (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning word and entity representations in monolingual settings are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for joint representation learning of cross-lingual words and entities that captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-linguistic inferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-lingual inferences among knowledge bases and texts. |
WikiDiverse: A Multimodal Entity Linking Dataset with Diversified Contextual Topics and Entity Types (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) is an essential task for many multimodal applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-annotated Wikipedia-based multimodal entity linking dataset to improve the quality of existing MEL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model uses the visual information of images more effectively than existing models. |
To Diff or Not to Diff? Structure-Aware and Adaptive Output Formats for Efficient LLM-based Code Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code editing, yet the full-code generation paradigm suffers from severe efficiency bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a structure-aware diff format to train LLMs to choose the most token-efficient format between a given diff format and full code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach matches the most token-efficient format with full-code generation while reducing latency and cost by over 30% on long-code editing tasks. |
Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators (2024.acl-long)
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Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Liang Chen, Zefan Cai, Dawei Zhu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks that use large language models as referees are insufficient for accurately assessing their alignment with human intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration framework to address positional bias in large language models as evaluators by manually annotating the “win/tie/lose” outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicun A Benchmark’s question prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework alleviates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments. |
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. |
FineLAP: Taming Heterogeneous Supervision for Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing audio-language models excel at clip-level understanding but struggle with frame-level tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training paradigm that advances both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm improves both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data. |
Can LLMs Speak For Diverse People? Tuning LLMs via Debate to Generate Controllable Controversial Statements (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack sufficient controllability to generate statements supporting diverse or even controversial perspectives. |
| Approach: | They develop a pipeline that fine tunes LLMs to generate statements generated via debate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the controllability of LLMs in generating statements supporting an argument the user defined in the prompt. |
GIFT: Guided Fine-Tuning and Transfer for Enhancing Instruction-Tuned Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiwen Ruan, Yichao Du, Jianjie Zheng, Longyue Wang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Jinsong Su, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
| Challenge: | Existing adapter-based transfer methods treat instruction-tuned models as passive targets . direct fine-tuning can disrupt this delicate balance and lead to instability or performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates instruction-level guidance into task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms direct fine-tuning and representative transfer-based baselines while maintaining robust generalization and favorable test-time scaling behavior. |
Consecutive Batch Model Editing with HooK Layers (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that retrain are time- and resource-consuming, but they lack the memory to support sequential and batch editing. |
| Approach: | They propose a model editing method that supports sequential and batch editing . they use a small amount of memory to store several hook layers that remain unchanged over time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is memory-friendly and can store hook layers that remain unchanged over time. |
Exploring the Impact of Personality Traits on LLM Toxicity and Bias (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | anthropomorphic LLMs are being developed to serve diversified roles, but content safety concerns remain regarding their toxicity and toxicity. |
| Approach: | They propose to assign personality traits to large language models (LLMs) to reduce toxic language and social biases in their outputs by using the widely accepted HEXACO personality framework developed in social psychology. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to perform on three toxic and bias benchmarks and shows that assigning personality traits reduces bias and toxicity similar to humans’ correlations between personality traits and toxic behaviors. |
Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters (2024.acl-long)
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Yinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shirong Ma, Yong Jiang, Zhongli Li, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on misspelled characters, ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult to correct. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese character checking to identify and correct wrong characters in texts by human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. |
Unified Semantic Typing with Meaningful Label Inference (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Semantic typing aims at classifying tokens into semantic categories such as relations, entity types, and event types. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for semantic typing that captures label semantics by projecting both inputs and labels into a joint semantic embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves strong performance across three semantic typing tasks. |
Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper: Advancing Multimodal Comprehension with Enhanced Visual Knowledge Alignment (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) focus on visual knowledge-dimension alignment, but ignore visual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive visual-language mapper that integrates visual-linguistic knowledge alignment with a fine-grained knowledge Adapter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves LMMs on knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) it also improves the performance of other models, including GPT-4V and Gemini-Pro. |
FB-Bench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Responsiveness to Human Feedback (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on benchmarking LLMs in single-turn dialogues, neglecting the nuanced nature of human feedback within real-world usage scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained, multi-task benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ responsiveness to human feedback under real-world usage scenarios in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that human feedback can significantly impact LLMs’ responsiveness in real-world usage scenarios. |
Efficient Inference for Large Vision-Language Models: Bottlenecks, Techniques, and Prospects (2026.findings-acl)
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Jun Zhang, Yicheng Ji, Feiyang Ren, Yihang Li, Bowen Zeng, Zonghao Chen, Ke Chen, Lidan Shou, Gang Chen, Huan Li
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models are hindered by a systemic efficiency barrier known as visual token dominance. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy of efficiency techniques structured around the inference lifecycle . they examine visual encoding, prefilling, and decoding to understand bottlenecks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques reveal how upstream decisions dictate downstream bottlenecks . the proposed techniques include hybrid compression and modality-aware decoding . |
FaithScore: Fine-grained Evaluations of Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) lack the capacity to handle multimodal inputs effectively. |
| Approach: | They introduce a reference-free and fine-grained evaluation metric that measures the faithfulness of the generated free-form answers from large vision-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric measures the faithfulness of free-form answers from large vision-language models. |
PrivacyRestore: Privacy-Preserving Inference in Large Language Models via Privacy Removal and Restoration (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protection methods for large language models suffer from performance degradation or large inference time overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method to protect the privacy of user inputs during LLM inference . they use offline restoration vectors to train restoration vector for each privacy span type . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can prevent the linear growth of the privacy budget. |
CroAno : A Crowd Annotation Platform for Improving Label Consistency of Chinese NER Dataset (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Baoli Zhang, Zhucong Li, Zhen Gan, Yubo Chen, Jing Wan, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Shengping Liu, Yafei Shi
| Challenge: | Existing crowd annotation tools for named entity recognition (NER) focus on efficiency and don't consider consistency of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a crowd annotation platform for Chinese named entity recognition (NER) CroAno provides a systematic solution for improving label consistency of Chinese NER datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform improves label consistency of Chinese NER datasets. |
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Mingjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | despite significant progress, full-duplex SLMs are constrained by severe modality interference, authors say . modality interferes with acoustic and semantic modeling, making them unintelligent and unnatural . authors propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances the state of the art on full-duplex benchmarks . it decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence . |
DynaEval: Unifying Turn and Dialogue Level Evaluation (2021.acl-long)
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Chen Zhang, Yiming Chen, Luis Fernando D’Haro, Yan Zhang, Thomas Friedrichs, Grandee Lee, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics focus on the turn-level quality of a dialogue . a unified framework that holistically considers the quality of the entire dialogue is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified automatic evaluation framework which holistically considers the quality of the entire dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art dialogue coherence model and correlates strongly with human judgements across multiple evaluation aspects at both turn and dialogue level. |
Joint Multimedia Event Extraction from Video and Article (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Brian Chen, Xudong Lin, Christopher Thomas, Manling Li, Shoya Yoshida, Lovish Chum, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract multimedia events from video and text are limited to video and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to jointly extract events from video and text documents . they propose 'self-supervised' cross-modal event coreference model and cross-mod transformer architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 6.0% and 5.8% absolute F-score gain on video-article pairs . the proposed method can resolve coreference and extract multimodal event frames more accurately than existing methods. |
Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for analyzing social media data lack a systematic integration of medical knowledge, causing a critical treatment gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to integrate medical knowledge into social media data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to distinguish depression from transient mood changes. |
Contextualized Perturbation for Textual Adversarial Attack (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for generating adversarial examples are driven by local heuristic rules that are agnostic to the context, resulting in unnatural and ungrammatical outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a ContextuaLized AdversaRial Example generation model that generates fluent and grammatical outputs through a mask-then-infill procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of attack success rate, textual similarity, fluency and grammaticality. |
Enhancing Talent Search Ranking with Role-Aware Expert Mixtures and LLM-based Fine-Grained Job Descriptions (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing talent search approaches fail to capture nuanced job-specific preferences and mitigate noise from subjective human judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts fine-grained recruitment signals from job descriptions and historical hiring data and employs a role-aware multi-gate MoE network to capture behavioral differences across recruiter roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves talent search effectiveness and delivers substantial business value. |
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. |
SUPERB-SG: Enhanced Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark for Semantic and Generative Capabilities (2022.acl-long)
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Hsiang-Sheng Tsai, Heng-Jui Chang, Wen-Chin Huang, Zili Huang, Kushal Lakhotia, Shu-wen Yang, Shuyan Dong, Andy Liu, Cheng-I Lai, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Phil Hall, Hsuan-Jui Chen, Shang-Wen Li, Shinji Watanabe, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Hung-yi Lee
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for transfer learning are limited in speech research . authors show that pre-trained models transfer well across multiple tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate pre-trained models by increasing task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark increases task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB-SG. |
DAFNet: Dynamic Auxiliary Fusion for Sequential Model Editing in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Taolin Zhang, Qizhou Chen, Dongyang Li, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue’, Jun Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results, but still suffer from hallucination, i.e., the generation of false information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of sequential model editing that aims to rectify mistakes continuously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines in single-turn and sequential editing. |
TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zezhong Jin, Shubhang Desai, Xu Chen, Biyi Fang, Zhuoyi Huang, Zhe Li, Chong-Xin Gan, Xiao Tu, Man-Wai Mak, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for handwriting generation capture global dependencies and can generate high-quality handwritten samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model for ink generation, TrInk, which captures global dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces character error rate and word error rate by 35.56% on the IAM-OnDB dataset compared to previous models. |
LEGO: A Multi-agent Collaborative Framework with Role-playing and Iterative Feedback for Causality Explanation Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Causality explanation generation is a generative task that aims to explain why a given cause-effect pair is true using natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with role-playing and iterative feedback for causality explanation generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing frameworks on WIKIWHY and e-CARE datasets. |
Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Code Pre-trained Models through Structure-Aware Adversarial Samples Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained code models have made significant strides in the field of neural code intelligence, but they are susceptible to adversarial attacks that subtly modify the input sequence and can impair generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of novel robustness evaluation methods based on the intrinsic structure of the code to explore the impact of imperceptible perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods have demonstrated their effectiveness across a wide range of models and tasks, and are able to predict the performance of perturbed models. |
DynaThink: Fast or Slow? A Dynamic Decision-Making Framework for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as prominent foundation models for diverse applications due to their outstanding ability to understand and generate humanlike text. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic decision-making framework that categorizes tasks into two distinct pathways: 'Fast' and 'Slow' they propose 'self-consistency' strategy to replace the straight-forward decoding method used in COT prompting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves more than 3% increase in accuracy with lower cost on five popular reasoning benchmarks. |
P-INT: A Path-based Interaction Model for Few-shot Knowledge Graph Completion (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode and match entity pairs have only a few observed reference entity pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that infers and leverages paths that can expressively encode the relation of two entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 11.2– 14.2% in terms of Hits@1. |
Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge (2025.naacl-long)
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Li Zhou, Taelin Karidi, Wanlong Liu, Nicolas Garneau, Yong Cao, Wenyu Chen, Haizhou Li, Daniel Hershcovich
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates cultural context significantly and improves its ability to access cultural knowledge. |
STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxiang Guo, Yu Zhang, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, ZheTao Chen, Wenhao Xu, Fei Wu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing automated singing annotation (ASA) methods tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that addresses transcription, alignment, and refined style annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace. |
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
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. |
ActiView: Evaluating Active Perception Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Fuwen Luo, Yurui Dong, Yuanchi Zhang, Yuzhuang Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Peng Li, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs have not addressed active perception . a novel benchmark is proposed to evaluate active perception in ML models . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate active perception in Multimodal Large Language Models . they restrict the perceptual field of a model and require it to actively zoom or shift it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark focuses on a specialized form of Visual Question Answering (VQA) that eases and quantifies the evaluation yet challenging for existing MLLMs. |
Chain-of-Scrutiny: Detecting Backdoor Attacks for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains, but are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-scrutiny approach which leverages LLMs’ unique reasoning abilities to mitigate backdoor attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is well-suited for the popular API-only LLM deployments, enabling detection at minimal cost and with little data. |
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Neural Machine Translation with Multilingual Pretrained Encoders (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on improving cross-lingual transferability of NMT model is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages a multilingual pretrained encoder to improve cross-lingual transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms mBART and m2m-100 on a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer task. |
Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering (2025.acl-short)
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Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating information across multiple modalities are suboptimal for multi-page, multimodal documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive iterative framework that balances information gain and uncertainty reduction at each step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures relevant multimodal content and achieves strong performance on complex QA tasks. |
PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Scheduling logistics associated with meetings can amount to hours each week . a lack of automation can cause a lot of errors and can be costly . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution that automates calendar conflict management . they propose 'pearl' that augments the language agent with an external preference memory . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution shows that existing agents perform poorly with high error rates. |
Condensing Multilingual Knowledge with Lightweight Language-Specific Modules (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to boost performance in multilingual models but scalability is difficult to manage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates language-specific (LS) modules to boost model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods while outperforming existing methods. |
SAC: Neural Speech Codec with Semantic-Acoustic Dual-Stream Quantization (2026.acl-long)
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Wenxi Chen, Ruiqi Yan, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yuzhe Liang, null Wenhanlin, Shunshun Yin, Ming Tao, Xinsheng Wang, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance high-quality reconstruction with semantically rich representations, limiting their effectiveness in both generative and understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural speech codec with semantic-acoustic dual-stream quantization that disentangles semantic and acousian modeling into two dedicated streams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms state-of-the-art speech tokenizers in auto-propagating text-to-speech models. |
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods for knowledge base question answering are either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph retrieval framework that decouples the retrieval from the subsequent reasoning process and trains subgraphs for easier reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval and QA performance over existing methods. |
Manifold Learning-based Word Representation Refinement Incorporating Global and Local Information (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show word embedding models underestimate similarities between similar words and overestimate similarities between distant words. |
| Approach: | They propose two new word embedding methods that align original and re-fined embeddable spaces to a new refined semantic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art methods for word representation refinement. |
MiLoRA: Harnessing Minor Singular Components for Parameter-Efficient LLM Finetuning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Efficient finetuning of large language models (LLMs) aims to adapt the LLMs with reduced computational and memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective method that initializes low-rank matrices with Gaussian distribution and zero values while keeping the original weight matrics frozen. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach only updates the minor components of the weight matrix while keeping the principal singular components frozen. |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
Formality is Favored: Unraveling the Learning Preferences of Large Language Models on Data with Conflicting Knowledge (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have shown excellent performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, but pretraining data tends to contain misleading and conflicting information. |
| Approach: | They systematically analyze LLMs’ learning preferences for data with conflicting knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human-level models on knowledge-intensive tasks by analyzing pretraining data. |
Towards Better Utilization of Multi-Reference Training Data for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a high proportion of Chinese training data is multi-referenced for the grammatical error correction task . however, there are many ways to correct an erroneous input sentence . a systematic study on multi-referencing training data has been proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose two new approaches and a simple two-stage training strategy to better utilize multi-reference training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that Chinese training data contain multiple references. |
Learning from Contrasts: Synthesizing Reasoning Paths from Diverse Search Trajectories (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MCTS methods retain only the single highest-reward trajectory, discarding comparative signals present in the many explored paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms supervision extraction into a synthesis procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or exceeds baselines on 60K CRPS-synthesized examples on out-of-domain benchmarks. |
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. |
An LLM-Embedding Semantic Adaptation Network for Post-level Semantic Drift Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating semantic drift is essential for understanding discourse evolution and opinion formation in online discussions. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-embedding Semantic Adaptation Network to evaluate semantic drift . they use an LRU module, an LEM-Embedding graph convolutional network module and an adaptive fusion module to integrate features from event related posts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the semantic drift evaluation task compared to baseline models. |
Generate, Discriminate and Contrast: A Semi-Supervised Sentence Representation Learning Framework (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised sentence embedding techniques rely on expensive human-annotated sentence pairs as the supervised signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised sentence embedding framework that leverages large-scale unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods on four domain adaptation tasks. |
SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wei Shi, Shuang Li, Kerun Yu, Jinglei Chen, Zujie Liang, Xinhui Wu, Yuxi Qian, Feng Wei, Bo Zheng, Jiaqing Liang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks. |
From Synthesis to Clinical Assistance: A Strategy-Aware Agent Framework for Autism Intervention based on Real Clinical Dataset (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the gold standard for clinical intervention, but large language models struggle to adhere to its standardized procedures. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy-aware framework to unify high-fidelity intervention dialogue synthesis and clinical decision support. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ASDAgent achieves nearly 80% strategic consistency with human experts. |
MemSearcher: Iterative Memory Integration for Search Agent via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Debing Zhang, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based search agents often concatenate the full interaction history into the context, producing long and noisy inputs and increasing compute cost and memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent framework that maintains a compact memory during multi-turn interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong history-concatenation (ReAct-style) baselines on a range of public datasets while maintaining nearly constant token counts across multi-turn interactions. |
Explainable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: An Empirical Analysis on State-Aware Reasoning Dynamics (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Sheldon Yu, Yuxin Xiong, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Ritwik Sinha, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Recent advances in chain-of-thought prompting have demonstrated the ability of large language models to perform multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze latent dynamics of CoT trajectories for interpretability . they segment generated CoT into discrete reasoning steps and abstract each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework segments generated CoT steps into discrete reasoning steps, abstracts each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices, and clusters these embeddements into semantically meaningful latent states. |
Data Quality Enhancement on the Basis of Diversity with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Uncovered, Difficult, and Noisy (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text classification based on large language models are difficult to apply directly to solve. |
| Approach: | They propose a data quality enhancement method to improve LLMs' performance in classification tasks by using a greedy algorithm to select data and then performing fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models in text classification tasks and significantly improves training efficiency, saving nearly half of the training time. |
Retrieval and Reasoning on KGs: Integrate Knowledge Graphs into Large Language Models for Complex Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed impressively in various NLP tasks, but their inherent hallucination phenomena severely challenge their credibility in complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate explainable Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with LLMs to alleviate hallucinations . they construct subgraphs to enhance the retrieval capabilities of KGs via CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two KGQA datasets show that the proposed model achieves convincing performance compared to strong baselines. |
MegaAgent: A Large-Scale Autonomous LLM-based Multi-Agent System Without Predefined SOPs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent systems lack agent coordination and rely on predefined procedures . existing systems lack adaptive task coordination when task is big and complex . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale autonomous LLM-based multi-agent system that generates agents based on task complexity and enables dynamic task decomposition, parallel execution, efficient communication and comprehensive system monitoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing systems in task completion efficiency and scalability. |
How Well Do LLMs Handle Cantonese? Benchmarking Cantonese Capabilities of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Cantonese has scant representation in NLP research, especially compared to other languages from similarly developed regions. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate Cantonese LLM performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantonesian. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models will evaluate Cantonese's performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantone. |
Tug-of-War between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge conflicts in RALMs can ensnare them in a tug-of-war between knowledge and evidence, limiting their practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model’s confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can resolve knowledge conflicts in large language models with the help of conflict-disentangle contrast decoding (CD2) . |
Large Language Models in Bioinformatics: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing bioinformatics, enabling advanced analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins, and single-cell data. |
| Approach: | They examine the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) in bioinformatics and precision medicine by focusing on genomic sequence modeling, RNA structure prediction, protein function inference, and single-cell transcriptomics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are capable of predicting RNA structure and function and predicting single-cell transcriptomics. |
Token Prediction as Implicit Classification to Identify LLM-Generated Text (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel approach for identifying large language models (LLMs) involved in text generation is proposed . instead of adding an additional classification layer, we reframe the classification task as a next-token prediction task . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for identifying large language models involved in text generation . instead of adding an additional classification layer, they reframe the task as a next-token prediction task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs exceptionally well in the text classification task . it can distinguish distinctive writing styles among various LLMs even without an explicit classifier. |
Unraveling and Mitigating Retriever Inconsistencies in Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALMs) do not consistently outperform the original retrieval-free Language Model (LM). |
| Approach: | They propose a trainable framework that can adaptively retrieve from different knowledge sources and effectively decrease unpredictable reader errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance over the RALM with a single retriever by significantly reducing inconsistent behaviors. |
MED-COREASONER: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Fan Gao, Sherry T. Tong, Jiwoong Sohn, Jiahao Huang, Junfeng Jiang, Ding Xia, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Hyunjae Kim, Qingyu Chen, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Kazuma Kobayashi, Akiko Aizawa, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing models that use English and local languages have a multilingual gap . a language-informed co-reasoning framework can be used to improve multilingual reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning and abstracts them into structured concepts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by 5% . the framework produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces . |
MDERank: A Masked Document Embedding Rank Approach for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Keyphrase extraction (KPE) extracts phrases in a document that provide a concise summary of the core content. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that ranks candidates by similarity between embeddings of source document and masked document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on six benchmarks . it achieves average 3.53 improvement over the existing method . |
Draft
& Verify: Lossless Large Language Model Acceleration via Self-Speculative Decoding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for accelerating Large Language Models have been criticized for their inference costs and inefficient decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-speculative decoding approach for accelerating Large Language Models without an auxiliary model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a speedup of up to 1.99 with no additional neural network training and no extra memory footprint. |
Beyond Surface-Level Pattern Trap: LLM Agents for Faster and Smarter Cross-Architecture Code Migration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | cross-architecture code migration is a resource-intensive and errorprone task. |
| Approach: | a framework for cross-architecture code migration is proposed to decouple implementation details through functional mining and code refactoring. |
| Outcome: | a new framework improves performance and correctness over state-of-the-art frameworks on OpenCV migration tasks. |
I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce and recommender systems lack a framework for personalized generation . a new framework extracts tags from multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts tags from multimodal information and rewrites item description . they then use a decoupled text-to-text and image-to image retriever to search for similar item text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate results aligned with user preferences . it can be used in e-commerce and recommender systems to win over diverse user base . |
Multi-target Backdoor Attacks for Code Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work for backdoor attacks on neural code models insert triggers into task-specific data for code-related downstream tasks, limiting the scope of attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose task-agnostic backdoor attacks for code pre-trained models . they use two learning strategies to implant backdoors into code understanding and generation models - Poisoned Seq2Seq learning and token representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is pre-trained with two learning strategies to support the multi-target attack of downstream code understanding and generation tasks. |
Rethinking Sentiment Style Transfer (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for text style transfer are unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a graph-based method to extract attribute content from sentences . they propose an efficient regularization to leverage attribute-dependent content as guiding signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a YELP and IMDB dataset and it is able to detect errors in the human evaluation. |
Capturing Relations between Scientific Papers: An Abstractive Model for Related Work Section Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing related work generation models are inflexible and extract sentences from multiple papers to form a related work discussion. |
| Approach: | They propose a Relation-aware Related work generator which generates an abstractive related work from the given multiple scientific papers in the same research area. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over existing models and can be used to familiarize researchers with the state of the art in the field. |
SLARD: A Chinese Superior Legal Article Retrieval Dataset (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results, a study finds . existing large language models lack prior knowledge of the content of superior legal articles . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese superior legal article retrieval dataset to find relevant articles with higher legal effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results. |
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)
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Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Gao Xing, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on role-playing agents have focused on enhancing their conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style, but there has been a gap in assessing their social intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. |
Relation-Aware Question Answering for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based approaches to solve multihop Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) fail to utilize information from head-tail entities and the semantic connection between relations to enhance the information capturing of relations in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dual relation graph to find the answer entity in a knowledge graph . they use primal entity graph reasoning, dual relation grafitment and interaction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant performance gain over the prior state-of-the-art on two public datasets, WebQSP and CWQ. |
Unveiling the Key Factors for Distilling Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinghao Chen, Zhijing Sun, Guo Wenjin, Miaoran Zhang, Yanjun Chen, Yirong Sun, Hui Su, Yijie Pan, Dietrich Klakow, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought prompting. |
| Approach: | They examine the factors influencing CoT distillation including granularity, format and teacher model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on four teacher models and seven student models across seven mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. |
MeanAudio: Fast and Faithful Text-to-Audio Generation with Mean Flows (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Text-to-Audio Generation (TTA) systems suffer from slow inference speed, authors report . authors demonstrate that MeanAudia achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-step audio generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-audio generator capable of rendering realistic sound with only one function evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-step audio generation. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
Red Teaming Language Models for Processing Contradictory Dialogues (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that language models are prone to self-contradiction during dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a red teaming framework that detects and attempts to explain dialogues, then modifies existing contradictory content using the explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves the ability to detect contradictory dialogues and provides valid explanations. |
AlphaFin: Benchmarking Financial Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Stock-Chain Framework (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, ML&DL methods fail to provide reasons for stock trend predictions, lacking interpretability and reasoning processes. large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and are unable to keep up with the latest information. |
| Approach: | They develop a method to train large language models to handle financial analysis tasks . they use AlphaFin datasets to compare performance with traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves stock trend prediction and financial question answering tasks. |
Towards Robust Neural Machine Translation with Iterative Scheduled Data-Switch Training (2022.coling-1)
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Zhongjian Miao, Xiang Li, Liyan Kang, Wen Zhang, Chulun Zhou, Yidong Chen, Bin Wang, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods on robust neural machine translation (NMT) construct adversarial examples by injecting noise into authentic examples and indiscriminately exploit two types of examples. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative scheduled data-switch training framework to mitigate this problem by injecting noise into authentic examples and indiscriminately exploiting two types of examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several competitive benchmarks on four translation benchmarks. |
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongcheng Guo, Wei Zhang, Junhao Chen, Yaonan Gu, Jian Yang, Junjia Du, Shaosheng Cao, Binyuan Hui, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work. |
LightningDOT: Pre-training Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Real-Time Image-Text Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models suffer from slow inference speed due to cross-modal attention in transformer architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach that accelerates the inference time of ITR by thousands of times . they extract pre-cached feature indexes offline and employ instant dot-product matching online . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models that consume 1000 times magnitude of computational hours using the same features. |
OptiCo: Adaptive Distributed Training Optimization via Collaborative Agent Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing distributed training frameworks are plagued by over-reliance on prior profiling and poor generalization across models/hardware. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-driven multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models to enable automatic and explainable distributed training strategy configuration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms expert-designed training strategies within 20 iterations. |
Trigger-Argument based Explanation for Event Detection (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing works on ED use words or phrases to explain models’ inner mechanisms, but for ED, the event structure is more enlightening clues to explain model behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Trigger-Argument based Explanation method which can utilize event structure knowledge to uncover a faithful interpretation for existing ED models at neuron level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reveal the process by which the model predicts on the large-scale MAVEN and the widely-used ACE 2005 datasets. |
IterAlign: Iterative Constitutional Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that iterAlign improves truthfulness, helpfulness, harmlessness and honesty, improving the LLM alignment by up to 13.5% in harmlessness. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven constitution discovery and self-alignment framework called IterAlign to overcome these drawbacks by leveraging red teaming to uncover weaknesses of an LLM. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that iterAlign improves truthfulness, helpfulness, harmlessness and honesty by up to 13.5%. |
LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting (2022.coling-1)
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Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Changliang Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting . they construct a learnable verbalizer of entity categories without any label-specific classifiers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and class transfer models in low-resource scenarios. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
Tailoring Vaccine Messaging with Common-Ground Opinions (2024.findings-naacl)
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Rickard Stureborg, Sanxing Chen, Roy Xie, Aayushi Patel, Christopher Li, Chloe Zhu, Tingnan Hu, Jun Yang, Bhuwan Dhingra
| Challenge: | Vaccine interventions aim to answer concerns expressed about vaccination. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to evaluate how well responses are tailored to a common-ground opinion . they find that GPT-4-Turbo performs significantly better than others . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms fine tuned LLMs on the task of tailoring vaccine responses to common-ground opinions. |
SelfRACG: Enabling LLMs to Self-Express and Retrieve for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qian Dong, Jia Chen, Qingyao Ai, Hongning Wang, Haitao Li, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented code generation methods fail to accurately fetch the knowledge required for code generation for consecutive code fragments. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables large language models to Self-express their information needs to enhance retrieval-augmented code generation methods. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SelfRACG can retrieve external knowledge that better aligns with the LLM’s own information needs, resulting in superior generation performance compared to vanilla RACG. |
LearnAlign: Data Selection for LLM Reinforcement Learning with Improved Gradient Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Shipeng Li, Zhiqin Yang, Shikun Li, Xiaobo Xia, Hengyu Liu, Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Dong Fang, Ying Tai, Zhe Peng
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a key technique for enhancing LLMs’ reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-alignment-based method which intelligently selects the learnable and representative training reasoning data for RLVR post-training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly reduces training data requirements while improving performance. |
TS-Align: A Teacher-Student Collaborative Framework for Scalable Iterative Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mainstream approaches to aligning large language models heavily rely on human preference data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fine-tunes a policy model using pairwise feedback data automatically mined from its outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the base model with an average win rate of 69.7% across seven conversational or instruction-following datasets. |
Ask-Before-Detection: Identifying and Mitigating Conformity Bias in LLM-Powered Error Detector for Math Word Problem Solutions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of large language models (LLMs) for automatic error detection in math word problems (MWPs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates adaptive reference solutions using LLMs to enhance error detection by reducing conformity bias in MWPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates the performance gap between conventional and alternative solutions in MWPs, especially when combined with reasoning-enhancing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting. |
Aligning Large Language Models with Implicit Preferences from User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)
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Zhaoxuan Tan, Zheng Li, Tianyi Liu, Haodong Wang, Hyokun Yun, Ming Zeng, Pei Chen, Zhihan Zhang, Yifan Gao, Ruijie Wang, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages implicit preferences in unlabeled user-generated content to generate preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms user-generated content into user queries and generates responses from the policy model. |
Multiple Knowledge-Enhanced Interactive Graph Network for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations models struggle due to lack of Common Sense Knowledge (CSK). |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach to integrate multiple knowledge into the edge representations by integrating textual and visual CSK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular datasets. |
AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videos (2026.findings-acl)
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Chaoyang Wang, Kaituo Feng, Dongyang Chen, Zhongyu Wang, Zhixun Li, Sicheng Gao, Meng Meng, Xu Zhou, Manyuan Zhang, Yuzhang Shang, Xiangyu Yue
| Challenge: | Existing models exhibit blind tool-use reasoning patterns, which significantly increases inference overhead and degrades model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an MLLM that performs adaptive tool-use by determining whether a visual problem truly requires tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in visual reasoning tasks. |
COM-MRC: A COntext-Masked Machine Reading Comprehension Framework for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract sentiment triplets from sentences, but when faced with multiple aspect terms, the MRC-based methods could fail due to the interference from other aspect terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a COntext-Masked MRC framework for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) which aims to extract sentiment triplets from sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and shows that it can extract sentiment triplets from multiple aspect terms. |
Towards the Law of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Language model (LM) distillation aims at distilling knowledge in a large teacher LM to a small student one. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the law of capacity gap to distill knowledge from a large teacher to a small student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other language models on a larger scale by using the law of capacity gap inducted from a preliminary study on small-scale (3B) LMs. |
Incongruity-aware Tension Field Network for Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal sarcasm detection (MSD) identifies sarcasm and accurately understands users’ real attitudes from text-image pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use incongruity-aware tension field network to extract effective text-image feature pairs in fact and sentiment perspectives and construct a fact/sentiment tension field with discrepancy metrics to capture contextual tone and polarized inconcongruities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance surpassing LLaVA1.5-7B with only 17.3M trainable parameters, demonstrating its optimal performance-efficiency in multi-modal sarcasm detection tasks. |
Personalized Transformer for Explainable Recommendation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the successful application of natural language generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses user and item IDs to predict the words in the target explanation to make personalized Transformer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms BERT on the explainable recommendation task in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. |
PG-GSQL: Pointer-Generator Network with Guide Decoding for Cross-Domain Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Generation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text-to-SQL generation depend on interaction history and current utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder model based on interaction-level encoder to capture historical information of SQL query and reuse the previous SQL query tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model on the SParC benchmark . it achieves 34.0% question matching accuracy and 19.0% interaction matching accuracy . |
Refusal-Aware Red Teaming: Exposing Inconsistency in Safety Evaluations (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require rigorous safety evaluations to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a red teaming framework that detects internal model refusals and contrasts them with judgments from an external safety evaluator to generate test cases that expose such discrepancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing reinforcement learning-based approaches in generating diverse test cases and achieves a substantially higher discovery rate of refusal gaps. |
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. |
IS-CoT: Breaking the Long-form Generation Collapse via Interleaved Structural Thinking (2026.acl-long)
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Zechen Sun, Yuyang Sun, Zecheng Tang, Juntao Li, Wenpeng Hu, Wenliang Chen, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models with reasoning capabilities suffer from a severe length collapse in open-ended writing . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that embeds a dynamic plan-write-reflect cycle into the generation process and train a model with interleaved reasoning traces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form benchmarks compared to other models on the same dataset. |
LiveCANNBench: Benchmark SWE AI Coding for Ascend CANN (2026.findings-acl)
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Sijie Wang, Kai Zhao, Wee Peng Tay, Shuo Zhang, Chengwen Liu, Quanjiang Guo, Ren Junhao, Xin Li, Heng Lian, Jingdi Lei, Rui She, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in agents have enabled multi-file, multi-language, and dependency-aware AI coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an SWE-level benchmark for AI coding in the Huawei Ascend CANN software stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world CANN repositories and consists of over 400 task instances spanning multiple file, multi-language, and execution-aware coding challenges. |
G2: Guided Generation for Enhanced Output Diversity in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance output diversity but compromise quality of outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free plug-and-play method that enhances output diversity while preserving generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances output diversity while maintaining an optimal balance between diversity and quality. |
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. |
A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based EAE methods have input length constraints and the gap between the retriever and the inference model. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based retrieval mechanism that overcomes input length constraints . they use compressive memory to cache retrieved information and support continuous updates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms retrieval-based methods on three public datasets. |
Good Visual Guidance Make A Better Extractor: Hierarchical Visual Prefix for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li, Yunzhi Yao, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for named entity recognition and relation extraction suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images are incorporated in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical visual prefix fusion NeTwork for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction using pluggable visual prefixed visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models are limited in their generalizability, despite their performance being over-estimated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
GAPO: Learning Preferential Prompt through Generative Adversarial Policy Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Zhouhong Gu, Xingzhou Chen, Xiaoran Shi, Tao Wang, Suhang Zheng, Tianyu Li, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this require a limited understanding of constraints and can be hallucinating or brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines adversarial training dynamics with an encoder-only reward model to progressively learn and adapt to increasingly complex constraints. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that GAPO significantly outperforms existing methods like PPO, DPO, and KTO in fine-grained constraints. |
Defense Against Prompt Injection Attack by Leveraging Attack Techniques (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent attacks leverage LLMs’ instruction-following abilities and their inabilities to distinguish instructions injected in the data content. |
| Approach: | They invert the intention of prompt injection methods to develop novel defense methods based on previous training-free attack methods by repeating the attack process with the original input instruction rather than the injected instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing defense approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results. |
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for event understanding have limited coverage due to complexity of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations . they propose 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction, and event relation extraction. |
Fine-grained Pluggable Gradient Ascent for Knowledge Unlearning in Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on knowledge unlearning focus on computer vision but extend their exploration to other fields. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive objective that calculates gradients with fine-grained control specifically targeting sensitive tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the general ability of language models while achieving knowledge unlearning. |
CoQuIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Quality-Aware Information Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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Jiahui Geng, Fengyu Cai, Shaobo Cui, Qing Li, Liangwei Chen, Chenyang Lyu, Haonan Li, Derui Zhu, Alexander Pretschner, Heinz Koeppl, Fakhri Karray
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on functional relevance while neglecting code quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark to evaluate quality-aware code retrieval . they include fine-grained quality annotations over 42,725 queries and 134,907 code snippets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that state-of-the-art models fail to separate buggy or insecure code from robust counterparts. |
Youling: an AI-assisted Lyrics Creation System (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Rongsheng Zhang, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lin Jiang, Lin Chen, Zhiwei Hu, Yadong Xi, Changjie Fan, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on a single pass of lyrics generation with little human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-assisted lyrics creation system that supports one pass full-text generation and interactive generation modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports full-text generation and interactive generation modes . it also provides a revision module which enables users to revise undesired lyrics repeatedly. |
Knowledge-augmented Self-training of A Question Rewriter for Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent rise of conversational applications has promoted the development of conversation KBQA (ConvKBQA). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to produce a full-fledged rewritten question based on conversation history and then reason the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces a full-fledged rewritten question based on the conversation history and reasoned the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
When Long Helps Short: How Context Length in Supervised Fine-tuning Affects Behavior of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use long-context SFT to improve short-contemporary performance . they also decouple and analyze two key components, Multi-Head Attention and Feed-Forward Network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves short-context performance, contrary to pretraining. |
CSS: A Large-scale Cross-schema Chinese Text-to-SQL Medical Dataset (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases . a single-domain task evaluates the performance on identical databases based on the same domain . |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-domain text-to-SQL task that parses user questions into SQL on unseen databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases. |
Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation" |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC) |
Generative Annotation for ASR Named Entity Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuanchang Luo, Daimeng Wei, Shaojun Li, Hengchao Shang, Jiaxin Guo, Zongyao Li, Zhanglin Wu, Xiaoyu Chen, Zhiqiang Rao, Jinlong Yang, Hao Yang
| Challenge: | Existing named entity correction models fail to transcribe domain-speciffcnamed entities when theforms of the wrongly-transcribed words and the ground-truth entity are signiffcantly different. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes speech sound features to retrieve candidate entities . it uses speech sound feature to annotate entityerrors in ASR transcripts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can bring signiffcant improvement to entity accuracy. |
A Unified Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Model Towards Interpolation and Extrapolation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graphs de-emphasize temporal correlations between facts sequences and ignore inferring clues from missing facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal PAth-based reasoning model that is robust to ambiguous temporal data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms SOTA methods on the link prediction task. |
Graph Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Radiology Findings Summarization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating impression generation have limited the relationship between extra knowledge and the original findings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automating impression generation that exploits extra knowledge and original findings . they propose combining key words and their relations to extract critical information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits extra knowledge and the original findings in an integrated way . the state-of-the-art results on two datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method . |
GeAR: Graph-enhanced Agent for Retrieval-augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhili Shen, Chenxin Diao, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Pascual Merita, Shriram Piramanayagam, Enting Chen, Damien Graux, Andre Melo, Ruofei Lai, Zeren Jiang, Zhongyang Li, Ye Qi, Yang Ren, Dandan Tu, Jeff Z. Pan
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) relies on effective retrieval capabilities, yet traditional sparse and dense retrievers struggle with multi-hop retrieval scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph expansion mechanism that augments any conventional base retriever and an agent framework that incorporates the resulting graph-based retrieval into a multi-step retrieval framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results on three multi-hop question answering datasets while consuming fewer tokens and requiring fewer iterations than existing multi-step retrieval systems. |
DNN-driven Gradual Machine Learning for Aspect-term Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) use pre-specified lexicons to extract sentiment features. |
| Approach: | They propose a Deep Neural Network-driven approach for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) that leverages shared features between labeled and unlabeled instances for knowledge conveyance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on real benchmark data. |
USSA: A Unified Table Filling Scheme for Structured Sentiment Analysis (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) is a problem of bi-lexical dependency parsing . previous studies have cast it as a bottleneck because of overlap and discontinuity issues . |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-lexical dependency parsing graph and a table-filling scheme that addresses overlap and discontinuity issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
BlendFilter: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Query Generation Blending and Knowledge Filtering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haoyu Wang, Ruirui Li, Haoming Jiang, Jinjin Tian, Zhengyang Wang, Chen Luo, Xianfeng Tang, Monica Cheng, Tuo Zhao, Jing Gao
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models struggle with complex inputs and noisy knowledge retrieval hindering model effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a query generation method that integrates query generation blending with knowledge filtering to enhance retrieval-augmented LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks on open-domain question answering benchmarks. |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
RAG-Star: Enhancing Deliberative Reasoning with Retrieval Augmented Verification and Refinement (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but struggle with complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RAG approach that integrates retrieved information to guide tree-based reasoning process based on LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in large language models . iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers based on the LLM itself . |
Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing but are not fully able to leverage the generative power of LLM. |
| Approach: | They examine the progress, methods, and future directions of large language models . they examine what generative recommendation is, why RS should advance to generative recommendations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be simplified to generate recommendations from the entire pool of items. |
Exclusive Hierarchical Decoding for Deep Keyphrase Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate keyphrases ignore hierarchical compositionality of keyphrase set and generate duplicated keyphrase sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical decoding framework that explicitly models hierarchic compositionality of a keyphrase set and either a soft or a hard exclusion mechanism to enhance the diversity of the generated keyphrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates less duplicated and more accurate keyphrases on a set of keyphrase sets. |
DialoGPS: Dialogue Path Sampling in Continuous Semantic Space for Data Augmentation in Multi-Turn Conversations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a context leads to various responses, and a response answers multiple contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments open-domain dialogue generation from a many-to-many perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can augment open-domain dialogue generation tasks with automatic and human evaluation. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
Beyond High-Entropy Exploration: Correctness-Aware Low-Entropy Segment-Based Advantage Shaping for Reasoning LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropies drive exploration and should receive stronger updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a correctness-aware reinforcement framework that performs fine-grained advantage modulation over low-entropy segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy over strong RL baselines across three backbones and six math benchmarks while maintaining high-entropy exploration. |
Beyond Surface Simplicity: Revealing Hidden Reasoning Attributes for Precise Commonsense Diagnosis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense question answering benchmarks often treat these aspects in isolation, resulting in evaluation accuracy differences of up to 24.8% across different difficulty levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reveals hidden reasoning attributes behind commonsense questions by leveraging the knowledge generated during the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals hidden reasoning attributes behind commonsense questions by leveraging the knowledge generated during the reasoning process. |
Bridging External and Parametric Knowledge: Mitigating Hallucination of LLMs with Shared-Private Semantic Synergy in Dual-Stream Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to mitigate the hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) however, external knowledge may contain noise and conflict with parametric knowledge of LLMs, leading to degraded performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Stream Knowledge-Augmented Framework for Shared-Private Semantic Synergy that refines the traditional self-attention into a mixed-attention that distinguishes shared and private semantics for a controlled knowledge integration. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves a superior performance over baselines. |
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. |
MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Li, Miaozeng Du, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Haiyun Jiang, Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks focus on coarse-grained knowledge, leaving the intricacies of fine-grounded knowledge unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and dataset specifically designed for FG multimodal entity knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark underscoring the complexity of FG knowledge editing in MLLMs. |
Understanding Secret Leakage Risks in Code LLMs: A Tokenization Perspective (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Code Large Language Models (CLLMs) are reshaping how software is built, maintained, and evolved. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BPE tokenization to inadvertently leak code secrets . they propose to mitigate the gibberish bias by using a newer tokenizer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a novel method that can be used to detect and mitigate gibberish bias in CLLMs. |
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]. |
TopicAttack: An Indirect Prompt Injection Attack via Topic Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent attacks have demonstrated potential, but their abrupt instruction injection often undermines their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prompts the LLM to generate a fabricated conversational transition prompt that gradually shifts the topic toward the injected instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with an attack success rate (ASR) over 90% in most cases, even when various defense methods are applied. |
WIKIGENBENCH:Exploring Full-length Wikipedia Generation under Real-World Scenario (2025.coling-main)
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Jiebin Zhang, Eugene J. Yu, Qinyu Chen, Chenhao Xiong, Dawei Zhu, Han Qian, Mingbo Song, Weimin Xiong, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to generate Wikipedia articles for new events fall short of real-world application. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to generate Wikipedia articles for new events under real-world scenarios . they use systematic metrics and LLM-based metrics to assess verifiability, organization, and other aspects aligned with real-life scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that hierarchical-based methods generate more comprehensive content while fine-tuned methods achieve better verifiability. |
Factorized Learning Assisted with Large Language Model for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Previous Sign Language Translation methods have relied on gloss annotations to improve performance, but labeling high-quality glosses is labor-intensive and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Large Language Model (LLM) into SLT by factorizing learning into two stages to improve the learning curve. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on three SLT datasets conducted under the gloss-free setting. |
Auto-Dialabel: Labeling Dialogue Data with Unsupervised Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog datasets rely on human labeling, which is expensive, limited in size, and in low coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically cluster dialogue intents and slots . they collect context features, leverage an autoencoder for feature assembly, and adapt a dynamic hierarchical clustering method for intent and slot labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can promote human labeling cost to a great extent and achieve good intent clustering accuracy (84.1%) it also provides reasonable and instructive slot labeling results. |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
Distantly Supervised NER with Partial Annotation Learning and Reinforcement Learning (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese are limited by the lack of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can automatically populate annotated training data without humancost by using distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than comparison systems on two datasets. |
EventOA: An Event Ontology Alignment Benchmark Based on FrameNet and Wikidata (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event ontologies focus on entity-based OA, and neglect event-based one . however, independent development of event ontoologies often results in heterogeneous representations that raise the need for establishing alignments between semantically related events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view event ontology alignment method that utilizes description information and neighbor information to obtain richer representations of the event ontoologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing entity-based methods and can serve as a strong baseline for future research. |
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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Wentao Deng, Jiahuan Pei, Keyi Kong, Zhe Chen, Furu Wei, Yujun Li, Zhaochun Ren, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren
| Challenge: | Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models. |
| Approach: | They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. |
Out-of-Distribution Detection via LLM-Guided Outlier Generation for Text-attributed Graph (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are widely used in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to generate OOD-nodes with high quality . they also use LLMs to integrate existing nodes with LLM-generated edges . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on samples outside the In-Distribution (ID) data, but it is difficult to obtain high-quality OOD samples in the real world. |
Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task. |
Retrieving Multimodal Information for Augmented Generation: A Survey (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruochen Zhao, Hailin Chen, Weishi Wang, Fangkai Jiao, Xuan Long Do, Chengwei Qin, Bosheng Ding, Xiaobao Guo, Minzhi Li, Xingxuan Li, Shafiq Joty
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly using multimodality to augment their generation ability, but there is no unified perception of at which stage and how to incorporate different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodality to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) this will provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the methods' applications and encourage them to adapt existing techniques to the fast-growing field of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve factuality, reasoning, interpretability, and robustness of the generated content. |
AesX: Enhance Your Images with Stunning Aesthetic Beauty (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing models do not analyze human preferences at a finer granularity, which leads to quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of preference indicators across two major dimensions, text-image consistency and aesthetic quality, and a generative framework to steer the model toward a generation path that more closely aligns with human aesthetic sensibilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves target recognition accuracy and overall visual aesthetic presentation by focusing on human preferences. |
ALERT: An LLM-powered Benchmark for Automatic Evaluation of Recommendation Explanations (2025.naacl-long)
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Yichuan Li, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Mao Li, Tianyi Liu, Pei Chen, Yifan Gao, Kyumin Lee, Kaize Ding, Zhengyang Wang, Zhihan Zhang, Jingbo Shang, Xian Li, Trishul Chilimbi
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for recommendation explanation evaluation lack item diversity and user preferences data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic recommendation explanation evaluation benchmark based on Amazon e-commerce categories with implicit preferences . they propose two novel automatic evaluators that enable scalable and human-preference aligned evaluation of explanations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic evaluation benchmark outperforms existing methods in a variety of domains. |
Dual-Phase Accelerated Prompt Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt optimization make light of the importance of high-quality initialization and the identification of effective directions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses a meta-instruction to generate high-quality initial prompts and iteratively optimize them at the sentence level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent accuracy gain over baselines with less than five optimization steps. |
Message Passing on Semantic-Anchor-Graphs for Fine-grained Emotion Representation Learning and Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion classification is an important task with applications in education, virtual reality, and robotics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token embeddings to generate a "semantic-anchor graph" using semantic anchors, sentences can be projected onto them to form a graph . |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed system can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion. |
HiPrune: Hierarchical Attention for Efficient Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual token pruning lack insight into the intrinsic property of the vision encoder . et al., 2017: 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic token pruning method that trains without training . they propose 'HiPrune' method which prunes visual tokens according to their attention . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens . it reduces inference FLOPs by 58.7% and maintains 99.99% accuracy with 2/9 tokens. |
Repo4QA: Answering Coding Questions via Dense Retrieval on GitHub Repositories (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Stack Overflow and GitHub are open source communities that are gaining popularity . developers need to raise programming questions in coding forums and navigate to GitHub repositories . |
| Approach: | They propose a questionrepository matching task that bridges the gap between repositories and real-world coding questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on coding questions and repositories . it can find suitable coding repositoriels and bridge the gap between them . |
C2KD: Cross-layer and Cross-head Knowledge Distillation for Small Language Model-based Recommendation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise but their size and high inference costs limit deployment on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to transfer task-relevant knowledge from two complementary dimensions to Large Language Models (LLMs) Large Language models (LLMS) have demonstrated great potential in sequential recommendation tasks . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across diverse model families show that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance compared to LLMs. |
xDial-Eval: A Multilingual Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation Benchmark (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, human evaluation is the most reliable way to holistically judge the quality of the dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English dialogue evaluation metrics to generalize them to other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics outperform OpenAI’s ChatGPT in terms of average Pearson correlations over all datasets and languages. |
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. |
HiSVD: Principled Low-Rank Approximation of LLMs via Hierarchical Modeling of Information Capacity and Spectral Structure (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating layer importance ignore the fine-grained influence of spectral distribution shape. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical rank allocation framework with two stages to address this gap . they propose SVD-based lowrank approximation that exploits spectral heterogeneity . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that HiSVD outperforms state-of-the-art methods on LLMs . |
LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Li, Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jiaxin Zhang, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs that stray from user input or contravene established knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a new phenomenon, Authority Bias, where LLMs favor one knowledge source over the other . they propose atomic information that generates conflicts and a Conflict Detection Enhanced Query framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces Authority bias in large language models . it detects conflicts, performs credibility assessment on conflicting paragraphs, and detects perturbed text . |
RubricHub: A Comprehensive and Highly Discriminative Rubric Dataset via Automated Coarse-to-Fine Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Sunzhu Li, Jiale Zhao, Huimin Ren, Zhenlin Wei, Yang Zhou, Jingwen Yang, Shunyu Liu, Kaike Zhang, Chen Wei
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating open-ended rubrics suffer from scalability bottlenecks and coarse criteria resulting in a supervision ceiling effect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated Coarse-to-Fine Rubric Generation . their framework uses principle-guided synthesis, multi-model aggregation, difficulty evolution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces comprehensive and highly discriminative criteria capable of capturing the subtle nuances. |
Distantly-Supervised Joint Extraction with Noise-Robust Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying entity pairs and relations with a single model are noisy . Existing methods only consider one source of noise or make decisions using external knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns entity mentions with corresponding tags for joint extraction . they propose DENRL, which employs a lightweight transformer backbone for joint tagging . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two benchmark datasets with better interpretability. |
Unearthing Gems from Stones: Policy Optimization with Negative Sample Augmentation for LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning language models have witnessed a paradigm shift from short to long CoT pattern. |
| Approach: | They propose a behavior-constrained policy gradient with negative sample augmented (BCPG-NSA) negative steps are valuable components in long CoT models, authors argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on math/coding reasoning benchmarks using the same training dataset. |
Analyzing Chain-of-thought Prompting in Black-Box Large Language Models via Estimated V-information (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in improving performance on challenging reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric which extends the concept of pointwise V-information to black-box models and quantifies label-relevant new information introduced by CoT prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric extends the concept of pointwise V-information to black-box models, quantifying label-relevant new information introduced by CoT prompting beyond pre-existing label information. |
MathMixup: Boosting LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Difficulty-Controllable Data Synthesis and Curriculum Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data synthesis methods suffer from limited diversity and lack precise control over problem difficulty, making them insufficient for efficient training paradigms such as curriculum learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis paradigm that generates high-quality, difficulty-controllable mathematical reasoning problems through hybrid and decomposed strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing methods and improves mathematical reasoning abilities. |
Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory (2025.acl-long)
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Mingda Chen, Yang Li, Karthik Padthe, Rulin Shao, Alicia Yi Sun, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gargi Ghosh, Wen-tau Yih
| Challenge: | Large language models can generate factually inaccurate content, a problem known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a working memory that receives feedback from external resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four fact-seeking datasets and increases the factuality metric by 2 to 6 points absolute. |
Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought-like method to elicit models' potential abilities to generate rationales and answers that are based on attribution tracing and causal tracers to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates Toxic CoT problems and improves the model’s overall commonsense reasoning performance by 5.5%. |
Uncertainty-Aware Bootstrap Learning for Joint Extraction on Distantly-Supervised Data (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract entity pairs and their relations from labeled data are noisy and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a bootstrap learning approach that is motivated by intuition that the higher the uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and related methods on two large datasets. |
ProCut: LLM Prompt Compression via Attribution Estimation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | ProCut compresses prompts using attribution analysis to reduce prompt size and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses prompts through attribution analysis using a heuristic and attribution-based attribution model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces prompt size by 78% while maintaining or improving task performance by 62%. |
LLMs Can Achieve High-quality Simultaneous Machine Translation as Efficiently as Offline (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models perform well in offline machine translation when the complete source sentence is provided . however, in many real scenarios, the source tokens arrive in a streaming manner and simultaneous machine translation is required . |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that includes constructing supervised fine-tuning data for simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) to achieve SiMT, source and target tokens are rearranged into interleaved sequences, separated by special tokens according to varying latency requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various SiMT benchmarks and evaluation metrics while maintaining efficient auto-regressive decoding. |
Intrinsic Mutual Information as a Modulator for Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for offline preference optimization involve additional hyperparameter tuning, resulting in substantial time overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework for offline preference optimization that leverages hyperparameter modulation to decouple preference contributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance over existing methods while reducing training overhead by more than 15%. |
Meta-Reflection: A Feedback-Free Reflection Learning Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Yaoke Wang, Yun Zhu, XintongBao XintongBao, Wenqiao Zhang, Suyang Dai, Kehan Chen, Wenqiang Li, Gang Huang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve large language models' ability to understand and reason are limited by external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-free reflection mechanism that requires only a single inference pass without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on an industrial e-commerce benchmark and public datasets. |
Distributed LLM Serving on Consumer-Grade GPUs by Reconciling Computation and Communication (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lewei Jin, Kui Zhang, Yongqi Chen, null Zhuoyifan, Renjie Li, Yi Gao, Bowei Yang, Zhengong Cai, Wei Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models are reshaping internet services, and serving them is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient distributed LLM serving system that splits prefill and decode requests into smaller chunks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces TTFT, TPOT, and latency compared to the state-of-the-art system. |
CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yong Zhao, Kai Xu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yue Hu, Zhiheng Zheng, Yingfeng Chen, Yatai Ji, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Jincai Huang
| Challenge: | Embodied Question Answering (EQA) tasks are primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions in dynamic city spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy compared to baselines . the proposed agent outperforms existing agents in open-ended city spaces . |
Better Highlighting: Creating Sub-Sentence Summary Highlights (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarizations are considered to be less reliable because they distort the original meaning and can be confusing for readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate summary highlights that are understandable on their own to avoid confusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows summaries to be understood in context and avoids misdirecting readers to false conclusions. |
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated increasing power, but they also have vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack that targets the cognitive structure and processes of large language models (LLMs) they propose defending cognitive overload attacks from three perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is a black-box attack with no need for knowledge of model architecture or access to model weights. |
Jailbreak-Zero: A Path to Pareto Optimal Red Teaming for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Kai Hu, Abhinav Aggarwal, Mehran Khodabandeh, David Zhang, Eric Hsin, Li Chen, Ankit Jain, Matt Fredrikson, Akash Bharadwaj
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to red teaming are based on example-based evaluation, where a static list of specific prompts is used to define and measure "unsafe content" |
| Approach: | They propose a new automated red teaming framework that shifts from example-based to policy-based evaluation that focuses on risk coverage, semantic diversity, and fidelity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior, human-readable attacks against open-source and proprietary models even for unseen safety policies. |
LLM Jailbreak Detection for (Almost) Free! (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting jailbreak prompts entail significant computational costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a free jailbreak detection method which scales logits by temperature to detect jailbreak prompts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects jailbreak prompts with no additional computational costs. |
Tailoring Diagnostic Modeling to Individual Learners: Personalized Distractor Generation via MCTS-Guided Reasoning Reconstruction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current distractor generation methods produce shared distractors for all students, ignoring individual variations in reasoning, which limits their diagnostic effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which tailors distractors to each student’s specific cognitive flaws, inferred from their past question-answering (QA) history. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in generating plausible distractors and adapts to group-level settings. |
LongTutor: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Long-term Personalized Tutoring (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations focus on isolated, short-term interactions, overlooking the inherently long-term nature of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-term personalized tutoring based on an annotated learning log . they propose an automated generator–verifier pipeline to enable benchmark expansion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks evaluate LLMs across three progressive tasks: evidence acquisition, knowledge state diagnosis, and adaptive teaching action. |
IntrAgent: An LLM Agent for Content-Grounded Information Retrieval through Literature Review (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Scientific research relies on accurate information retrieval from literature to support analytical decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that automates fine-grained information retrieval *faithfully* grounded in the provided content in response to research-driven queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 13.2% higher cross-domain accuracy than state-of-the-art RAG and research-agent baselines across seven backbone LLMs. |
Global Structure Knowledge-Guided Relation Extraction Method for Visually-Rich Document (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Relation Extraction framework that generates relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from scanned images and incorporates global structural knowledge into the representations of the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in fine-tuning setting and yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting. |
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. |
DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer’s Disease Questions with Scientific Literature (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Li, Shu Yang, Zhen Tan, Jae Baik, Sukwon Yun, Joseph Lee, Aaron Chacko, Bojian Hou, Duy Duong-Tran, Ying Ding, Huan Liu, Li Shen, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have achieved promising performances across various applications, but the challenge of integrating long-tail knowledge continues to impede the seamless adoption of LLMs in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic co-augmentation framework for the refinement of large language models and knowledge graphs in the context of Alzheimer's Disease. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to study Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using LLMs and KGs. |
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
Robustness via Referencing: Defending against Prompt Injection Attacks by Referencing the Executed Instruction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yulin Chen, Haoran Li, Yuan Sui, Yue Liu, Yufei He, Xiaoling Bai, Chi Fei, Li Yabo, Haozhe Ma, Yangqiu Song, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Prompt injection attacks manipulate large language models (LLMs) by misleading them to deviate from the original input instructions and execute maliciously injected instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt injection defense method that suppresses the model's instruction-following tendencies rather than suppressing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms prompt-engineering-based approaches and fine-tuning methods and reduces the ASR to nearly 0% in some scenarios. |
Towards Reliable Large Audio Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
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Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yakun Song, Wenxi Chen, Chenpeng Du, Jian Wu, Yuanzhe Chen, Zhuo Chen, Yuping Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large audio language models (LALMs) have demonstrated impressive results and promising prospects in universal understanding and reasoning across speech, music, and general sound. |
| Approach: | They propose to use training-free and training-based methods to enhance LALM reliability to different extents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the reliability of large audio language models to different extents. |
Dual Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model relationships between aspects and opinion words are inefficient due to informal expressions and complexity of online reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual graph convolutional networks model that considers complementarity of syntax structures and semantic correlations simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets and validates it. |
PairCoder: Pair Programming-Inspired Two-Agent Collaboration for Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi agent frameworks for large language models are brittle on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that brings pair programming to autonomous LLM collaboration. |
| Outcome: | Using PairCoder, large language models achieve better results on code generation tasks and reduce token usage by 40% to 70% on eight representative backbones. |
GTA: Supervised-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Text Classification with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning fine-tuning methods suffer from inefficient exploration and slow convergence . supervised fine- tuning methods have limited performance ceiling and less solid theoretical foundation . |
| Approach: | They propose a Guess-Think-Answer framework that combines supervised and supervised learning in a unified training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both standalone SFT and RL training models on three text classification benchmarks. |
ImPart: Importance-Aware Delta-Sparsification for Improved Model Compression and Merging in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to reduce resource requirements for task-specific large language models have been developed. |
| Approach: | They propose a delta compression approach that optimizes for importance of a model . they use SVD to dynamically adjust the sparsity ratios of different vectors based on their importance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art in retaining task-specific knowledge even at high sparsity ratios. |
Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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Yuanzhen Xie, Xinzhou Jin, Tao Xie, Matrixmxlin Matrixmxlin, Liang Chen, Chenyun Yu, Cheng Lei, Chengxiang Zhuo, Bo Hu, Zang Li
| Challenge: | In-context learning of large-language models has achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing . however, the single-step chain-of-thought prompting approach faces challenges such as attention diffusion and inadequate performance in complex tasks like text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow paradigm method to enhance the attention and problem-solving scope of large-language models through decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three datasets and improves the upper limit of LLM-based approaches. |
Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Search for Optimization Problem Solving (2026.acl-long)
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Linlin Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Chen Zhao, Feng Chen, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Language model hallucinations and limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors and feasibility failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that automates optimization problems from natural language descriptions with efficiency and reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy and reduces token usage. |
Explicit Semantic Decomposition for Definition Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing definition generation methods rely on decoding to extract semantic components of words. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which explicitly decomposes meaning of words into semantic components and models them with discrete latent variables for definition generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on WordNet and Oxford benchmarks. |
On Tree-Based Neural Sentence Modeling (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing tree-based sentence modeling approaches adopt syntactic parsing trees as the explicit structure prior. |
| Approach: | They replace parsing trees with trivial trees to study their effectiveness . they found that tree-based sentence modeling gives better results when crucial words are closer to the final representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tree-based sentences have shown better results on many downstream tasks. |
A Parameter-Efficient and Fine-Grained Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current vision-language models extract semantic information from large-scale cross-modal associations, limiting performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a detail-oriented prompt learning method to implement fine-grained multi-modal semantic alignment with merely 0.25M trainable parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method implements fine-grained multi-modal semantic alignment with merely 0.25M trainable parameters. |
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%. |
Decoding Probing: Revealing Internal Linguistic Structures in Neural Language Models Using Minimal Pairs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a new method is being developed to probe internal linguistic characteristics in neural language models layer by layer . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses minimal pairs benchmark to probe internal linguistic characteristics in neural language models layer by layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures grammaticality labels in language models layer by layer . it is based on the cognitive neurosciences of the brain and its representations as "neural activations". |
CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianqi Xu, Linyao Chen, Dai-Jie Wu, Yanjun Chen, Zecheng Zhang, Xiang Yao, Zhiqiang Xie, Yongchao Chen, Shilong Liu, Bochen Qian, Anjie Yang, Zhaoxuan Jin, Jianbo Deng, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexity of constructing tasks and evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-environment agent benchmark framework that integrates graph-based evaluation and task generation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. |
SELECting over Tokens: Curating Pre-training Data at Scale via Token Classification (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Tong, Weidong Zhang, Jiaang Li, Haibin Chen, Shilei Liu, Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Yujin Yuan, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing pipelines rely on expert-crafted heuristic rules, which lack content-aware, fine-grained noise detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes data refinement as a highly efficient token classification task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing pipelines on benchmarks and is 2.5x faster at inference. |
DEEPER Insight into Your User: Directed Persona Refinement for Dynamic Persona Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Aili Chen, Chengyu Du, Jiangjie Chen, Jinghan Xu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Zulong Chen, Liangyue Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating personas from static historical data fail to capture dynamic behaviors and evolving preferences in real-world interactive scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that iteratively updates personas using streaming user behavior data to continually enhance their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach delivers 32.2% reduction in user behavior prediction error over four update rounds, outperforming the best baseline by 22.92%. |
A Data-Efficient Path to Multilingual LLMs: Language Expansion via Post-training PARAM𝛥 Integration into Upcycled MoE (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Zhou, Tianhao Li, Zhijun Wang, Shuaijie She, Linjuan Wu, Hao-Ran Wei, Baosong Yang, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expensive and require extensive Continued Pre-Training and data-intensive alignment to expand. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which upcycles a dense model into a Mixture-of-Experts architecture, allocating different experts to different languages. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model upcycles a dense model into a Mixture-of-Experts(MoE) architecture, allocating different experts to different languages. |
E-ConvRec: A Large-Scale Conversational Recommendation Dataset for E-Commerce Customer Service (2022.lrec-1)
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Meihuizi Jia, Ruixue Liu, Peiying Wang, Yang Song, Zexi Xi, Haobin Li, Xin Shen, Meng Chen, Jinhui Pang, Xiaodong He
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on developing conversational recommendation system (CRS), which provides valuable recommendations to users through conversations. |
| Approach: | They construct an authentic Chinese dialogue dataset consisting of over 25k dialogues and 770k utterances, which contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
LoRA-PAR: A Flexible Dual-System LoRA Partitioning Approach to Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale generative models like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-O1 benefit substantially from chain-of-thought reasoning, yet pushing their performance typically requires vast data, large model sizes, and full-parameter fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-system LoRA framework that partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands and adopts a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance knowledge and intuition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands, using fewer yet more focused parameters for each task. |
InstructCoder: Instruction Tuning Large Language Models for Code Editing (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | InstructCoder is the first instruction-tuning dataset designed to adapt LLMs for general-purpose code editing. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to edit code based on user instructions . they use a dataset to adapt LLMs to general-purpose code editing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly improve code editing performance compared to proprietary models . the proposed model is based on a human-written execution-based benchmark . |
SPPO: Sequence-Level PPO for Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Tianyi Wang, Yixia Li, Long Li, Yibiao Chen, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
| Challenge: | Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models with verifiable rewards. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable algorithm that harmonizes sample efficiency with stability of outcome-based updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms standard PPO and matches the performance of computation-heavy group-based methods. |
Eliciting Implicit Acoustic Styles from Open-domain Instructions to Facilitate Fine-grained Controllable Generation of Speech (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work relies on pre-defined rules or templates to control the style of speech. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-domain instructions to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on their instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on open-domain instructions. |
PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing training data is sparse, with each document associated with one or a few labeled queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free potential query retrieval framework to address this problem . they use a Gaussian mixture distribution to model all potential queries for a document . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to capture comprehensive semantic information from a document with multiple queries. |
CSMCIR: CoT-Enhanced Symmetric Alignment with Memory Bank for Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhipeng Qian, Zihan Liang, Yufei Ma, Ben Chen, Huangyu Dai, Yiwei Ma, Jiayi Ji, Chenyi Lei, Han Li, Xiaoshuai Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to search for images using single-modality are limited by representation space fragmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified representation framework that achieves efficient query-target alignment . they introduce a multi-level Chain-of-Thought prompting strategy that guides MLMs to generate discriminative, semantically compatible captions for target images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves efficient query-target alignment through synergistic components. |
Early Exit with Disentangled Representation and Equiangular Tight Frame (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing early exit paradigm relies on training parametrical internal classifiers to complete specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decouple two distinct types of representation and introduce a non-parametric tight frame classifier for improvement. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on monolingual and multilingual tasks show that the proposed method improves over existing methods. |
Exploring In-Context Learning for Knowledge Grounded Dialog Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge grounded dialog generation models are prone to hallucination and produce factually inaccurate outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based framework which leverages in-context learning and retrieval techniques to enhance LLMs on knowledge grounded dialog generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing training-based models on a large-scale knowledge graph with 1M+ facts and is expected to perform knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Cross Attention Augmented Transducer Networks for Simultaneous Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simultaneous translation are limited by monotonic constraint . a novel architecture for simultaneous translation is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a cross attention-augmented transducer for simultaneous translation that optimizes both policies and translation models by expanding target sequences with blank symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves better latency-quality trade-offs than state-of-the-art approaches. |
From Pseudo-Balancing to True Specialization: Memory-Aware Routing for Mixture-of-Experts (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize expert-centered load balancing fail to account for pseudo-balance phenomenon . severe knowledge overlap among experts leads to redundant representations and inefficient parameter utilization . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prioritizes expert utilization over semantic alignment . they use memory-aware routing to ensure expert load balancing is consistent . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that MAR improves expert specialization by 35% and accuracy by 2%-25% . MAR matches baseline performance with only half the experts . |
Evolutionary Guided Decoding: Iterative Value Refinement for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for directing language model outputs are limited in their accuracy due to a distributional gap . existing methods train static value functions on trajectories sampled exclusively from the base policy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to bridge a distributional gap in the accuracy of value functions . they propose RLHF to align language models with human values and task requirements . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computational costs and improves value function accuracy by leveraging principled value function optimization. |
PaperRegister: Boosting Flexible-grained Paper Search via Hierarchical Register Indexing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paper search systems lack detailed information to support finer-grained queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper-based index that transforms abstract-based corpus index into hierarchical index tree and offline can support paper search queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves the SOTA performance and excels in fine-grained scenarios. |
NaSGEC: a Multi-Domain Chinese Grammatical Error Correction Dataset from Native Speaker Texts (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on Chinese grammatical error correction focus on learning essays. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese grammatical error correction dataset that annotates multiple references for 12,500 sentences from three native domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to facilitate research on Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) for native speaker texts from multiple domains. |
Infinity-Parser: Layout-Aware Reinforcement Learning with High-quality Document Parsing Dataset (2026.findings-acl)
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Baode Wang, Biao Wu, Weizhen Li, Meng Fang, Zuming Huang, Jun Huang, Yanjie Liang, Haozhe Wang, Ling Chen, Wei Chu, Yuan Qi
| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning methods struggle to generalize across document types, leading to poor performance. |
| Approach: | They propose layoutRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes layout understanding through composite rewards integrating normalized edit distance, paragraph count accuracy, and reading order preservation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms specialized document parsing systems and general-purpose vision-language models on a broad range of document types, languages, and structural complexities. |
Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter (2020.acl-demos)
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Runxin Xu, Jun Cao, Mingxuan Wang, Jiaze Chen, Hao Zhou, Ying Zeng, Yuping Wang, Li Chen, Xiang Yin, Xijin Zhang, Songcheng Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Xiaomingbot is a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four inte- gal capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates Chinese news, then reads it in multiple languages and generates an animated avatar reading it. |
Exploring Mathematical Extrapolation of Large Language Models with Synthetic Data (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent capabilities in language understanding, text generation and many other tasks, but struggle in complex multi-step reasoning problems such as mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune an open-llama-3B model to perform well on multi-step reasoning tasks via synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reach a zero-shot pass@1 at 0.44 on the in-domain dataset and demonstrates certain generalization capabilities on the out-of-domain data. |
Diagnosing Memorization in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning, One Token at a Time (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on reasoning benchmarks but often fail when inputs alter slightly, raising concerns about overreliance on memorization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Source-aware Token-level Identification of Memorization which attributes each token in a reasoning chain to one of multiple memorization sources based on their statistical co-occurrence with the token in the pretraining corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework attributes each token in a reasoning chain to one of multiple memorization sources based on their statistical co-occurrence with the token in the pretraining corpus. |
A Deep Relevance Model for Zero-Shot Document Filtering (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document classification do not consider document filtering . existing methods do not include document filter. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep relevance model for zero-shot document filtering called DAZER . they use word embeddings to extract the relevance signals from word embeds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two document collections . it estimates the relevance between a document and a category by using seed words . |
Breaking the Noise Barrier: LLM-Guided Semantic Filtering and Enhancement for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities between two multimodal knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLMguided MMEA framework that prioritizes noise reduction before fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework prioritizes noise reduction before fusion and improves semantics on the noisy FB YG dataset. |
SAFER: Advancing Safety Alignment via Efficient Ex-Ante Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods struggle to cover diverse safety scenarios and remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for 'S**afety' alignment via e**F**ficient' E**x-Ante-R**easoning that instantiates structured Ex-Ance reasoning and embeds predefined safety rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances safety performance while maintaining usefulness and efficiency. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
Integrating Data Validation with Large Language Models for Regulation-Guided Tabular Anomaly Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tabular anomaly detection methods focus on detecting anomalies based on data distribution without considering regulatory compliance. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that leverages regulations to detect anomalies in tabular data . they also develop three new datasets to address this task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three new datasets. |
QiMeng-PRepair: Precise Code Repair via Edit-Aware Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Changxin Ke, Rui Zhang, Jiaming Guo, Yuanbo Wen, Li Ding, Shuo Wang, Xuyuan Zhu, Xiong Peng, Di Huang, Zidong Du, Xing Hu, Qi Guo, Yunji Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to program repair are based on correctness alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that mitigates over-editing and improves repair accuracy by generating buggy programs and re-edits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves repair precision by 31.4% under fix1@1, a metric that considers repair correctness and extent, and significantly increases decoding throughput when combined with speculative editing. |
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)
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Run Luo, Haonan Zhang, Longze Chen, Ting-En Lin, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Min Yang, Yongbin Li, Minzheng Wang, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen, Yunshui Li, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Xiaobo Xia, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | a new framework for image-text instruction data evolution improves MLLM performance . lack of high-quality instruction data remains a major bottleneck in ML modeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal instruction data evolution framework that iteratively enhances data quality through fine-grained perception, cognitive reasoning, and interaction evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves MLLM performance in nine vision-language tasks while using significantly less data. |
Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Pipelined Error-Mitigated Aggregation and Matrix-Wise Freezing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models often suffer from biased model aggregation and are hindered by significant communication and computation burden. |
| Approach: | They propose a Federated low-rank adaptation system for large language models that leverages pipelined error-mitigated model aggregation and adaptive matrix-wise parameter freezing to mitigate aggregations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves time-to-target by 2.17-8.48 on real-world datasets. |
Efficient Large Scale Language Modeling with Mixtures of Experts (2022.emnlp-main)
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Mikel Artetxe, Shruti Bhosale, Naman Goyal, Todor Mihaylov, Myle Ott, Sam Shleifer, Xi Victoria Lin, Jingfei Du, Srinivasan Iyer, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Giridharan Anantharaman, Xian Li, Shuohui Chen, Halil Akin, Mandeep Baines, Louis Martin, Xing Zhou, Punit Singh Koura, Brian O’Horo, Jeffrey Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mona Diab, Zornitsa Kozareva, Veselin Stoyanov
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts layers (MoEs) enable efficient scaling of language models . large autoregressive language models such as GPT-3 can be adapted to a wide range of tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mixture of Experts layers to enable efficient scaling of language models . they find that MoEs are substantially more compute efficient than dense models compared to MoE models - but only when they are more modestly trained . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms dense models in a wide range of tasks and domains. |
VLFeedback: A Large-Scale AI Feedback Dataset for Large Vision-Language Models Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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Lei Li, Zhihui Xie, Mukai Li, Shunian Chen, Peiyi Wang, Liang Chen, Yazheng Yang, Benyou Wang, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu
| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are evolving rapidly and require data with human supervision to achieve better alignment. |
| Approach: | They introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset . they train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms its base model in helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks. |
GenTranslate: Large Language Models are Generative Multilingual Speech and Machine Translators (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stepped forward the development of multilingual speech and machine translation by its reduced representation errors and incorporated external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative paradigm for translation tasks that integrates the diverse translation versions in N-best list. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on speech and machine translation benchmarks on various languages. |
ExploraCoder: Advancing Code Generation for Multiple Unseen APIs via Planning and Chained Exploration (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models face intrinsic limitations in coding with unseen APIs in training corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that empowers LLMs to invoke multiple unseen APIs in code solution by planning a complex problem into several API invocation subtasks and experimenting with correct API usage at intermediate steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance for models lacking prior API knowledge, achieving 11.99% over retrieval-based approaches and 17.28% over pretraining-based methods in pass@10. |
SEP-MLDC: A Simple and Effective Paradigm for Multi-Label Document Classification (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on optimizing document features, overlooking the potential of high-quality label features to enhance classification performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-label document classification paradigm that utilizes large language models to expand the label content and generate pseudo-samples for the tail categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. |
Generating Sentences from Disentangled Syntactic and Semantic Spaces (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are widely used in natural language generation due to the regularization of the latent space. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate sentences from disentangled syntactic and semantic spaces by using the linearized tree sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves similar or better performance in various tasks compared with state-of-the-art models. |
Beyond Chunking: Discourse-Aware Hierarchical Retrieval for Long Document Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing long document question answering systems process texts as flat sequences or use heuristic chunking, which overlooks the discourse structures that guide human comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-aware hierarchical framework that leverages rhetorical structure theory for long document question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits strong robustness across diverse document types and linguistic settings. |
EvoMD-LLM: Learning the Language of Species Evolution in Reactive Molecular Dynamics (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models operate on static molecular representations or rely on external tools for reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates species-level molecular dynamics as a symbolic temporal language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms neural networks and language-based baselines on multiple temporal prediction tasks and generates plausible interpretations of reaction dynamics. |
From Graph to Word Bag: Introducing Domain Knowledge to Confusing Charge Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing charge prediction methods have shown impressive performance, but they face significant challenges when dealing with confusing charges, such as Snatch and Robbery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which introduces domain knowledge regarding constituent elements to guide the model in making judgments on confusing charges, much like a judge’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains exceptional performance in imbalanced label distributions. |
Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via Prior-LLM Context Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) lack understanding of multi-image and interleaved inputs due to the visual features encoded by frozen encoders before being fed into the LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a two phase paradigm to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively. |
Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Generative Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xi Victoria Lin, Todor Mihaylov, Mikel Artetxe, Tianlu Wang, Shuohui Chen, Daniel Simig, Myle Ott, Naman Goyal, Shruti Bhosale, Jingfei Du, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Sam Shleifer, Punit Singh Koura, Vishrav Chaudhary, Brian O’Horo, Jeff Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Zornitsa Kozareva, Mona Diab, Veselin Stoyanov, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Large-scale generative language models such as GPT-3 are competitive few-shot learners. |
| Approach: | They train multilingual generative language models on a corpus covering a diverse set of languages and study their few- and zero-shot learning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3 on 171 out of 182 directions with 32 training examples and surpasses the official supervised baseline in 45 directions. |
MuSe: Multi-Stage Graph Reasoning via Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and graph transformers are inadequate for tasks with limited generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage graph reasoning framework based on vision-language models that incrementally samples and visualizes task-relevant subgraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks in Graph-related tasks. |
Making Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have made impressive progress in few-shot learning but still face difficulties in reasoning tasks such as GSM8K. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that uses a verifier to filter out incorrect answers based on a weighted voting scheme to improve reasoning ability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves GSM8K reasoning rate by 17.9% to 58.1%. |
Unveiling the Achilles’ Heel of NLG Evaluators: A Unified Adversarial Framework Driven by Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted various neural metrics that align well with human evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box adversarial framework that generates strong disagreements between human and victim evaluators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can significantly improve the performance of human and victim evaluators. |
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. |
JointCoder: Exploring Automated ICD Coding on Real-World Chinese EHRs with a Multi-Agent Framework (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated ICD coding systems face several fundamental challenges due to the limited availability of publicly available Chinese ICD datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese ICD coding dataset and a multi-agent framework to reformulate ICD as a joint disease-procedure coding task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world Chinese ICD coding datasets and 1.7B-parameter models. |
Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots with Deep Attention Matching Network (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for matching dialogue responses rely on semantic and functional dependencies . a recent study only uses the last utterance in context for matching a reply . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that matches a response with its multi-turn context using attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks. |
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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Jiangjie Chen, Rui Xu, Ziquan Fu, Wei Shi, Zhongqiao Li, Xinbo Zhang, Changzhi Sun, Lei Li, Yanghua Xiao, Hao Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose an explanation benchmark for analogical reasoning using a Civil Service exam . they use a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is very challenging for state-of-the-art models, it is found. |
Less is More: Knowledge-Aware Compression for Long Legal Judgment Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances leverage large language models (LLMs) for legal reasoning, but they face high computational costs and information degradation when handling long cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that selectively retains legally relevant information while reducing redundant or less informative content, enabling efficient and accurate long-context reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four real-world datasets spanning multiple jurisdictions and languages. |
FLiText: A Faster and Lighter Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Convolution Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | obtaining large amounts of labeled data is expensive. |
| Approach: | They develop a semi-supervised learning framework called FLiText which improves text classification accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy of lightweight models on IMDb, Yelp-5, and Yahoo! Answer . the framework improve accuracy by 6.59%, 3.94%, and 3.22% on the datasets of IMDa, Yep-5 and Yahoo. Answer compared with the fully supervised method on the full dataset . |
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. |
CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Nianqi Li, Jingping Liu, Sihang Jiang, Haiyun Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Jiaqing Liang, Zujie Liang, Feng Wei, Jinglei Chen, Zhenghong Hao, Bing Han
| Challenge: | Existing concept reasoning related datasets suffer from modeledge leakage and context leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept reasoning for large language models with modeledge leakage prevention and context leakage preventive methods to improve the models' conceptual reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the existing models and reasoning methods, achieving a 7% increase in accuracy compared to CoT and showing better granularity. |
Take a Break in the Middle: Investigating Subgoals towards Hierarchical Script Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work assumes that events are sequentially arranged in a script, while this assumption leads to linear generation that is far from sufficient for comprehensively acquiring the representation about how events are organized towards a task goal. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend goal-oriented Script Generation task from the perspective of cognitive theory by incorporating subgoals into hierarchical script generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a new dataset and human evaluation metrics. |
AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenhao Huang, Zhouhong Gu, Chenghao Peng, Jiaqing Liang, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao, Liqian Wen, Zulong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for web scraping suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates web scrapers with large language models and a new executability metric to measure the performance of web scraper generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can handle diverse web environments more efficiently. |
Surveying the Dead Minds: Historical-Psychological Text Analysis with Contextualized Construct Representation (CCR) for Classical Chinese (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Humans have produced written language for thousands of years, but most computational work is focused on contemporary languages and corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for historical-psychological text analysis in classical Chinese . they propose an indirect contrastive learning approach that fine-tunes pre-trained models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms word-embedding-based approaches across all tasks and exceeds prompting with GPT-4 in most tasks. |
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. |
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. |
FastGAS: Fast Graph-based Annotation Selection for In-Context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select unlabeled examples for annotation require a long time due to their complexity, hindering their practical viability. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based selection method to efficiently identify high-quality instances while minimizing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces selection time and improves performance on different tasks. |
Towards Order Fairness: Mitigating LLMs Order Sensitivity through Dual Group Advantage Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies attempt to obtain optimal or suboptimal arrangements based on statistical results or using dataset-based search, but these methods increase inference overhead while leaving the model’s inherent order bias unresolved. |
| Approach: | They propose Dual Group Advantage Optimization (DGAO) which aims to improve model accuracy and order stability simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model accuracy and order stability while penalizing order-sensitive or incorrect responses. |
Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | citation graphs can be used to extract scientific papers under different conditions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity unsupervised summarization model that fine tunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a public benchmark dataset. |
TruthReader: Towards Trustworthy Document Assistant Chatbot with Reliable Attribution (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Document assistant chatbots are empowered with extensive capabilities by Large Language Models (LLMs) however, they suffer from hallucinations that are difficult to verify in the context of given documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a document assistant chatbot with reliable attribution that enables users to seek relevant information from given documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates answers with detailed inline citations, which can be attributed to the original document paragraphs, facilitating verification of factual consistency of the generated text. |
Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition: An Empirical Baseline Study (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jiaxin Huang, Chunyuan Li, Krishan Subudhi, Damien Jose, Shobana Balakrishnan, Weizhu Chen, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Existing methods to build named entity recognition systems with limited labeled data are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose three orthogonal schemes to build named entity recognition systems when labeled data is limited. |
| Outcome: | The proposed NER systems outperform existing methods on few-shot and training-free settings. |
PALM: Pre-training an Autoencoding&Autoregressive Language Model for Context-conditioned Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for natural language understanding and generation use autoencoding and/or autoregressive objectives to train models. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised pre-training scheme that pre-trains an autoencoding and autoregressive language model on a large unlabeled corpus for generating new text conditioned on context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of language generation benchmarks covering generative question answering, abstractive summarization and conversational response generation. |
Towards Medical Machine Reading Comprehension with Structural Knowledge and Plain Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | MRC has achieved significant progress on the open domain in recent years due to large-scale pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine reading comprehension model which exploits structural medical knowledge and reference medical plain text to improve the exam's accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with a large margin and passes the exam with 61.8% accuracy rate on the test set. |
Navigating the Infinite Dynamic Web Space: Effective In-Context Exploration via Cognitive Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.eacl-long)
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Guozhao Mo, Yanjiang Liu, Yafei Shi, Jiawei Chen, Yang Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Bo Zheng, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic web navigation rely on greedy strategies or value estimation, struggle to achieve effective backtracking and are heavily dependent on proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive multi-agent collaboration framework that enhances cyberspace exploration capability through In-Context Exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the proprietary model Claude-3.5 Sonnet on the WebArena benchmark. |
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Jizhou Guo, Yankai Chen, Chunyu Miao, Hoang H Nguyen, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Hanrong Zhang, Fangxin Wang, Pengfei Zhang, Langzhou He, Yangning Li, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems improve system performance, reliability, and safety by integrating human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system. |
“What Do You Mean by That?” A Parser-Independent Interactive Approach for Enhancing Text-to-SQL (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In Natural Language Interfaces to Databases systems, text-to-SQL parsers allow users to query databases by using natural language questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a parser-independent interactive approach that interacts with users using multi-choice questions and can easily work with arbitrary parsers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance with limited interaction turns by using simulation and human evaluation on two cross-domain datasets with five state-of-the-art parsers. |
DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering in Disaster Management (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Chen, Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong, Chengkai Liu, Xiangpeng Li, Bo Li, Junwei Ma, Yiming Xiao, Ali Mostafavi, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for question answering (QA) are lacking in a high-stakes environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions . they propose 'keypoint-based evaluation protocol' emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose models such as MMLU-Pro. |
Benchmarking Large Language Models Under Data Contamination: A Survey from Static to Dynamic Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Simin Chen, Yiming Chen, Zexin Li, Yifan Jiang, Zhongwei Wan, Yixin He, Dezhi Ran, Tianle Gu, Haizhou Li, Tao Xie, Baishakhi Ray
| Challenge: | In the era of evaluating large language models, data contamination is an increasingly prominent concern . static benchmarking has been used for evaluation, but there are limitations of *dynamic* benchmarks . |
| Approach: | They propose a series of optimal design principles for *dynamic* benchmarking and analyze the limitations of existing *static* benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks highlight a critical gap in the evaluation of LLMs. |
PEMV: Improving Spatial Distribution for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Using Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on the analysis of contextual structure in dialogue and the interactions between different emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (PEMVs) based on emotion feature queues to optimize the spatial representation of text features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used benchmark datasets. |
DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Damai Dai, Chengqi Deng, Chenggang Zhao, R.x. Xu, Huazuo Gao, Deli Chen, Jiashi Li, Wangding Zeng, Xingkai Yu, Y. Wu, Zhenda Xie, Y.k. Li, Panpan Huang, Fuli Luo, Chong Ruan, Zhifang Sui, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures face challenges in ensuring expert specialization . despite the promising performance, scaling language models to an extremely large scale is associated with exceedingly high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture that allows for ultimate expert specialization by segmenting experts into mN ones and activating mK from them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves comparable performance with GShard with 2B parameters and computation. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
Bridging Language and Items for Retrieval and Recommendation: Benchmarking LLMs as Semantic Encoders (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have enabled their use as semantic encoders for recommendation, but their roles and behaviors in this setting are still not well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models as semantic encoders in recommendation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that ranking of 11 leading LLMs is low compared to MTEB, highlighting the unique challenges of semantic encoding in recommendation. |
Neuron-Aware Active Few-Shot Learning for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on output-level signals for sample identification, such as predictive entropy or semantic similarities with test-time data, which overlook models’ internal dynamics which could pinpoint specific knowledge gaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a Neuron-Aware Active Few-Shot Learning framework that shifts the selection paradigm from output-level proxies to models’ internal dynamics. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three datasets show that NeuFS outperforms existing AFSL baselines. |
Expanding before Inferring: Enhancing Factuality in Large Language Models through Premature Layers Interpolation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Dingwei Chen, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Chak Tou Leong, Shiwen Ni, Ahmadreza Argha, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Chengming Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating factually inconsistent outputs are resource-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play intervention designed to enhance factuality by inserting premature layers formed through mathematical interpolation with adjacent layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed intervention reduces hallucinations while outperforming baselines on four datasets. |
Transfer-Aware Data Selection for Domain Adaptation in Text Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve domain adaptation do not guarantee improved adaptability, but may negatively impact model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can effectively improve model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
Advancing General Multimodal Capability of Vision-language Models with Pyramid-descent Visual Position Encoding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode visual positions inhibit the performance of vision-language Models (VLMs) however, language constitutes only one aspect of communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assign visual position indexes from the periphery to the center and expand the central receptive field incrementally to enhance the perception of visual tokens within VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the relative distance between interrelated visual elements and instruction tokens, promoting a more rational allocation of attention weights and allowing for a multi-granularity perception of visual elements. |
CaMML: Context-Aware Multimodal Learner for Large Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a lightweight module for tuning large multimodal models is introduced . CaMML integrates contextual samples into large models, enabling them to make inferences . |
| Approach: | They introduce a lightweight module for tuning large multimodal models . they have developed two models that have shown exceptional performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LLaVA-1.5 on ten widely recognized datasets with a noticeable margin. |
Incorporating External Knowledge into Machine Reading for Generative Question Answering (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-aware QA models do not have commonsense and background knowledge to answer nontrivial questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new neural model which exploits external knowledge to generate answers in natural language for a given question with context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves answer quality over existing models without knowledge and knowledge-aware models, a study shows . state officials in Hawaii confirmed that president Barack Obama was born in the U.S. |
FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuohan Xie, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Jinyan Su, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Rui Xing, Rania Elbadry, Chen Xu, Haonan Li, Fajri Koto, Ivan Koychev, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Sophia Ananiadou, Preslav Nakov
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic benchmark for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance . FINCHAIN spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains and three difficulty levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to bridge symbolic reasoning and factual verification. |
Instant Personalized Large Language Model Adaptation via Hypernetwork (2026.acl-long)
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Zhaoxuan Tan, Zixuan Zhang, Haoyang Wen, Zheng Li, Rongzhi Zhang, Pei Chen, Fengran Mo, Zheyuan Liu, Qingkai Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods require training a separate adapter for each user, making them computationally expensive and impractical for real-time updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable framework that maps a user's profile directly to a full set of adapter parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prompt-based personalization and OPPU while using substantially fewer computational resources at deployment. |
Through the Valley: Path to Effective Long CoT Training for Small Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision is effective for large language models . but small models trained on limited long CoT data experience performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They identify a phenomenon called Long CoT Degradation in small language models . long CoT data can be used to generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) responses . |
| Outcome: | The results show that models trained on 8k long CoT examples lose up to 75% of their original performance before fine-tuning. |
Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. |
PLAES: Prompt-generalized and Level-aware Learning Framework for Cross-prompt Automated Essay Scoring (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing cross-prompt automatic essay scoring systems focus on obtaining shared knowledge specific to the target prompt, but this may not be feasible in practical situations because the target essay may not exist as training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel learning framework for cross-prompt automatic essay scoring to capture more general knowledge across different prompts and improve the model’s capacity to distinguish between writing levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning framework captures more general knowledge across prompts and improves its capacity to distinguish between writing levels. |
Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zeping Li, Hongru Wang, Yiwen Zhao, Guanhua Chen, Yixia Li, Keyang Chen, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai, Zhenfei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks, but in long trajectories, agents often invoke tools excessively or inappropriately, increasing computation cost and derailing the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use entropy reduction as a supervisory signal to reduce tool calls . they propose to design two reward strategies to address the needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward strategies reduce tool calls by 72.07% and improve performance by 22.27%. |
IEvoAgent: Evolving Conversational Agent based on User Implicit Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize conversational agents often rely on explicit preference pairs and expert evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent framework that leverages the structured dependency between agent responses and user reactions to extract implicit feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on MT-Bench-101, WildBench, and FB-Bech, and shows that mining implicit feedback supports better multi-turn alignment under evolving user preferences. |
Measuring Pointwise 𝒱-Usable Information In-Context-ly (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new learning paradigm that has gained popularity along with the development of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt a recently proposed hardness metric, pointwise V-usable information (PVI), to an in-context version. |
| Outcome: | The proposed hardness metric is compared with the original model and is more efficient because it requires only a few exemplars and does not require fine-tuning. |
DISC: Plug-and-Play Decoding Intervention with Similarity of Characters for Chinese Spelling Check (2025.acl-long)
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Ziheng Qiao, Houquan Zhou, Yumeng Liu, Zhenghua Li, Min Zhang, Bo Zhang, Chen Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check (CSC) tasks require that incorrect characters are usually similar to the correct ones in either phonetics or glyph. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play decoding intervention with similarity of characters module for Chinese spelling check (CSC) they propose to incorporate phonetic and glyph similarities only during the inference phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves Chinese spelling check models on benchmarks and on benchmark datasets. |
AdaMARP: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Interaction Framework for General Immersive Role-Playing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack immersion and adaptability, resulting in limited character orchestration and on-the-fly character introduction. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based framework that allows actors to interact with users in an ongoing narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms commercial LLMs in character consistency, environment grounding, and narrative coherence. |
T2DR: A Two-Tier Deficiency-Resistant Framework for Incomplete Multimodal Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing incomplete multimodal learning frameworks are inadequate for integrating multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for incomplete multimodal learning that is deficiency-resistant and provides two modules to address fine-grained deficiencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the SOTA models on two well-known multimodal benchmarks. |
Word-level Prefix/Suffix Sense Detection: A Case Study on Negation Sense with Few-shot Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Morphological analysis is an important research issue in natural language processing . prefixes/suffixes are sometimes ambiguous, causing difficulty in detecting negation sense . |
| Approach: | They propose a context-free morphological analysis task that deals with negation sense . they propose morphology task that uses input-augmentation prompts to train a model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective in detecting negation senses in a corpus of prefixes/suffixes . Empirical studies show that the proposed approach works in context-free mode . |
CAVGAN: Unifying Jailbreak and Defense of LLMs via Generative Adversarial Attacks on their Internal Representations (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have isolated LLM jailbreak attacks and defenses . a new framework combines attack and defense to protect against malicious queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines attack and defense to protect the Large Language Model (LLM) by embedding harmful problems into the safe area. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average jailbreak success rate of 88.85% across three popular LLMs while the defense success rate reaches an average of 84.17%. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. |
Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show language agents lack human-level planning abilities . limitations and mechanisms to address them remain insufficiently understood . |
| Approach: | They apply a feature attribution study to identify key factors hindering agent planning . they identify the limited role of constraints and diminishing influence of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 15.6% on a real-world planning benchmark. |
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context (P19-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Suyi Li, Heyang Er, Irene Li, Bo Pang, Tao Chen, Emily Ji, Shreya Dixit, David Proctor, Sungrok Shim, Jonathan Kraft, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2017): a dataset for cross-domain semantic parsing in context with 4,298 question sequences. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it has greater semantic diversity and can be generalized to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseened databases at test time. |
Can Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Be Detected and Removed? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have developed various detection mechanisms to protect against prompt injection attacks. |
| Approach: | They investigate the feasibility of detecting and removing indirect prompt injection attacks . they use two methods to evaluate their performance and train detection models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a benchmark dataset and is available on github . it evaluates the performance of existing models and open-source detection models . |
Employing Discourse Coherence Enhancement to Improve Cross-Document Event and Entity Coreference Resolution (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on cross-document coreference resolution focuses on within-document events and entities, but cross-doc mentions lack such critical contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to enhance the discourse coherence between two cross-document mentions by adding coherent texts to a document to form a new coherent document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three popular datasets. |
Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling (2024.acl-long)
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Zekun Li, Zhiyu Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, Paul Crook
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for solving dialogue state tracking (DST) with large language models through function calling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. |
A Hierarchical N-Gram Framework for Zero-Shot Link Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero-shot link prediction use textual features of relations as auxiliary information to improve the encoded representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical N-gram framework for Zero-Shot Link Prediction that leverages character n-gram information for ZSLP. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on two standard ZSLP datasets. |
UnitCoder: Scalable Code Synthesis from Pre-training Corpora (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code understanding and generation, yet code generation remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that supervises pre-training data quality through automatically generated unit tests while ensuring correctness via an iterative fix and refine flow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on a large dataset with high quality pre-training data. |
DcLM: Output Length Control of Large Language Models via Dynamic Length Markers (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have limited awareness of output length, making it difficult to satisfy precise length requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach that introduces dynamic length markers to guide length-controllable outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces length deviation across multiple datasets. |
Multi-Granularity Semantic Revision for Large Language Model Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaoyu Liu, Yun Zhang, Wei Li, Simiao Li, Xudong Huang, Hanting Chen, Yehui Tang, Jie Hu, Zhiwei Xiong, Yunhe Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models rely on student-generated outputs, which introduce generation errors and misguide the distillation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity semantic revision method for LLM distillation that corrects errors using teacher-generated tokens and re-generates the sequence to minimize errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces errors and misguides distillation on student models and improves consistency between teacher and student outputs. |
Modeling Evolution of Message Interaction for Rumor Resolution (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for rumor resolution ignore local interactions during the message diffusion which is important for the identification of rumors. |
| Approach: | They propose to model confrontation and reciprocity between message pairs via discrete variational autoencoders which effectively reflects the diversified opinion interactivity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a PHEME dataset show that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy than existing methods. |
Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the likelihood of sequence prediction models are based on MLE and teacher forcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Bridging Network (GBN) that extends the point-wise ground truth to a bridge distribution conditioned on it and optimizes their KL-divergence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bridge module can improve on two recognized sequence prediction tasks and minimize learning burden. |
LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application (2023.acl-demo)
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Rindra Ramamonjison, Timothy Yu, Linzi Xing, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Xiaorui Li, Xiaojin Fu, Xiongwei Han, Yuanzhe Chen, Ren Li, Kun Mao, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems that translate optimization formulas manually are cumbersome and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that converts optimization formulas from TeX document to solver language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps operations research practitioners convert optimization formulations into solver modeling languages. |
Past Meets Present: Creating Historical Analogy with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Nianqi Li, Siyu Yuan, Jiangjie Chen, Jiaqing Liang, Feng Wei, Zujie Liang, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Historical analogies are important abilities that help people make decisions and understand the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a historical analogy acquisition task that uses large language models to acquire historical analogies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates hallucinations and stereotypes when LLMs generate historical analogies. |
AdamMeme: Adaptively Probe the Reasoning Capacity of Multimodal Large Language Models on Harmfulness (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that assess mLLMs on harmful meme understanding are inaccurate and lack accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adaptively probes the reasoning capabilities of mLLMs . their framework systematically reveals the varying performance of different target mllms a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework systematically reveals the performance of different target mLLMs. |
EmotionQueen: A Benchmark for Evaluating Empathy of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) focus on basic sentiment analysis tasks, such as emotion recognition, which is not enough to evaluate LLMs’ overall emotional intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating the emotional intelligence of large language models (LLMs) that includes four distinct tasks: Key Event Recognition, Mixed Event Recognition and Implicit Emotional Recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework includes four distinct tasks: Key Event Recognition, Mixed Event Recognition and Implicit Emotional Recognition. |
Semantic Role Labeling from Chinese Speech via End-to-End Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Semantic role labeling (SRL) has traditionally focused on text input. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end approach for SRL from speech integrating ASR and SRL in a joint-learning framework, focusing on the Chinese language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the Chinese Proposition Bank 1.0 dataset and the existing model with improved performance. |
CiPO: Counterfactual Unlearning for Large Reasoning Models through Iterative Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to unlearning large reasoning models do not remove unwanted knowledge from CoT traces or interfere with the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that targets the CoT reasoning in Large Reasoning Models by generating a valid counterfactual reasoning trace for preference tuning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large LRMs show that CiPO completely removes knowledge from the intermediate CoT steps and the final answer while preserving the reasoning abilities of LRM. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
PCQPR: Proactive Conversational Question Planning with Reflection (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current CQG methods focus on immediate context without strategic consideration of the specified conversational outcome. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a planning algorithm inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search to generate contextually relevant questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses existing methods in e-learning and customer service fields . it generates contextually appropriate questions strategically devised to reach a specified outcome . |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Low-Resource Sequence Labeling via Unsupervised Multilingual Contextualized Representations (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual sequence labeling require bilingual resources and require linguistic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual language model with deep semantic Alignment to generate language-independent representations for cross-lingual sequence labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art NER and POS performance across European languages and on distant language pairs such as English and Chinese. |
Circuit Complexity Bounds for RoPE-based Transformer Architecture (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies provide the circuit complexity bounds to Transformer-like architectures. position embedding has emerged as a crucial technique in modern large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use position embedding to improve Transformer-like architectures by analyzing their circuits and analyzing the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to solve canonical tasks without embedding positional information. |
Large Language Models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback Approach for Enhancing Explainable Sexism Detection (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing have significantly improved text comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) based fine-tuning framework for sexism detection that leverages contextual learning to understand and apply instructions to new scenarios without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on three EDOS tasks and scores 0.8681 on binary sexism detection, 0.6829 on category classification of sexists and 0.4722 on task C. |
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)
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Rui Li, Xu Chen, Chaozhuo Li, Yanming Shen, Jianan Zhao, Yujing Wang, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
HENIN: Learning Heterogeneous Neural Interaction Networks for Explainable Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting cyberbullying rely on text analysis of social media sessions. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep model that uses a comment encoder and a post-comment co-attention sub-network to explain why a media session is identified as cyberbullying. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on real datasets and shows evidential comments in the model explainability of cyberbullying detection. |
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chuhao Jin, Yutao Zhu, Lingzhen Kong, Shijie Li, Xiao Zhang, Ruihua Song, Xu Chen, Huan Chen, Yuchong Sun, Yu Chen, Jun Xu
| Challenge: | Persuasive dialogue models rely on utterance semantic matching and a key aspect has been ignored . compared with utterrance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model conversation semantics and strategies to match them using a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art by 5% on a small and 37% on 'large' datasets. |
To Answer or Not To Answer? Improving Machine Reading Comprehension Model with Span-based Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to recognize answerable questions due to subtle literal changes . MRC models are forced to perceive crucial semantic changes from slight literal differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based method of Contrastive Learning which explicitly contrasts answerable questions with their answerable counterparts at the answer span level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves baselines significantly and is an effective way to utilize generated questions. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
Rectified Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Sun, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Yuqing Xia, Jian Chen, Yizhao Gao, Shijie Cao, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency but suffer from KV cache misalignment, resulting in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines block-sparse attention with periodic dense rectification to bound error accumulation and preserve alignment with the pretraining distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning, language modeling, and retrieval tasks show that ReSA achieves near-lossless generation quality with significantly improved efficiency. |
AlgBench: To What Extent Do Large Reasoning Models Understand Algorithms? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for algorithmic reasoning fail to answer a critical question: do LRMs master algorithmic thinking? Empirical evaluations on leading LRM models reveal substantial performance heterogeneity, while models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% on globally optimized algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm-centric benchmark that evaluates large reasoning models under an algorithmic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations on leading LRMs reveal substantial performance heterogeneity . models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% . |
Reasoning Makes Good Annotators : An Automatic Task-specific Rules Distilling Framework for Low-resource Relation Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract knowledge from unlabeled data generate noise labels. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic task-specific rules distilling framework to generate a logic rule from unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework could power the labeling ability by discovering reliable model-labeled data. |
Coding Agents with Multimodal Browsing are Generalist Problem Solvers (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | specialized AI agents with task-specific tools or architectures fail to generalize beyond their intended scope. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-agent system with a modest number of general tools . they propose to generalize across software engineering, deep research and web browsing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves superior or competitive performance over specialized agents on three benchmarks. |
CN-AutoMIC: Distilling Chinese Commonsense Knowledge from Pretrained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense knowledge graphs are limited to English, hindering research in non-English languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese CKG generated from multilingual PLMs that is translated into Chinese . they propose 'generate-by-category' strategy to reduce invalid generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed CKG has high quality and diversity, surpassing the direct translation version of similar English CKGs. |
Unlocking Multilingual Reasoning Capability of LLMs and LVLMs through Representation Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Yixuan Ma, Ruihan Chen, Zihe Tong, Zekai Ye, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Haoyu Ren, Kun Chen, Yunfei Lu, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance multilingual reasoning capabilities rely on costly multilingual training or employ prompting with external translation tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference-time method to enhance multilingual reasoning capabilities via Representation Engineering without additional training data or tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on four reasoning benchmarks in English and Thai and Swahili. |
Derailer-Rerailer: Adaptive Verification for Efficient and Reliable Language Model Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods struggle with complex tasks and reasoning stability, limiting their practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adaptively balances reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency by employing a lightweight Derailer mechanism to assess reasoning stability and selectively triggers an advanced Rerailer verification process only when necessary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant accuracy improvements (8-11%) while maintaining 2-3 times better efficiency than existing verification methods. |
Packing Analysis: Packing Is More Appropriate for Large Models or Datasets in Supervised Fine-tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Packing is an optimization technique that optimizes training time and resources by combining different training sequences to fit the model’s maximum input length. |
| Approach: | They perform extensive comparisons between packing and padding methods, covering datasets ranging from 69K to 1.2M and models from 8B to 70B. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been shown to improve training efficiency while maintaining performance. |
CHBias: Bias Evaluation and Mitigation of Chinese Conversational Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on social biases in language models have focused on only English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dataset for bias evaluation and mitigation of Chinese conversational language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes under-explored bias categories, such as ageism and appearance biases, which received less attention in previous studies. |
ShopSimulator: Evaluating and Exploring RL-Driven LLM Agent for Shopping Assistants (2026.acl-long)
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Pei Wang, Yanan Wu, Xiaoshuai Song, Weixun Wang, Gengru Chen, Zhongwen Li, Kezhong Yan, Qi Liu, Ken Deng, Shuaibing Zhao, Shaopan Xiong, Xuepeng Liu, Xuefeng Chen, Wanxi Deng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language model-based agents focus on evaluation benchmarks without training support. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese shopping simulation environment that uses large language models to train agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly in a large-scale and challenging shopping environment in China. |
How Can Cross-lingual Knowledge Contribute Better to Fine-Grained Entity Typing? (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on multi-lingual datasets show that our method significantly outperforms multiple baselines and can robustly handle negative transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer semantic knowledge from rich-resourced languages to low-resource languages by using multilingual transfer learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and can handle negative transfer. |
Flipping Knowledge Distillation: Leveraging Small Models’ Expertise to Enhance LLMs in Text Matching (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in acquiring diverse knowledge, making them highly effective across a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flipped knowledge distillation paradigm where LLM learns from SLM . they propose to reinterpret LLMs as encoder-decoder models using LoRA . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has been deployed in an online application environment and validated on financial and healthcare benchmarks and real-world applications. |
Developing and Utilizing a Large-Scale Cantonese Dataset for Multi-Tasking in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiyue Jiang, Alfred Kar Yin Truong, Yanyu Chen, Qinghang Bao, Sheng Wang, Pengan Chen, Jiuming Wang, Lingpeng Kong, Yu Li, Chuan Wu
| Challenge: | Cantonese is considered a low-resource language due to the dominance of Mandarin . rich colloquial vocabulary of Cantone, English loanwords, and code-switching characteristics add to the complexity of corpus collection and processing. |
| Approach: | We collect Cantonese texts from open source corpora, Hong Kong-specific forums, Wikipedia . we refine the model through supervised fine-tuning on curated Cantonesian tasks . |
| Outcome: | The model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four Cantonese benchmarks. |
Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | specialized LLMs are often limited in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They provide a comprehensive overview of four key methods to enhance large language models by integrating domain-specific knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorized into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. |
Geo-Encoder: A Chunk-Argument Bi-Encoder Framework for Chinese Geographic Re-Ranking (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chinese geographic re-ranking task aims to find the most relevant addresses among retrieved candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate Chinese geographic semantics into re-ranking pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two Chinese benchmark datasets. |
Mitigating Language Bias of LMMs in Social Intelligence Understanding with Virtual Counterfactual Calibration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on social intelligence using large multimodal models is under-explored due to the prevalence of text-based data in the pretraining stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure causal model to mitigate the negative language biases of large multimodal models by preserving beneficial priors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model minimizes negative language bias while preserving beneficial priors while avoiding spurious correlations between LMMs' internal commonsense knowledge and the given context. |
EGSS: Entropy-guided Stepwise Scaling for Reliable Software Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Chenhui Mao, Yuanting Lei, Zhixiang Wei, Ming Liang, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Entropy-Guided Stepwise Scaling (EGSS) is a novel TTS framework for software engineering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-guided stepwise scaling framework that balances efficiency and effectiveness through entropic-guide encoding and robust test-suite augmentation. |
| Outcome: | EGSS boosts performance by 5–10% across all evaluated models, and reduces inference-time token usage by over 28% . compared to existing methods, EGS reduces token usage and reduce inference time by over 20% . |
Explore More Guidance: A Task-aware Instruction Network for Sign Language Translation Enhanced with Data Augmentation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on the recognition step, while paying less attention to sign language translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware instruction network, namely TIN-SLT, for sign language translation, by introducing the isntruction module and the learning-based feature fuse strategy into a Transformer network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing solutions on two benchmark datasets, PHOENIX-2014-T and ASLG-PC12, and outperformed previous best solutions by 1.65 and 1.42 in terms of BLEU-4. |
BoundRL: Efficient Token-level Structured Text Segmentation through Reinforced Boundary Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoyuan Li, Zhengyuan Shen, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Jiayu Li, Qi Zhu, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Structured texts often contain elements beyond plain language, such as code snippets, which conventional sentence-level segmentation methods cannot handle effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level approach that performs efficient token-based text segmentation and label prediction for long structured texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models on short-shot prompts and SFT and standard RLVR models on complex LLM prompts. |
Understanding and Mitigating Bias Inheritance in LLM-based Data Augmentation on Downstream Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Miaomiao Li, Hao Chen, Yang Wang, Tingyuan Zhu, Weijia Zhang, Kaijie Zhu, Kam-Fai Wong, Jindong Wang
| Challenge: | Generating synthetic datasets via large language models (LLMs) has emerged as promising approach to improve LLM performance. |
| Approach: | They propose three mitigation strategies to mitigate bias inheritance in LLMs by analyzing real and LLM-augmented data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can work differently on different tasks and biases. |
Audio Jailbreak: An Open Comprehensive Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Audio-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Zirui Song, Qian Jiang, Mingxuan Cui, Mingzhe Li, Lang Gao, Zeyu Zhang, Zixiang Xu, Yanbo Wang, Guangxian Ouyang, Zhenhao Chen, Xiuying Chen
| Challenge: | a recent study evaluated large audio-language models against jailbreak attacks . a new benchmark is being developed to evaluate LAM safety against jailbreaking attacks based on temporal and semantic nature of speech . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LAM jailbreak vulnerabilities in adversarial audio prompts . they use a dataset of 1,495 adversarials to evaluate their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates state-of-the-art LAMs against jailbreak attacks . it demonstrates that even small, semantically preserved perturbations can reduce safety . |
A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Cross-Lingual Stance Detection Using Chain-of-Thought Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual stance detection can't effectively perform cross-linguistic transfer of complex reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to facilitate cross-lingual transfer of complex reasoning processes in stance detection by using cross-linguistic Chain-of-Thought alignment to obtain high-quality CoTs generated from target language inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing models on four multilingual datasets. |
GUI-explorer: Autonomous Exploration and Mining of Transition-aware Knowledge for GUI Agent (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | GUI automation is a key challenge in dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free GUI agent that integrates two mechanisms to explore trajectories in GUIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI-explorer shows significant improvements over existing agents. |
DICE: Structured Reasoning in LLMs through SLM-Guided Chain-of-Thought Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often prioritize reasoning over adherence to detailed instructions due to high computational costs and limited parameter access. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that guides small language models to refine LLMs’ outputs through chain-of-thought correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the average format accuracy and content correctness of LLM outputs by 35.4% and 29.4%, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance over other competitive baselines. |
Faster In-Context Learning for LLMs via N-Gram Trie Speculative Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is a key method in prompt engineering, but its long retrieved contexts and limited token throughput will slow reasoning speeds. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the overlap between context and model output to generate drafts from the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest mean speedup on Vicuna-7B, Llama2-7B-Chat, and Llma3-8B-Instruct tasks. |
CLEAR: A Clinically Grounded Tabular Framework for Radiology Report Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuyang Jiang, Chacha Chen, Shengyuan Wang, Feng Li, Zecong Tang, Benjamin M. Mervak, Lydia Chelala, Christopher M Straus, Reve Chahine, Samuel G. Armato Iii, Chenhao Tan
| Challenge: | Existing metrics lack the granularity and interpretability to capture nuanced clinical differences between candidate and ground-truth radiology reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a tabular framework with E**xpert-curated labels and an attribute-level comparison for radiology report evaluation (**CLEAR) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract clinical attributes and provide automated metrics that are strongly aligned with clinical judgment. |
MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Weiwen Xu, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou, Chang Liu, Yujia Hu, Xing Xie, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Chaojun Wang, Long Li, Rui Liu, Huiyao Liu, Koji Inoue, Ryuichi Sumida, Tatsuya Kawahara, Fan Xu, Lingyu Ye, Wei Tian, Dongjun Kim, Jimin Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Pham Minh Duc, Ojasva Saxena, Palash Nandi, Xiyan Tao, Wiwik Karlina, Tuan Luong, Keertana Arun Vasan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech . |
Automatic rule generation for time expression normalization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing SOTA methods for normalization rely on expert-designed rules or grammars . current methods are domain sensitive and not sufficient on emerging corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates normalization rules from annotated data without expert intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing rule-based methods on the Tweets benchmark and on the TempEval-3 benchmark. |
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. |
Diversifying Question Generation over Knowledge Base via External Natural Questions (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods on knowledge base question generation focus on refining the quality of a single generated question. |
| Approach: | They propose a new diversity evaluation metric which measures the diversity among top-k generated questions for each instance while ensuring their relevance to the ground truth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pre-trained language model baselines and text-davinci-003 in diversity while achieving comparable performance with ChatGPT. |
ZoomRAG: Hierarchical Random-walk Zooming across Multi-scale Information Graphs for Fast and Accurate RAG (2026.findings-acl)
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Xianming Hu, Jingyang Chen, Bin Tang, Yihe Liu, Yihong Huang, Hongbo Zhao, Nuoyi Chen, Jie Zhang, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful tool for NLP applications . but it is challenging to encode large knowledge bases as compact offline structures . |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical graph inference method that uses random walks to retrieve information from a corpus of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces offline indexing costs and accelerates retrieval. |
Natural Response Generation for Chinese Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | MRC models trained on labeled answers are limited in generating human-like responses in real QA scenarios. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset called Penguin to promote machine reading comprehension . they use 200k training data with fluent, well-informed responses to train models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first benchmark towards natural response generation in Chinese MRC on a relatively large scale. |
Efficient Domain Adaptation for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-parametric approaches like nearest neighbor machine translation have made small Autoregressive translation models less efficient . despite their impressive generalization and task performance, LLMs suffer from prohibitive inference cost when confronted with specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain adaptation approach that tailors a k-nearest-neighbor algorithm for NAT models that incorporates the parallel nature of NAT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over the Base-NAT model and exhibits enhanced efficiency. |
Take Off the Training Wheels! Progressive In-Context Learning for Effective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL) however, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment method that embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses vanilla ICL and achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. |
KACE: Generating Knowledge Aware Contrastive Explanations for Natural Language Inference (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches in NLP focus on “WHY A” rather than contrastive “WHA NOT B” Experimental results show that contrastive explanations are beneficial to fit the scenarios by clarifying the difference between the predicted answer and other possible wrong ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate contrastive explanations with counterfactual examples in NLI by identifying key phrases from input sentences and using them as key perturbations to generate counterfacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on SNLI and ETPA models by 91.9%. |
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. |
Octopus: On-device language model for function calling of software APIs (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are pivotal for advanced text processing and generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train on-device Large Language Models optimized for invoking software APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in API calling tasks while maintaining inference speed. |
Focus-Constrained Attention Mechanism for CVAE-based Response Generation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models generate high-frequency but trivial responses such as "I don't know" or "I'm ok" due to the discrepancy in discourse-level information, standard models generate one-to-many relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform coarse-grained discourse-level information into fine-grounded word-level knowledge by introducing a fine-grain focus signal and a focus-constrained attention mechanism to take full advantage of focus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more diverse and informative responses compared with state-of-the-art models. |
RPC-Bench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Research Paper Comprehension (2026.acl-long)
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Yelin Chen, Fanjin Zhang, Suping Sun, Yunhe Pang, Yuanchun Wang, Jian Song, XiaoYan Li, Lei Hou, Shu Zhao, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for understanding research papers offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review–rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on human-verified QA pairs and contains 15K questions. |
GraPPI: A Retrieve-Divide-Solve GraphRAG Framework for Large-scale Protein-protein Interaction Exploration (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation frameworks have accelerated drug discovery, but integrating models into workflows remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale knowledge graph-based retrieve-divide-solve agent pipeline RAG framework to support large-level PPI signaling pathway exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on large-scale knowledge graphs and can be used to analyze protein-protein interactions. |
TrendSim: Simulating Trending Topics in Social Media Under Poisoning Attacks with LLM-based Multi-agent System (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zeyu Zhang, Jianxun Lian, Chen Ma, Yaning Qu, Ye Luo, Lei Wang, Rui Li, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Le Wu, Xing Xie, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Trending topics bring in a new channel for poisoning attacks, resulting in negative impacts on society. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based multi-agent system to simulate trending topics in social media . they propose a time-aware interaction mechanism, centralized message dissemination, and an interactive system . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system simulates trending topics under poisoning attacks on social media platforms. |
Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for controllable text generation are guided by coarse-grained feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or progressions within sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning algorithm which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for controllable text generation and employs a "first-quantize-then-noise" paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve superior performance on single-attribute and multi-attract control tasks. |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
Multi-Granularity Information Interaction Framework for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches in Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) fail to capture the source of important words, introducing words from irrelevant utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to capture the multi-granularity of semantic information and fetch the relevant utterance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets . it can capture the source of important words and fetch the relevant utterance . |
On Compositional Generalization of Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Modern neural machine translation models have shown competitive performance in benchmarks such as WMT, but there are significant issues such as robustness, domain generalization, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for NMT models from the perspective of compositional generalization and quantitatively analyze the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well under traditional metrics, but is low in out-of-domain and low-resource conditions. |
Mitigating the Language Mismatch and Repetition Issues in LLM-based Machine Translation via Model Editing (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on using Large Language Models to improve translation quality . language mismatch and repetition are two of the main problems with LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage model editing methods to reduce language mismatch and repetition . they propose to fetch intersections of locating results under different language settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce language mismatch and repetition ratios and enhance translation quality in most cases. |
Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Reward Models for Subjective Ambiguity (2026.acl-long)
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Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu, Xiong Liu, Jing Ye, Ziqiang Liu, Haonan Zhang, Liang Zhu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reward modeling in reinforcement learning tasks are limited when dealing with ambiguous preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AAM to dynamically calibrate preference margins using the Bradley-Terry model's internal parameter knowledge to improve reward modeling in subjective tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. |
Contrastive Learning enhanced Author-Style Headline Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work only uses the article itself in the headline generation, but have not taken the writing style of headlines into account. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which takes historical headlines into account to integrate the stylistic features of the author into the model and integrate them into the decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can integrate the stylistic features of the author into the model and generate a headline that is appropriate for the article and consistent with the author’s style. |
Backdooring Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models with Virtual Prompt Injection (2024.naacl-long)
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Jun Yan, Vikas Yadav, Shiyang Li, Lichang Chen, Zheng Tang, Hai Wang, Vijay Srinivasan, Xiang Ren, Hongxia Jin
| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can modulate responses based on human instructions, but they can be maliciously steered to impact society in subtle but persistent ways. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack setting that allows an attacker to inject a virtual prompt into an LLM to steer it without any explicit injection at its input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to poison the model's instruction tuning data and show that it is highly effective in steering the model. |
Task-adaptive Pre-training and Self-training are Complementary for Natural Language Understanding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT) and Self-training can be complementary with simple TFS protocol. |
| Approach: | They propose to use task-adaptive pre-training and self-training to combine TAPT and ST with a simple TFS protocol to achieve strong combined gains across six datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve strong combined gains across six datasets covering sentiment classification, paraphrase identification, natural language inference, named entity recognition and dialogue slot classification. |
emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for speech emotion recognition are not suitable for emotional tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a universal speech emotion representation model that is pre-trained on open-source emotion data. |
| Outcome: | euphoria2vec outperforms state-of-the-art models and emotion specialist models . it shows consistent improvements among 10 different languages of speech emotion recognition datasets . |
Mind Reader: Latent User Demand-Guided Content Optimization for Generative Search Engine (2026.acl-long)
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Tong Chen, JiaWei Guo, Yuxi Li, Baiming Chen, Houxing Ren, Zhang Zhiwei, Yunxiang Zhang, Hanyang Xia, Kun Liang, Zhaoran Fan
| Challenge: | Generative Search Engines (GSEs) have reshaped information retrieval and Generating Engine Optimization (GEO) emerges to improve the content visibility in GSEs’ responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize content to cover latent semantic information of GSEs by decomposing query into diverse perspectives and capturing underlying semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and effectively improves content visibility (with up to 2.44x objective metrics and 1.23x subjective metrics on average). |
Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with impressive capabilities, but they lack domain specificity, real-time information and face challenges in solving specialized problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages in tool learning. |
MTG: A Benchmark Suite for Multilingual Text Generation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Using MTG, we train and evaluate multilingual text generation models using human-annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual multiway text generation dataset with 400k human-annotated data that includes four generation tasks across five languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes four generation tasks across five languages (English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese) it provides comprehensive evaluations with diverse generation scenarios. |
EFUF: Efficient Fine-Grained Unlearning Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to eliminate hallucinations require expensive human annotation . hallucination in multimodal large language models poses unique challenges for current research . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained unlearning framework that performs gradient ascent to eliminate hallucinations without paired data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations while preserving quality with modest computational overhead. |
RouteMoA: Dynamic Routing without Pre-Inference Boosts Efficient Mixture-of-Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jize Wang, Han Wu, Zhiyuan You, Yiming Song, Yijun Wang, Zifei Shan, Yining Li, Songyang Zhang, Xinyi Le, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for mixing-of-agents (MoA) lack model selection criteria and struggle with large model pools. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-agents framework with dynamic routing that uses a lightweight scorer to perform initial screening and refines the model scores through self- and cross-assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for large model pools and tasks . it reduces cost by 89.8% and latency by 63.6% in the large-scale model pool. |
CrowdSelect: SyntheticInstruction Data Selection with Multi-LLM Wisdom (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for capturing instruction-following complexity rely on single-dimensional signals, but they fail to capture complexity across diverse fields. |
| Approach: | They propose three foundational metrics that leverage Multi-LLMs wisdom to capture instruction-response pair characteristics and propose CrowdSelect, an integrated metric incorporating a clustering-based approach to maintain response diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics outperform existing models on MT-bench and Arena-hard and show improvements of 4.81% on full and LoRA fine-tuning. |
M-ABSA: A Multilingual Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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ChengYan Wu, Bolei Ma, Yihong Liu, Zheyu Zhang, Ningyuan Deng, Yanshu Li, Baolan Chen, Yi Zhang, Yun Xue, Barbara Plank
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on English-centric aspects of sentiment analysis, limiting scope for multilingual evaluation and research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual dataset to analyze aspects with associated sentiment elements in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the most extensive multilingual parallel dataset for ABSA to date. |
Contextualized End-to-End Neural Entity Linking (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a proposed entity linking model that disjointly applies MD and ED from the same contextualized BERT embeddings is able to generalize better. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity linking (EL) model that jointly learns mention detection (MD) and entity disambiguation (ED) they propose to use task-specific heads on top of shared BERT contextualized embeddings to learn MD and ED. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results across a standard EL dataset and under a setting where hand-crafted candidate sets are not available. |
Contrastive Aligned Joint Learning for Multilingual Summarization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization systems for multilingual text summarizing are limited due to the lack of large-scale data in multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual summarization system that can understand documents in multiple languages and generate summaries in the corresponding language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over monolingual models in all languages and transferable to other languages. |
Corrupted but Not Broken: Understanding and Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Corrupted Data in Visual Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunhao Gou, Hansi Yang, Zhili Liu, Kai Chen, Yihan Zeng, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Qun Liu, Bo Han, James Kwok, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) aims to enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but its effectiveness is often compromised by corrupted datasets with issues such as hallucinated content and poor OCR quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a corruption-robust training paradigm that surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data. |
SGSH: Stimulate Large Language Models with Skeleton Heuristics for Knowledge Base Question Generation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods have significantly boosted the performance of Knowledge Base Question Generation (KBQG) through pre-trained language models thanks to the richly endowed semantic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to Stimulate GPT-3.5 with Skeleton Heuristics to enhance KBQG by combining skeleton heuristic guidance with a soft prompting approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates "skeleton heuristics" which provides more fine-grained guidance associated with each input to stimulate LLMs to generate optimal questions. |
RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Zhang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Shilinlu Yan, Jin Wang, Yaoqi Guo, Yitian Chen, Yalan Qin, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics that characterize authentic physical environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a robustness benchmark to stress-test Audio Large Models (ALLMs) using high-fidelity auditory scene simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on a wide range of tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and audio-based reasoning. |
Generating Temporally-ordered Event Sequences via Event Optimal Transport (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal event ordering and event infilling ignore the global semantics of events, and the model adopts a word-level objective to model events in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event ordering and event infilling task using a model that uses maximum likelihood estimation to model events in texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on all evaluation datasets. |
HyperLoRA: Efficient Cross-task Generalization via Constrained Low-Rank Adapters Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt pre-trained language models (PLMs) to emerging tasks are costly and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-network that generates task-specific weights without any optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has flexible generalization ability and superior performance over hypenetworks. |
Event-Centric Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating the extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks. |
LINKED: Eliciting, Filtering and Integrating Knowledge in Large Language Model for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to elicit, filter and integrate knowledge in large language models (LINKED) they propose 'reward model' to filter out noisy knowledge and 'take marginal consistent reasoning module' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SOTA baselines on two commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Do Deep Neural Nets Display Human-like Attention in Short Answer Scoring? (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | DL-based graders often lack the ability to explain and justify how a prediction is made, which decreases their trustworthiness and hinders educators from embracing them in practice. |
| Approach: | They conducted a user study to determine whether DL-based graders align with human grader . they also ran a randomized controlled experiment to explore the impact of highlighting important words detected by DL grader. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables human graders to identify important words when marking short answer questions. |
DSM: Question Generation over Knowledge Base via Modeling Diverse Subgraphs with Meta-learner (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods on knowledge base question generation learn a one-size-fits-all model by training together all subgraphs without distinguishing the diverse semantics of subgraph. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph contrastive learning-based retriever to model diverse subgraphs with meta-learner to learn semantics-specific and semantics agnostic knowledge on and across these tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces learning difficulty and improves performance on two widely-adopted benchmarks on KBQG. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
Editing the Moving World: Model Editing for Video LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Qian Zhang, Xinye Li, Xiaokai Wu, Junhao Xu, Zhanyue Qin, Qingbin Liu, Junxian Cai, Xi Chen, Bolin Zhang, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Xiaoyan Yu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge editing focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for modeling large language models using six representative models . they analyze the strengths and limitations of existing models and identify new directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark extends existing models from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. |
Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT. |
Chunk-based Chinese Spelling Check with Global Optimization (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check is a challenging task due to the characteristics of the language . previous studies only consider corrections with similar character pronunciation or shape . |
| Approach: | They propose a chunk-based framework to correct single-character and multi-character word errors uniformly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets and optical character recognition datasets. |
HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from**doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources. |
SCOPE: Compress Mathematical Reasoning Steps for Efficient Automated Process Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing process annotation approaches are computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-based approach that transforms reasoning steps into code and normalizes them through Abstract Syntax Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on Best-of-N strategy and ProcessBench. |
Faithful Inference Chains Extraction for Fact Verification over Multi-view Heterogeneous Graph with Causal Intervention (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact verification do not extract faithful inference chains due to the diversity of relation paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view heterogeneous Graph with causal intervention to extract evidence graphs from the knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides precise evidence graphs and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public KG-based fact verification dataset FactKG. |
Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained systems are able to capture advice better than rule-based systems, but advice identification is challenging. |
| Approach: | They analyze a dataset of advice posts on two reddit forums and annotate whether they contain advice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that pre-trained models capture advice better than rule-based systems, but advice identification is challenging. |
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. |
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Ruiqi Yan, Yuzhe Liang, Xiquan Li, Ruiyang Xu, Zhikang Niu, Yanqiao Zhu, Yifan Yang, Zhanxun Liu, Kai Yu, Yuxuan Hu, Jinyu Li, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | a new spoken dialogue system with single-stage training is demonstrating its low latency and high quality . SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms previous models on 4 GPUs with limited data. |
LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)
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Pei Chen, Hongye Jin, Cheng-Che Lee, Rulin Shao, Jingfeng Yang, Mingyu Zhao, Zhaoyu Zhang, Qin Lu, Kaiwen Men, Ning Xie, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Han Li, Lingyun Wang
| Challenge: | LongLeader aims to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . long-constext comprehension is a key bottleneck for many use cases . |
| Approach: | They propose a leaderboard to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . they offer open-source access to the benchmarks and maintain a dedicated website . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model assesses different LLMs on selected benchmarks and provides open-source access to the benchmarks. |
SOLAR: Serendipity Optimized Language Model Aligned for Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zichen Yuan, Lifan Sun, Yucen Zhuang, Yue Wang, Xinyuan Song, Tianqi Xu, Siyuan Li, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Sirui Hong, Jiaqi Chen, Joemon M. Jose, Yongxin Ni
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have shown strong potential in recommendation tasks . however, their application to serendipity-oriented recommendations remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptive instruction tuning method that aligns Large Language Models with recommendation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the domain gap between LLMs and recommendation tasks. |
Event Extraction as Multi-turn Question Answering (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to event extraction fail to model rich interactions among event types and arguments of different roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that formulates event extraction as multi-turn question answering . they propose to use reading comprehension problems to extract triggers and arguments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art on argument extraction tasks . it makes full use of dependency among arguments and event types, and generalizes well . |
SWE-Fixer: Training Open-Source LLMs for Effective and Efficient GitHub Issue Resolution (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel in code generation benchmarks, but these benchmarks focus on single-file scenarios with constrained context scope. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework to effectively resolve GitHub issues using a code file retrieval module and a model-based code editing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on two GitHub benchmarks. |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
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Baojun Wang, Zhao Zhang, Kun Xu, Guang-Yuan Hao, Yuyang Zhang, Lifeng Shang, Linlin Li, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
Semantic Framework based Query Generation for Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal question answering ignore intrinsic connections between events that can make them temporally related. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal question answering method that generates query graphs by exploring relevant facts of mentioned entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two benchmarks over different knowledge graphs. |
Agentic Episodic Control (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning (RL) are limited by poor data efficiency and weak generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that integrates large language models into episodic RL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves 2–6 higher data efficiency than baselines and is the only method to solve complex tasks like UnlockLocal with over 90% success. |
KBM: Delineating Knowledge Boundary for Adaptive Retrieval in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhen Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Yong Jiang, Zile Qiao, Zhuo Chen, Guangyu Li, Feiteng Mu, Mengting Hu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges . a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) is used to express the known/unknown of a given question . |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Boundary Model to express the known/unknown of a given question . they find that not all questions need to trigger RAG to improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces time and computational costs by retrieving parts of unknown knowledge . the proposed model can express the known/unknown of a given question and determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered . |
GRIL: Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Integrated Learning with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jialin Chen, Houyu Zhang, Seongjun Yun, Alejandro Mottini, Rex Ying, Xiang Song, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Zheng Li, Qingjun Cui
| Challenge: | Existing graph RAGs decouple retrieval and reasoning processes, preventing adaptability . existing graph Raggings depend heavily on ground-truth entities, which are often unavailable in open-domain settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph retriever that is trained end-to-end with large-scale graphs . structure and semantic features are encoded via soft tokens and the verbalized graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large-scale graph retrieval models by grounding it with external knowledge. |
CrossTune: Black-Box Few-Shot Classification with Label Enhancement (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Training large-scale language models requires substantial computation resources . current research focuses on adapting black-box models to downstream tasks using prompt optimization . |
| Approach: | They propose a label-enhanced cross-attention network called CrossTune to improve the generalization of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art black-box tuning method by 5.7% on average. |
Large Language Models are Easily Confused: A Quantitative Metric, Security Implications and Typological Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Language Confusion is a phenomenon where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text that is neither in the desired language, nor in a contextually appropriate one. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric to measure and quantify language confusion in Large Language Models (LLMs) they link language confusion to LLM security and find patterns in the case of multilingual embedding inversion attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric reveals language confusion across LLMs and link it to LLM security and embedding inversion attacks. |
RelEdit: Evaluating Conceptual Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Relational Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods struggle to reason about related conceptual knowledge effectively, despite a lack of model-level relational reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess concept-level and instance-level relational reasoning abilities of edited models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains the best scores on the memory-based in-context editing baseline, MICE, suggesting a promising direction for model editing. |
DuReader-Retrieval: A Large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Retrieval from Web Search Engine (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for non-English passage retrieval are lacking in quality and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese dataset for passage retrieval . they reduce false negatives by manually annotating results pooled from multiple retrievers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset reduces false negatives in development and testing sets and removes similar training queries. |
Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yuanxing Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yifan Chen, Yuchi Zhang, Haopeng Bai, Fan Feng, Hengbin Cui, Yongbin Li, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | E-commerce pre-sales dialogues elicit user needs and preferences for items . large language models lack domain-specific knowledge for accurate recommendations . |
| Approach: | They propose two collaboration strategies to integrate CRS and large language models in pre-sales dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be very effective in some cases, the authors say . |
Hallucinations as Orthogonal Noise: Inference-Time Manifold Alignment via Dynamic Contextual Orthogonalization (2026.findings-acl)
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Mingkuan Zhao, Wentao Hu, Tianchen Huang, Yuheng Min, Suquan Chen, Yide Gao, Yanbo Zhai, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Hallucinations in Large Language Models persist in critical domains where generated content diverges from contextual facts or logical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate hallucinations as orthogonal noise relative to the semantic manifold of the residual stream. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior contextual faithfulness compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
RAG-Instruct: Boosting LLMs with Diverse Retrieval-Augmented Instructions (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models by incorporating external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in multiple tasks and achieves strong zero-shot performance. |
ProLongVid: A Simple but Strong Baseline for Long-context Video Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rui Wang, Bohao Li, Xiyang Dai, Jianwei Yang, Yi-Ling Chen, Zhen Xing, Yifan Yang, Dongdong Chen, Xipeng Qiu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt image-focused models for video understanding have not been successful in analyzing long video sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a video instruction dataset that outperforms existing video instruction data for fine-tuning MLLMs by incrementally increasing input context length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on video benchmarks and outperformed proprietary models on VideoMME even with a compact 7B model. |
Tackling Modality Heterogeneity with Multi-View Calibration Network for Multimodal Sentiment Detection (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on fusing different features but ignore the challenge of modality heterogeneity. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-guided fusion module with novel Sparse-Attention to reduce the negative impacts of redundant visual elements and a sentiment-based congruity constraint task to calibrate the feature shift in the representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is competitive against existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art results on two public benchmark datasets. |
Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun, Jianwei Lv, Chen Tang, Shaojie Zhang, Nayu Liu, Guoxin Yu, Zihao Li, Qichao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao, Ping Luo, Yue Yu
| Challenge: | Existing routing methods rely on direct mapping from queries to models based on surface-level features, leading to poor generalizability on out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new routing framework that recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves matching accuracy while lowering inference costs . it decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements . |
Teaching According to Talents! Instruction Tuning LLMs with Competence-Aware Curriculum Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Yankai Chen, Wei-Chieh Huang, Wenhao Jiang, Hui Wang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models (LLMs) current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed and potentially sub-optimal learning trajectory. |
| Approach: | a framework for efficient instruction tuning is proposed to address the issue of curriculum rigidity . current methods rely on static heuristic difficulty metrics and fail to adapt to evolving capabilities . |
| Outcome: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models . current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed learning trajectory . |
ProBench: Judging Multimodal Foundation Models on Open-ended Multi-domain Expert Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Solving expert-level multimodal tasks requires strong user query understanding, domain-specific knowledge, and advanced reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark of open-ended user queries encapsulating professional expertise and advanced reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is publicly accessible at TBC. |
MLEC-QA: A Chinese Multi-Choice Biomedical Question Answering Dataset (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Question Answering (QA) is a branch of QA that enables effective perceiving, accessing, and understanding complex biomedical knowledge by innovative applications. |
| Approach: | They present MLEC-QA, the largest-scale Chinese multi-choice biomedical QA dataset . they implement eight representative control methods and open-domain QA methods as baselines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest-scale Chinese multi-choice biomedical QA dataset . it covers the following biomedically-relevant sub-fields: Clinic, Stomatology, Public Health, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Traditional Chinese medicine Combined with Western Medicine. |
See the World, Discover Knowledge: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Vision Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jihao Gu, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Chen Wang, Ziming Wang, Tengtao Song, Donglai Wei, Jiale Yuan, Yingxiu Zhao, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Meng Cao, Jun Song, Yingshui Tan, Xiang Li, Wenbo Su, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing models for large vision language models do not fully reflect their knowledge capacity and reliability, resulting in erroneous outputs that do not align with the image content or provide answers lacking knowledge evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based benchmark for visual factuality across 8 major topics and 56 subtopics and a multi-hop question construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples visual factuality into two parts: seeing the world and discovering knowledge. |
Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of neural table-to-text models due to the limited source tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-structureaware text generation model with pretrained language model and propose TASD to bridge the gap between the structured table and text input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between the structured table and text input and generates accurate and fluent descriptive texts on two public datasets. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
PrefIx: Understand and Adapt to User Preference in Human-Agent Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current benchmarks evaluate task accuracy but overlook how agents interact . Preference-aware agents show 7.6% average UX improvement and 18.5% gain in preference alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a configurable environment that evaluates both what agents accomplish and how they interact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance and improves user experience by 7.6% and 18.5% respectively. |
Finding RELIEF: Shaping Reasoning Behavior without Reasoning Supervision via Belief Engineering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for shaping large reasoning models rely on reinforcement learning or fine-tuning with gold-standard reasoning traces. Existing techniques for behavior shaping rely only on additional reward modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns a model's self-concept with a target belief blueprint and internalizes desired traits by fine-tuning on synthesized, self-reflective QA pairs that affirm the target belief. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms behavior-supervised and preference-based models while requiring significantly lower training costs. |
SumCSE: Summary as a transformation for Contrastive Learning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Sentence embedding models are typically trained using contrastive learning (CL) using human annotations directly or by repurposing other annotated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generative language models to generate CL data using annotated data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous best unsupervised method by 1.8 points and SimCSE, a strong supervised baseline by 0.3 points on the semantic text similarity (STS) benchmark. |
EvoAgent: Towards Automatic Multi-Agent Generation via Evolutionary Algorithms (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on extending specialized agents to multi-agent systems is dependent on human-designed frameworks, limiting the functional scope and scalability of agent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic method to automatically extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems via evolutionary algorithm . they consider existing agent frameworks as the initial individual and apply evolutionary operators to generate multiple agents with diverse settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems . it can generate multiple agents with diverse settings, and improves performance across tasks . |
Multilingual Generation in Abstractive Summarization: A Comparative Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multilingual generation lack thorough analysis due to extensive linguistic diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose to classify multilingual generation methodologies into three categories based on their underlying modeling principles . they introduce an automatic metric to mitigate spurious correlations associated with language mixing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in high-resource, low-resourced, and zero-shot scenarios. |
VulLibGen: Generating Names of Vulnerability-Affected Packages via a Large Language Model (2024.acl-long)
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Tianyu Chen, Lin Li, ZhuLiuchuan ZhuLiuchuan, Zongyang Li, Xueqing Liu, Guangtai Liang, Qianxiang Wang, Tao Xie
| Challenge: | Existing work on affected package identification is limited by large language models . a recent study shows that 84% third-party packages contain security vulnerabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to use LLM to generate the affected package . they propose supervised fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation and a local search algorithm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has an average precision of 0.806 for identifying vulnerable packages in four most popular ecosystems in GitHub Advisory. |
DocLens: A Tool-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Long Visual Document Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to localizing evidence from long visual documents fail on a fundamental challenge: evidence localization. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that “zooms in” on evidence like a lens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMLongBench-Doc and FinRAGBench-V, surpassing even human experts. |
Adaptive Feature-based Low-Rank Compression of Large Language Models via Bayesian Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yixin Ji, Yang Xiang, Juntao Li, Qingrong Xia, Zi Ye, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models require a balance between efficiency and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank compression technique that reduces non-essential parameters by decomposing weight matrices into products of two low-ranked matrici. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing pruning and low-rank compression techniques in maintaining model performance at the same compression ratio. |
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. |
OntoED: Low-resource Event Detection with Ontology Embedding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to ED rely on training instances and ignore correlation of event types. |
| Approach: | They propose a process of event ontology population linking event instances to pre-defined event types in event ontoology and ontological embedding to address these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to new unseen event types by establishing linkages to existing ones. |
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)
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Guanting Dong, Daichi Guo, Liwen Wang, Xuefeng Li, Zechen Wang, Chen Zeng, Keqing He, Jinzheng Zhao, Hao Lei, Xinyue Cui, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts. |
Task Knowledge Injection via Interpolations and Reinstatement for Large Language Model Generalization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained large language models have been widely adopted to elicit their superior performance on downstream tasks, but instruction tuning may overfit them to specific task formats, compromising their generalization on unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject latent task adaptation and knowledge reinstatement into large language models to mitigate spurious correlations between inputs and targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization on in-domain and out-of-domain unseen tasks. |
VQAGuider: Guiding Multimodal Large Language Models to Answer Complex Video Questions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can grasp the intention of a question and decomposing it to a series of visual recognition sub-tasks to find out the answer with the help of an agent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal large language models to grasp the intention of a question and decompose it into a series of visual recognition sub-tasks to find out the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of complex video-related questions by 29.6% and 17.2% on CVQA and the existing VQA datasets. |
Type Enhanced BERT for Correcting NER Errors (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is the task of identifying spans that belong to particular categories, such as person, location, organization, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates named entity’s type information into BERT by an adapter layer and integrates it into a gazetteer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in multiple corpus. |
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. |
Repulsive Attention: Rethinking Multi-head Attention as Bayesian Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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Bang An, Jie Lyu, Zhenyi Wang, Chunyuan Li, Changwei Hu, Fei Tan, Ruiyi Zhang, Yifan Hu, Changyou Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-head attention is an effective module in deep neural networks, but there are no explicit mechanisms guaranteeing this property. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric approach that explicitly improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and consequently strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
AnchorSeg: Language Grounded Query Banks for Reasoning Segmentation (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Qian, Chuanhang Deng, Qiang Huang, Jian Xiong, Mingxuan Li, Yingbo Zhou, Wei Zhai, Jintao Chen, Dejing Dou
| Challenge: | Existing models rely on a single segmentation token whose hidden state implicitly encodes both semantic reasoning and spatial localization . Existing methods rely only on SEG>, which encodes semantic reasoning, limiting the model's ability to explicitly disentangle what to segment from where to segment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformulates reasoning segmentation as a structured conditional generation process over image tokens conditioned on language grounded query banks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges token-level predictions and pixel-level supervision by decoupling spatial grounding from semantic reasoning through structured language grounded query banks. |
FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing financial question answering datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset for long-form question answering in finance to evaluate QA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites. |
CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent System (2025.acl-long)
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Li Hu, Guoqiang Chen, Xiuwei Shang, Shaoyin Cheng, Benlong Wu, LiGangyang LiGangyang, Xu Zhu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
| Challenge: | CompileAgent is the first LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves compilation success rate, ranging from 10% to 71%. |
LSDC: An Efficient and Effective Large-Scale Data Compression Method for Supervised Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zhaoguang Long, Yuhao Zhou, Shangqing Zhao, Yupei Ren, Li Cai, Chenghao Jia, Zhe Chen, Zhe Fang, Yuxiang Song, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expanding in scale and size, increasing computational costs . large-scale data compression techniques can reduce the size of training datasets while maintaining data integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale data compression method to reduce the size of training data . they use a bifurcated quantization strategy to maximize the diversity of samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the size of training data while maximizing the submodular gain. |
ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks can manipulate the output of deep neural networks and possess high insidiousness. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual backdoor defense based on outlier word detection that can handle all the textual attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations. |
QueueEDIT: Structural Self-Correction for Sequential Model Editing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can be effective for correcting factual inaccuracies but can still suffer from hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a queue-based self-correction framework that addresses parameter bias during sequential model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while maintaining competitive performance in single-turn editing. |
Forget the Token and Pixel: Rethinking Gradient Ascent for Concept Unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Li, Chuanyi Zhang, Miaozeng Du, Hui Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Qianshan Wei, Junfeng Fang, Ruipeng Wang, Sheng Bi, Guilin Qi
| Challenge: | Gradient Ascent (GA) has emerged as a promising approach for concept unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (MGMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that selectively applies GA to targeted Conceptual Knowledge while preserving Natural Knowledge through Gradient Descent (GD). |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach removes Conceptual Knowledge and inadvertently diminishes Natural Knowledge, resulting in utility degradation. |
Tree-KG: An Expandable Knowledge Graph Construction Framework for Knowledge-intensive Domains (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs are a useful tool for organizing complex data in knowledge-intensive domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an expandable framework that combines structured domain texts with advanced semantic techniques to create a tree-like graph from textbooks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses competing methods in the text-Annotated dataset with high scores on the Text-Annalytated data. |
Learning Embeddings for Rare Words Leveraging Internet Search Engine and Spatial Location Relationships (2021.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embedding techniques depend heavily on the frequencies of words in the corpus, and fail to provide reliable representations for rare words. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to learn embeddings for rare words based on an Internet search engine and the spatial location relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can learn more accurate representations for a wider range of vocabulary. |
Timely Machine: Awareness of Time Makes Test-Time Scaling Agentic (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) tackle complex reasoning tasks, but test-time scaling is becoming expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to redefine test-time as wall-clock time, where models dynamically adjust strategies based on time budgets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves time budget awareness and boosts performance across Timely-Eval. |
CADReview: Automatically Reviewing CAD Programs with Error Detection and Correction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Computer-aided design (CAD) is crucial in prototyping 3D objects through geometric instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a CAD review task to automatically detect and correct potential errors . they propose CAD program repairer framework to provide helpful feedback on error correction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing MLLMs in detecting errors and providing feedback on error correction. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
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Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
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. |
Trajectory2Task: Training Robust Tool-Calling Agents with Synthesized Yet Verifiable Data for Complex User Intents (2026.acl-long)
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Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Yimeng Zhang, Pei Chen, Ziwei Dong, Jing Huang, Jiri Gesi, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Qun Liu, Yisi Sang, Hanqing Lu, Manling Li, Jin Lai, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows . but most studies on tool-callers focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-calling agent-based data pipeline that converts trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be used to study tool use under three scenarios. |
Many Heads Are Better Than One: Improved Scientific Idea Generation by A LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.acl-long)
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Haoyang Su, Renqi Chen, Shixiang Tang, Zhenfei Yin, Xinzhe Zheng, Jinzhe Li, Biqing Qi, Qi Wu, Hui Li, Wanli Ouyang, Philip Torr, Bowen Zhou, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent AI methods have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, but they fail to replicate the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual scientific system that mimics the collaborative nature of scientific research by organizing a team of agents to generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing new scientific ideas and offers valuable insights to guide future research. |
Improving Large Language Models Function Calling and Interpretability via Guided-Structured Templates (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hy Dang, Tianyi Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Tao Yang, Pei Chen, Zhengyang Wang, Helen Wang, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-use errors and improves interpretability and transparency of tool-using agents. |
Dual-Reasoner: Bridging Interleaved Atomicity and Streaming Latency via Thinking-while-Talking (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangzhuo Li, Shengpeng Ji, Yifu Chen, Tianle Liang, Haoyu Yang, null Junboli, Jun Fang, Lin Li, Qingyang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate Chain-of-Thought into spoken dialogue models incur prohibitive latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Streaming Masking Mechanism to ensure uninterrupted audio streaming . they use a quadruple-constraint system to reconstruct logical atomicity . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Dual-Reasoner improves speech generation performance with low latency. |
From Implicit Exploration to Structured Reasoning: Guideline and Refinement for LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on implicit exploration, which leads to unstable reasoning paths and lack of error correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts from implicit exploration to structured reasoning through guideline and refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the Big-Bench Hard benchmark. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
FlexiQA: Leveraging LLM’s Evaluation Capabilities for Flexible Knowledge Selection in Open-domain Question Answering (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for open-domain question answering lacks the hallucination and relevance of acquired knowledge to the given question. |
| Approach: | They propose a new pipeline that utilizes the diverse evaluation capabilities of large language models to select knowledge effectively and flexibly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline combines the strengths of both paradigms and overcomes their shortcomings. |
Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: On the Emergence of LLM Agents as the Welfare Dictator (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhengliang Shi, Ruotian Ma, Jen-tse Huang, Xinbei Ma, Xingyu Chen, Mengru Wang, Qu Yang, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ziyang Chen, Shanyi Wang, Cixing LI, Wenxuan Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Zhaochun Ren, Liefeng Bo
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 20 state-of-the-art Large language models (LLMs) and 20 LLM dictators to create a social welfare function benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model creates dilemma between maximizing collective efficiency and ensuring distributive fairness. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
Multilingual Translation from Denoising Pre-Training (2021.findings-acl)
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Yuqing Tang, Chau Tran, Xian Li, Peng-Jen Chen, Naman Goyal, Vishrav Chaudhary, Jiatao Gu, Angela Fan
| Challenge: | Recent work shows potential of training one model for multilingual machine translation . but little has been explored on the potential to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual translation in a single model. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual machine translation in a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over models trained from scratch and bilingually for translation into English. |
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. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
Tandem: Riding Together with Large and Small Language Models for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li, Yejing Wang, Yijun Chen, Zhao Zihao, Luo Yixuan, Hanyu Yan, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the rise of reasoningintensive inference paradigms, where models perform explicit step-by-step reasoning before generating final answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-small LLM collaboration framework that synergizes large and small language models to achieve high-quality reasoning with significantly reduced computational cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the mentor LLM while preserving the benefits of the thinking paradigm of LLMs. |
Mind the Gap in Cultural Alignment: Task-Aware Culture Management for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs’ broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-cultural interference. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment that synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. |
GraphCheck: Breaking Long-Term Text Barriers with Extracted Knowledge Graph-Powered Fact-Checking (2025.acl-long)
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Yingjian Chen, Haoran Liu, Yinhong Liu, Jinxiang Xie, Rui Yang, Han Yuan, Yanran Fu, Peng Yuan Zhou, Qingyu Chen, James Caverlee, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking methods that use large language models often generate subtle factual errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-checking framework that uses extracted knowledge graphs to enhance text representation. |
| Outcome: | GraphCheck outperforms existing specialized fact-checkers on seven benchmarks spanning general and medical domains . Graph Neural Networks process extracted knowledge graphs as a soft prompt, enabling efficient fact- checking in a single inference call. |
When Generative Adversarial Networks Meet Sequence Labeling Challenges (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for sequence labeling use a feature extractor and sequence tagger . a recent study shows that SLGAN is versatile and highly effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harnesses the capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks to address sequence labeling challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits strong adaptability to various sequence labeling tasks. |
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning abilities when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize Chain-of-X methods by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks, and then categorise them by taxanomies and discuss potential future directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorised by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. |
ReasonEmbed: Enhanced Text Embeddings for Reasoning-Intensive Document Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that traditional retrievers struggle with reasoningintensive tasks such as personal assistants and scientific research. |
| Approach: | They propose a new data synthesis method that overcomes the triviality problem prevalent in previous synthetic datasets and propose 'ReMixer', a data fusion method that generates 82K high-quality training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks. |
LLMsPark: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Strategic Gaming Contexts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly important for their intelligence evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a game theory-based evaluation platform that measures LLMs’ decision-making strategies and social behaviors in classic game-theoretic settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system cross-evaluates 15 leading LLMs using leaderboard rankings and scoring mechanisms. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
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. |
Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of model editing and knowledge updating add additional network parameters, knowledge bases, knowledge base, and model parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning that employs parametric arithmetic to facilitate the forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two datasets and is comparable to full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-uning. |
EmpDG: Multi-resolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on empathetic dialogue generation fails to capture the nuances of human emotion and consider the potential of user feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-resolution adversarial model - EmpDG - to generate more empathetic responses by exploiting both coarse-grained dialogue-level and fine-grounded token-level emotions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in both content quality and emotion perceptivity. |
CausalEval: Towards Better Causal Reasoning in Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Longxuan Yu, Delin Chen, Siheng Xiong, Qingyang Wu, Dawei Li, Zhikai Chen, Xiaoze Liu, Liangming Pan
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used for a variety of tasks, including problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a review of existing methods aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning . they categorize existing methods as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better than existing methods on a range of tasks. |
Agent-GWO: Collaborative Agents for Dynamic Prompt Optimization in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xudong Wang, Chaoning Zhang, Chenghao Li, Shuxu Chen, Qigan Sun, Jiaquan Zhang, Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari, Tae-Ho Kim, Jiwei Wei, Malu Zhang, Guoqing Wang, Yang Yang, Heng Tao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing automatic prompt optimization methods fail to optimize prompts and decoding hyperparameters within a unified framework to achieve stable global improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic prompt optimization framework for complex reasoning that unifies prompt templates and decodes hyperparameters as inheritable agent configurations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical and hybrid reasoning benchmarks show that Agent-GWO improves accuracy and stability over existing prompt optimization methods. |
Semantic-Aware Logical Reasoning via a Semiotic Framework (2026.acl-long)
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Yunyao Zhang, Xinglang Zhang, Junxi Sheng, Wenbing Li, Junqing Yu, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen, Wei Yang, Zikai Song
| Challenge: | Existing studies largely overlook the interplay between logical complexity and semantic complexity, limiting their robustness under abstract propositions, ambiguous contexts, and conflicting stances. |
| Approach: | They propose a semiotic-square-guided framework that integrates automated deduction with reflective verification to manage logical complexity across deeper reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on RepublicQA with 6.25% average gain, and generalizes well to four mainstream logical reasoning benchmarks with an additional 7.05% improvement. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
Advancing Precise Outline-Conditioned Text Generation with Task Duality and Explicit Outline Control (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on outline-conditioned text generation focus on generating text using provided outlines as rough sketches, but lack of clarity and rationality of the rough outlines hampers quality of the generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that requires generating stories based on specific, sentence-level outlines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the quality of precise outline-conditioned text generation. |
Don’t Forget Your Reward Values: Language Model Alignment via Value-based Calibration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models have been criticized for their complexity and instability. |
| Approach: | They propose a value-based calibration method to better align Large Language Models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on AI assistant and summarization datasets, providing impressive generalizability, robustness, and diversity in different settings. |
SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework (2026.acl-long)
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Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Jinfeng Jiang, Xin Zhou, Haoye Tian, Mingzhe Du, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Yikun Li, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating vulnerability repair suffer from syntactic overfitting . nvd published 49,230 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in 2025 alone . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware reward framework that optimizes for code semantic equivalence rather than lexical mimicry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks on repository-level splits . it incorporates expert-aligned reasoning mechanism that grounds patch generation in structured diagnosis. |
Re-evaluating the Need for Visual Signals in Unsupervised Grammar Induction (2024.findings-naacl)
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Boyi Li, Rodolfo Corona, Karttikeya Mangalam, Catherine Chen, Daniel Flaherty, Serge Belongie, Kilian Weinberger, Jitendra Malik, Trevor Darrell, Dan Klein
| Challenge: | Recent studies show multimodal inputs can improve grammar induction, but weak textual baselines are needed for training. |
| Approach: | They use a fixed grammar family to compare multimodal grammar induction methods . they find multimodal inputs can improve grammar induction by grounding textual inputs to the visual world . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms weaker baselines on four benchmark datasets. |
Nuclear Deployed!: Analyzing Catastrophic Risks in Decision-making of Autonomous LLM Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into autonomous decision-makers, raising concerns about catastrophic risks in high-stakes domains, particularly in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that is carefully constructed to effectively and naturally expose catastrophic risks in high-stakes domains such as CBRN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exposes LLM agents to catastrophic behaviors and deception without being deliberately induced. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
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Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
RuleR: Improving LLM Controllability by Rule-based Data Recycling (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning datasets are composed of general instructions without userspecified constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method incorporating multiple constraints into the original data samples according to predefined rules to create new training tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLM controllability while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities. |
Scaffolding Coordinates to Promote Vision-Language Coordination in Large Multi-Modal Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompting techniques for Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) focus on improving textual reasoning or leveraging tools for image preprocessing, lacking a simple and general visual prompting scheme to promote vision-language coordination. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompting scheme that scaffolds coordinates to promote vision-language coordination in Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) they overlay a dot matrix within the image as visual information anchors and leverage multi-dimensional coordinates as textual positional references. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a wide range of vision-language tasks show the superiority of SCAFFOLD prompting over the textual Chain-of-Thought prompting. |
HybridKV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model Inference (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are hindered by the rapid growth of key–value (KV) caches. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid KV cache compression framework that reduces KV memory by 7.9 and speeds up decoding by 1.52. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 multimodal benchmarks show that HYBRIDKV cuts KV cache memory by 7.9 and speeds up decoding by 1.52. |
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. |
Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes . human translators of songs need to have a mastery of cultural traditions and the poetic usage of both source and target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can model lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment . they use an encoder-decoder framework that can translate lyrics and determine number of aligned notes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can translate lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step. |
Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a key concept in the field of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance EI of large language models by naive fine-tuning on EI-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves EI of two LLM-based assistants without compromising GI. |
What is Stigma Attributed to? A Theory-Grounded, Expert-Annotated Interview Corpus for Demystifying Mental-Health Stigma (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing resources for training neural models to finely classify mental-health stigma are limited, relying primarily on social media or synthetic data without theoretical underpinnings. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an expert-annotated corpus of human-chatbot interviews to finely classify mental-health stigma. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus can facilitate research on computationally detecting, neutralizing, and counteracting mental-health stigma. |
PreAlign: Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer by Early Establishment of Multilingual Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes multilingual alignment prior to language model pretraining and preserves this alignment using a code-switching strategy during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in a synthetic English to English-Clone setting show that PreAlign outperforms standard multilingual joint training in language modeling, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and cross-linguistic knowledge application. |
Adversarial Attacks on Parts of Speech: An Empirical Study in Text-to-Image Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that text-to-image models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations . |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of adversarial attacks on different POS tags within text prompts on T2I models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is vulnerable to adversarial perturbations with noun perturbations in text prompts. |
SelfMix: Robust Learning against Textual Label Noise with Self-Mixup Training (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to handle label noise in text classification tasks are limited to visual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to handle label noise in text classification tasks using a Gaussian Mixture Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three types of text classification tasks on visual and textual data. |
Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihao Yi, Qingxuan Jiang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Qu Yang, Mengru Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ying Shen, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, but their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined. |
| Approach: | They propose a moral alignment benchmark to test the safety of large language models . they find that models struggle with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to accurately portray morally ambiguous or villainous characters . the model fails most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
Towards IP Intelligence: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Intellectual Property Knowledge and Practice (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiyao Wang, Guhong Chen, Hongbo Wang, Huaren Liu, Minghui Zhu, Zhifei Qin, Li Linwei, Yilin Yue, Shiqiang Wang, Jiayan Li, Wu Yihang, Ziqiang Liu, Longze Chen, Run Luo, Liyang Fan, Jiaming Li, Lei Zhang, Kan Xu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Chengming Li, Shiwen Ni, Yuan Lin, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets and benchmarks focus only on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP practice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating room for improvement . open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models . |
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities require large-scale data or significant training efforts. |
| Approach: | They introduce an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models trained on long-CoT distilled data with 3.1k initialization samples and achieves an accuracy improvement of 51.0% to 81.6%. |
MLDebugging: Towards Benchmarking Code Debugging Across Multi-Library Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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JinYang Huang, Xiachong Feng, Qiguang Chen, Hanjie Zhao, Zihui Cheng, Jiesong Bai, Jingxuan Zhou, Min Li, Libo Qin
| Challenge: | MLDebugging is a benchmark designed to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a benchmark to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code using 126 Python libraries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 126 Python libraries and a wide range of multi-library code issues. |
Dataset and Enhanced Model for Eligibility Criteria-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Clinical trials require that patients meet eligibility criteria to ensure safety and effectiveness of studies. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that includes the first-of-its-kind eligibility-criteria corpus and queries for criteria-to-sql . they propose 'neuro semantic parser' which can translate eligibility criteria to executable SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms existing state-of-the-art general-purpose models while highlighting the challenges presented by the new dataset. |
A New Pipeline for Knowledge Graph Reasoning Enhanced by Large Language Models Without Fine-Tuning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional knowledge Graph Reasoning models learn the embeddings of KG components over the structure of a KG. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to integrate knowledge from LLMs into KGs without fine-tuning . they propose knowledge alignment, KG reasoning and entity reranking to enhance conventional models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can enhance the performance of conventional KGR models in incomplete and general situations. |
CORAL: Learning Consistent Representations across Multi-step Training with Lighter Speculative Drafter (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that focus on training and inference suffer from misalignment . speculative decoding is a powerful technique that accelerates large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that improves both accuracy and efficiency in speculative drafting by using cross-step representational alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on three LLM families and three benchmark datasets. |
R2AG: Incorporating Retrieval Information into Retrieval Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to augment large language models with external documents are lacking in the semantic gap between LLMs and retrievers due to differences in their training objectives and architectures. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate R2AG into R2etrieval augmented generation framework by using a R2-Former to capture retrieval information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework fills the semantic gap between LLMs and retrievers due to differences in their training objectives and architectures. |
Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on entity representation and final answer reasoning, which results in limited supervision for this task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes relations to enhance entity representation and introduce additional supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the F1 score on two benchmark datasets by 5.8% . it improves by 6.7% on WebQSP, better than state-of-the-art methods . |
MindBridge: Scalable and Cross-Model Knowledge Editing via Memory-Augmented Modality (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods overfit to specific models, causing edited knowledge to be discarded during each LLM update and requiring frequent re-editing. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that allows editors to edit knowledge in multiple LLMs at the same time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution performs better even in editing tens of thousands of knowledge entries and can adapt to different LLMs. |
A Study of Implicit Ranking Unfairness in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior ability to serve as ranking models, but they will exhibit discriminatory ranking behaviors based on users’ sensitive attributes (gender). |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation method to investigate the severity of implicit ranking unfairness and a pair-wise regression method to conduct fair-aware data augmentation for LLM fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in ranking fairness, achieving this with only a small reduction in accuracy. |
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianjun Pan, Junyi Wang, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Kaiyin Xu, Yougen Zhou, Yihan Li, JingYuan Zhao, Qin Chen, Ningning Zhou, Kai Chen, Liang He
| Challenge: | Existing models focus on a single therapy, but complex cases require flexible strategies among various therapies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark . it is designed to address three key challenges: 1) can we train a highly realistic AI counselor? 2) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?" |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is annotated with extensive professional skills and includes over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. |
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. |
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuqing Huang, Rongyang Zhang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Xuyang Zhi, Guiquan Liu, Xin Li, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention. |
RaaS: Reasoning-Aware Attention Sparsity for Efficient LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Junhao Hu, Wenrui Huang, Weidong Wang, Zhenwen Li, Tiancheng Hu, Zhixia Liu, Xusheng Chen, Tao Xie, Yizhou Shan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various domains, but their large-scale deployment faces a major obstacle: the high computational cost of long-sequence inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that retains key-value vectors until they are no longer needed to solve reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves high accuracy with O(L) time but O(N) memory complexities. |
MemeArena: Automating Context-Aware Unbiased Evaluation of Harmfulness Understanding for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation approaches focus on mLLMs’ detection accuracy for binary classification tasks, which often fail to reflect the in-depth interpretive nuance of harmfulness across diverse contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-based arena-style evaluation framework that provides context-aware and unbiased assessment for mLLMs’ understanding of multimodal harmfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces evaluation biases of judge agents and provides unbiased comparisons of mLLMs’ abilities to interpret multimodal harmfulness. |
“Knowing When You Don’t Know”: A Multilingual Relevance Assessment Dataset for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Nandan Thakur, Luiz Bonifacio, Crystina Zhang, Odunayo Ogundepo, Ehsan Kamalloo, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Boxing Chen, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Prior work on RAG grounds Large Language Models to reduce factual hallucinations lacks a comprehensive evaluation of different language families. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-annotated dataset for evaluating LLM robustness in RAG . they find that most models struggle to balance the two capacities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes both a non-relevant and a relevant subset. |
No More Stale Feedback: Co-Evolving Critics for Open-World Agent Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhicong Li, Lingjie Jiang, Yulan Hu, Xingchen Zeng, Yixia Li, Xiangwen Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Current methods for training Large Language Model agents rely on static or offline critic models, which fail to adapt as the policy evolves. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a critique and a policy to optimize the policy and critic through a synchronized co-evolutionary loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields more stable training and higher long-horizon task success across open-world environments. |
VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, yet most remain English-centric . scaling multilingual multimodal instruction tuning is limited by the scarcity and high cost of non-English image–text supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment by composing complementary task vectors over a shared LLM backbone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with a fully multimodally trained model using less than 2% of the text data. |
What if Othello-Playing Language Models Could See? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a multi-modal model trained on move sequences and board images is a popular testbed for language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal model trained jointly on move sequences and board images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-modal model trains on move sequences and board images. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
Analyzing the Intensity of Complaints on Social Media (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies on identifying the existence or the type of complaints focus on building automatic classification models for identifying complaints. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure the intensity of complaints from text using Best-Worst Scaling method to estimate the popularity of posts on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can estimate the popularity of complaints on social media with best-worst scaling (BWS) method. |
DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications. |
EpiGEN: An Efficient Multi-Api Code GENeration Framework under Enterprise Scenario (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models fail to meet expectations for code generation tasks . existing approaches are faced with drawbacks of high resource consumption and inadequate handling of multi-API tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient multi-Api code GENeration framework that uses private APIs to pre-train LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows good acceptability and readability on single-GPU tasks compared to fully fine-tuned LLMs with a larger number of parameters. |
Adaptive Immune-based Sound-Shape Code Substitution for Adversarial Chinese Text Attacks (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text attack methods are designed for English text, but robust implementation of Chinese text is understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive immune-based sound-shape code algorithm for Chinese text attacks . they leverage the Sound-Shape Code to generate natural substitutions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm produces high-quality Chinese adversarial examples . it can reduce duplication of population and improve search ability . |
rSIM: Incentivizing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs via Reinforced Strategy Injection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature on Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) focuses on the ability to integrate reasoning strategies into the chain-of-thought process, contributing to improved problem-solving accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforced strategy injection mechanism that enables any LLM to become an RLM by employing a small planner to guide the LLM's CoT through the adaptive injection of reasoning strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in mathematical, coding, and financial reasoning tasks and is generalizable. |
MAmmoTH-VL: Eliciting Multimodal Reasoning with Instruction Tuning at Scale (2025.acl-long)
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Jiawei Guo, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yuelin Bai, Bo Li, Yubo Wang, King Zhu, Graham Neubig, Wenhu Chen, Xiang Yue
| Challenge: | Current instruction-tuning datasets focus on simplistic visual question answering tasks, and provide phrase-level answers without any intermediate rationales. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source multimodal large language models to train MLLMs on a dataset with 12M instruction-response pairs to elicit CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as MathVerse, MMMU-Pro, and MuirBench, and gains improvements of up to 4% on non-reasoning-based benchmarks. |
OVEL: Online Video Entity Linking (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Multi-modal Entity Linking focus on linking textual and visual mentions or offline videos’ mentions to entities in multi-modal knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Online Video Entity Linking to establish connections between online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can establish connections between mentions in online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
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Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks. |
Semantic Parsing with Dual Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to parse natural language queries are limited by lack of labeled data and constrained decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing framework with the dual learning algorithm that makes full use of data through a dual-learning game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on ATIS dataset and gets competitive performance on overnight dataset. |
Cultural Compass: Predicting Transfer Learning Success in Offensive Language Detection with Cultural Features (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current knowledge is limited on whether cultural features can predict cross-cultural transfer learning success for subjective tasks. |
| Approach: | They advocate integration of cultural information into datasets and cultural adaptability . findings suggest cultural features can predict cross-cultural transfer learning success . |
| Outcome: | The findings suggest that cultural features can predict cross-cultural transfer learning success in OLD tasks. |
Chain-of-Memory: Lightweight Memory Construction with Dynamic Evolution for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for large language model (LLM) agents use memory construction and retrieval-augmented generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that advocates for a paradigm shift toward lightweight construction paired with sophisticated utilization. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoM outperforms baselines with accuracy gains of 7.5%–10.4% while reducing computational overhead to approximately 2.7% of token consumption and 6.0% of latency compared to complex memory architectures. |
SpecVLM: Enhancing Speculative Decoding of Video LLMs via Verifier-Guided Token Pruning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Video large language models (Vid-LLMs) rely on dense video token representations and require substantial memory and computational overhead in both prefilling and decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free speculative decoding framework that prunes up to 90% of video tokens to enable efficient speculation without sacrificing accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 2.68 speedup on LLaVA-OneVision-72B and 2.11 speed up on Qwen2.5-VL-32B. |
Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph for Conditional Question Answering on Long Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conditional question answering on long documents ignore document structure and discourse relations between sentences in document sections. |
| Approach: | They construct a Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph and conduct bottom-up information propagation to address this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing methods on the conditional question answering on long documents by 3.0 EM score and 2.4 F1 score on answer measuring, and 2.2 EM and 1.9 F1 scores on jointly answer and condition measuring. |
Neural Mixed Counting Models for Dispersed Topic Discovery (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference of parameter parameters are time-consuming and difficult to use. |
| Approach: | They propose two efficient neural mixed counting models that use the negative binomial distribution as the prior for dispersed topic discovery. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models in terms of perplexity and topic coherence on real-world datasets. |
OSCBench: Benchmarking Object State Change in Text-to-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Xianjing Han, Bin Zhu, Shiqi Hu, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Patrick Carrington, Roger Zimmermann, Jingjing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on perceptual quality, text–video alignment, or physical plausibility, leaving a critical aspect of action understanding unexplored. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark specifically designed to assess OSC performance in T2V models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of open-source and proprietary T2V models on object state change (OSC) in the context of novel and compositional scenarios. |
Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Adapter (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for federated multilingual neural machine translation (Fed-MNMT) are limited in language resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that keeps PLMs frozen and only transfers lightweight adapter modules between clients. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces communication cost by over 98% while achieving similar or even better performance compared to baselines. |
PychoAgent: Psychology-driven LLM Agents for Explainable Panic Prediction on Social Media during Sudden Disaster Events (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mengzhu Liu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Chuan Ai, Chen Gao, Xinghong Li, Lingnan He, Kaisheng Lai, Yingfeng Chen, Xin Lu, Yong Li, Quanjun Yin
| Challenge: | Social media's rich information content and spatiotemporal granularity provide unique opportunities for emotion prediction and management. |
| Approach: | They propose a Psychology-driven generative Agent framework for explainable panic prediction based on emotion arousal theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves panic emotion prediction performance by 13% to 21% compared to baseline models. |
Improving Variational Autoencoder for Text Modelling with Timestep-Wise Regularisation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely used in text modelling but posterior collapse is a problem when RNN-based models are employed. |
| Approach: | They propose a timestep-wise regularisation VAE architecture which can effectively avoid posterior collapse when used in text modelling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model avoids posterior collapse and can be applied to any RNN-based VAE model. |
Few-shot Knowledge Graph Relational Reasoning via Subgraph Adaptation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict unseen triplets from knowledge graphs are limited by spurious information in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adapts contextualized graphs to subgraphs generated from support and query triplets to perform the prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts more comprehensive information from support triplets while minimizing spurious information when predicting query triplet. |
LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems are Scalable Graph Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiarui Ji, Runlin Lei, Jialing Bi, Zhewei Wei, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Xuchen Pan, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding
| Challenge: | Social graphs are mathematical structures stem from pairwise interactions between entities through nodes and edges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dynamic, text-attributed social graph generation that simulates the temporal node and edge generation processes for zero-shot social graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves macroscopic graph structure metrics by 11% . the proposed model can generate graphs with up to 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges . |
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Gao, Haotian Wu, Hong Chen, Junquan Huang, Yibo Yan, Jungang Li, Zihao Dongfang, Sicheng Tao, PS Tan, Jie Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing efficiency methods for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generate excessively long rationales without commensurate accuracy gains. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that operationalizes this principle through coarse-to-fine budgeting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GSM8K and MATH500 show that HAB surpasses standard CoT in accuracy and reduces token usage, achieving stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than baselines. |
Augmentation, Retrieval, Generation: Event Sequence Prediction with a Three-Stage Sequence-to-Sequence Approach (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict event sequences are complex and ignore the knowledge of external events. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical induction problem to generate a sequence of events by exploring the similarity between the given goal and known sequences of events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on an event sequence prediction task. |
Rethinking Document-level Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are weak enough for document-level translation . current models only translate sentences individually, resulting in poor document coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose to use the original Transformer model to test document-level neural machine translation . they find that the original transformer models can achieve strong results for document translation if trained properly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms sentence-level models on nine datasets and two sentence- level datasets across six languages. |
Teaching Small Language Models Reasoning through Counterfactual Distillation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual distillation framework that leverages LLMs to generate high-quality counterfacts and utilizes multi-view CoT to enhance the diversity of reasoning samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances reasoning capabilities of large language models and is more robust to OOD data. |
Exploring the Capability Boundaries of LLMs in Mastering of Chinese Chouxiang Language (2026.findings-acl)
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Dianqing Lin, Tian Lan, Jiali Zhu, Jiang Li, Wei Chen, Xu Liu, null Aruukhan, Xiangdong Su, Hongxu Hou, Guanglai Gao
| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit clear limitations on multiple tasks, while performing well on tasks that involve contextual semantic understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a mouse-based benchmark to evaluate LLMs' performance on NLP tasks involving Chouxiang Language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of LLMs on six NLP tasks involving Chouxiang Language. |
SafeMT: Multi-turn Safety for Multimodal Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Han Zhu, Juntao Dai, Jiaming Ji, Haoran Li, Chengkun Cai, Pengcheng Wen, Chi-Min Chan, Boyuan Chen, Yaodong Yang, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Multi-turn dialogues pose a greater risk than single prompts, but existing safety benchmarks do not account for this situation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features dialogues of varying lengths generated from harmful queries accompanied by images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces multi-turn Attack Success Rate (ASR) compared to existing guard models. |
Conditional Augmentation for Aspect Term Extraction via Masked Sequence-to-Sequence Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect term extraction is a task to extract aspect terms from review texts as opinion targets for sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional generation task for augmentation of aspect term extraction . they use a sequence-to-sequence method that generates a new sentence . results confirm that their method alleviates the data scarcity problem significantly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the data scarcity problem significantly and boosts current models. |
ElasticFlow: One-Step Physics-Consistent Policy with Elastic Time Horizons for Language-Guided Manipulation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embodied AI use iterative denoising to achieve high latency and lack physical consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation-free, physics-consistent one-step policy framework that reconstructs the Mean Field Theory by directly modeling the average velocity field. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LIBERO, CALVIN, and RoboTwin show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on long-horizon tasks. |
MMUIE: Massive Multi-Domain Universal Information Extraction for Long Documents (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level information extraction systems operate at the sentence level or within narrow domains due to annotation constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale universal dataset for multi-domain, document-level information extraction from long texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset integrates traditional knowledge bases with large language models to extract fine-grained entities, aliases, and relation triples across 34 domains. |
Ready Jurist One: Benchmarking Language Agents for Legal Intelligence in Dynamic Environments (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for legal intelligence are limited to static evaluation paradigms or simplified scenarios. |
| Approach: | They introduce J1-ENVS, the first interactive and dynamic legal environment tailored for LLM-based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses task performance and procedural compliance across legal proficiency levels. |
When "Correct" Is Not Safe: Can We Trust Functionally Correct Patches Generated by Code Agents? (2026.acl-long)
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Yibo Peng, James Song, Lei Li, Xinyu Yang, Mihai Christodorescu, Ravi Mangal, Corina S. Pasareanu, Haizhong Zheng, Beidi Chen
| Challenge: | Code agents are increasingly trusted to autonomously fix bugs on platforms such as GitHub, yet their security evaluation focuses on functional correctness. |
| Approach: | They propose to attack functionally correct yet vulnerable (FCV) patches by combining multi-turn reasoning with tool invocation and environment interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed FCV-Attack achieves an attack success rate of 40.7% on GPT-5 Mini + OpenHands. |
BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoliang Liu, Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Han Zhu, Shizhou Huang, Xinglin Zhang, Tao Chen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Zhang Huaping, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing information extraction (IE) tasks rely on in-context learning with large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based in-context learning framework that refines label representations across IE tasks using particle filtering and Bayes updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over existing methods (up to 30%) it underperforms one-shot prompting by a substantial margin on NER tasks and CodeIE fails on RE tasks with near-zero micro-F1. |
An Integrated Approach for Keyphrase Generation via Exploring the Power of Retrieval and Extraction (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods on keyphrase generation are purely extractive or generative . however, extractive methods cannot predict absent keyphrases which are not in the document. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that jointly learns an extractive model and a generative model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on five keyphrase generation tasks. |
Summarizing Chinese Medical Answer with Graph Convolution Networks and Question-focused Dual Attention (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate answer summarization for medical questions are not straightforward to apply to the medical domain. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that utilizes graph convolution networks and question-focused dual attention for Chinese medical answer summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more coherent and informative summaries compared with baseline models. |
Activation Steering Decoding: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models through Bidirectional Hidden State Intervention (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from hallucination where generated textual descriptions fail to align accurately with visual semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that mitigates hallucination through targeted intervention in the model’s intermediate activations by identifying directional patterns of hallucinism in the activation space using a small calibration set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucination across multiple benchmarks while maintaining performance on general visual understanding tasks. |
Hallucination Detection in Structured Query Generation via LLM Self-Debating (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Hallucination remains a key challenge in applying large language models to structured query generation . we propose the Self-Debating framework to enhance detection performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that prompts an LLM to generate contrastive explanations from opposing perspectives . they also propose 'self-debating' framework to enhance detection performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge baselines in hallucination detection . the framework generates contrastive explanations from opposing perspectives . |
Learning to Rank for Plausible Plausibility (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to encoding sentences using contextualized encoders are inconsistent . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a cross entropy log-loss objective to improve plausibility . they propose a margin-based loss leads to a more plausible model of plausability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed loss is intuitively wrong when applied to plausibility tasks . the proposed loss leads to a more plausible model of plausability . |
Unlocking Black-Box Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Zeroth-Order Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prompt optimization is an important technique for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a zeroth-order approach which enables efficient prompt tuning solely via inference APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing black-box prompt tuning methods in terms of performance and convergence speed. |
Memory-Efficient Differentiable Transformer Architecture Search (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current neural architecture search methods suffer from huge computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible recursive backpropagation algorithm that uses the last layer to store the outputs of the network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms standard Transformers on three sequence-to-sequence datasets. |
DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xu, Liankuan Tao, Haiyang Yu, Hongbin Ye, Shuofei Qiao, Xin Xie, Xiang Chen, Zhoubo Li, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge extraction tools are not complete due to emerging entities and relations in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE that supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the role of Large Language Models in combating misinformation, but there is still a lack of detailed analysis on the specific aspects and extent to which LLMs are influenced by misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' behavior and knowledge preference toward misinformation to identify their models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on 10,346,712 pieces of misinformation and examines knowledge conflicts and stylistic variations. |
PHMOSpell: Phonological and Morphological Knowledge Guided Chinese Spelling Check (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | False gram and phonological errors make Chinese spelling check difficult . a novel end-to-end trainable model outperforms existing methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a trainable Chinese spelling check model that integrates phonological and visual information into a pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
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. |
Knowledgeable Preference Alignment for LLMs in Domain-specific Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Domain-specific question answering (QA) requires a comprehensive understanding of a specific domain to answer specialized questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new alignment objective to align the LLM preference with different human preferences uniformly to optimize LLM performance in real-world, domain-specific QA settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline is superior for real-scenario domain-specific question answering with LLMs. |
End-to-End Unsupervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Referring Expression Matching (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised vision-and-language pre-training methods take pre-extracted region-based visual features from external object detectors, which limits flexibility and reduces computational efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised vision-and-language pre-training task that predicts which patches contain an object referred to in natural language from the encoded visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and obtains state-of-the-art results on four vision-and-language tasks. |
MEDSYN: Benchmarking Multi-EviDence SYNthesis in Complex Clinical Cases for Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Boqi Chen, Xudong Liu, Jiachuan Peng, Marianne Frey-Marti, Kyle Lam, Bang Zheng, Lin Li, Jianing Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal large language models do not capture real-world clinical complexity. |
| Approach: | They evaluate multilingual, multimodal multimodal models of clinical cases with up to 7 distinct visual clinical evidence types per case. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human models on differential diagnosis (DDx) generation and final diagnosis (FDx) selection. |
Better Red Teaming via Searching with Large Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating large language models face challenges in managing semantic intricacies and optimizing the efficiency of the search process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconceptualizes test case generation as a strategic planning problem, leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a range of LLM architectures show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates without sacrificing computational efficiency. |
BubbleRAG: Interactive Cognitive Offloading with Thought Bubble in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing access to external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that emulates human interactive reading through annotation and re-reading by integrating a thought bubble module that offloads internal cognition into external bookmark tokens, which are then annotated back into the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offloads internal cognition into external bookmark tokens, which are then annotated back into the context. |
Deep Learning on Graphs for Natural Language Processing (2021.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for non-Euclidean data modeling and are used in many graph-related NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will cover applying deep learning on graph techniques to NLP using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) Graph4NLP is the first library for researchers and practitioners for easy use of GNNs for various NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will cover the latest developments in deep learning on graph techniques and their applications in various NLP tasks. |
Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yunzhi Yao, Peng Wang, Bozhong Tian, Siyuan Cheng, Zhoubo Li, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in model editing for LLMs have created challenges and opportunities for the community. |
| Approach: | They propose to alter the behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alters behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
Boundary-Driven Table-Filling for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on extracting aspect terms and opinion terms without considering the relations between aspect terms . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to extract aspect terms, opinion terms, and expressed sentiments from a two-dimensional (2D) table. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on several public benchmarks and is well-suited to the ASTE task. |
BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing text summarization datasets are compiled from news articles, where summary-worthy content often appears in the beginning of input articles. |
| Approach: | They present a novel dataset, BIGPATENT, consisting of 1.3 million records of U.S. patent documents along with human written abstractive summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is compared with existing summarization datasets and demonstrates that salient content is evenly distributed in the input. |
OMIBench: Benchmarking Olympiad-Level Multi-Image Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Qiguang Chen, Chengyu Luan, Jiajun Wu, Qiming Yu, Yi Yang, Yizhuo Li, Jingqi Tong, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks for large vision-language models emphasize single-image analysis and fail to exploit contextual information across multiple images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Olympiad-level reasoning when evidence is distributed over multiple images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on bi-image Olympiads and Gemini-3-Pro on multimodal Olympiad-level reasoning tasks. |
Dialogue Summarization with Static-Dynamic Structure Fusion Graph (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue summarization is a challenging task since it has dynamic interaction nature and inconsistent information flow among various speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a Static-Dynamic graph-based Dialogue Summarization model which fuses prior knowledge from human expertise and adaptively learns the graph structure in an end-to-end learning fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can help people capture the highlights of a semi-structured and multi-participant dialogue without reviewing the complex dialogue context. |
Task-Aware Resolution Optimization for Visual Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual large language models pre-assume a fixed resolution for downstream tasks, leading to sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a formula to determine the optimal resolution for a given vision-language task . they then propose 'parameter-efficient' fine-tuning technique to extend the visual input resolution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on rigorous experiments on vision-language tasks. |
Is the Attention Matrix Really the Key to Self-Attention in Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In multivariate long-term time series forecasting, it is widely believed that the effectiveness of self-attention arises from its attention matrix. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch MLP that isolates the ‘multi-brain mapping with element-wise operation’ structure from the Transformer and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms three classic and three latest Transformer models and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models lack textual information, which limits their performance . a plug-in-and-play approach is needed to train small models in descriptive context . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in-and-play approach to knowledge graph completion that prompts LLMs to generate descriptive context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on Wikipedia articles and synset definitions. |
Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Text Classification Using Latent Space Geometry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on predictive shortcuts that hold in training data but break under distribution shifts, leading to large performance drops for minority groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms abstract biases into interpretable geometric anchors without auxiliary classifiers by manipulating latent space geometry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and improves worst-group accuracy by over 20% on the CivilComments dataset. |
MMEKG: Multi-modal Event Knowledge Graph towards Universal Representation across Modalities (2022.acl-demo)
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Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Mukai Li, Yixin Cao, Meiqi Chen, Xinze Li, Wenqi Sun, Kunquan Deng, Kun Wang, Aixin Sun, Jing Shao
| Challenge: | Recent Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store billions of world facts in a directed graph, but expression ability of such entity-centric KGs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multi-modal event knowledge graph named MMEKG that unifies different modalities of knowledge via events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system unifies different modalities of knowledge via events, which complement and disambiguate each other. |
Selective Reflection-Tuning: Student-Selected Data Recycling for LLM Instruction-Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Instruction tuning is critical to large language models but its success heavily relies on the training data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that synergizes a teacher LLM’s reflection and introspection with the data selection capability of the student LLM to automatically refine existing instruction-tuning data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much stronger and top-tier 7B and 13B LLMs without collecting brand-new data. |
INarIG: Iterative Non-autoregressive Instruct Generation Model For Word-Level Auto Completion (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for word-level autocompletion (WLAC) only use human typed sequences as prefixes in decoding module. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel iterative nonautoregressive instruct generation model for WLAC task . it uses human typed sequences and iterating decoding with subwords to fully utilize input information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more competent in dealing with low-frequency words, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the WMT22 and benchmark datasets. |
VideoQA-TA: Temporal-Aware Multi-Modal Video Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video question answering align visual or textual features directly with large language models, limiting the deep semantic association between modalities and hindering a comprehensive understanding of interactions within spatial and temporal contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-aware framework for multi-modal video question answering that aligns videos and questions at fine-grained levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reasoning ability and accuracy of videoQA by aligning videos and questions at fine-grained levels. |
Reimagining Safety Alignment with An Image (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models face inefficiency, fragility, or architectural constraints, resulting in inefficient performance and heightened over-refusal in cross-modal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimization-driven visual prompt framework that enhances security and reduces over-refusal at the same time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances security and reduces over-refusal while maintaining robust safety while reducing unnecessary denials. |
Efficient Context and Schema Fusion Networks for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to track dialogue state are limited due to data sparsity and long dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the previous dialogue state and current dialogue utterance as input for DST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and improves existing ones. |
MPrompt: Exploring Multi-level Prompt Tuning for Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing soft prompt methods focus on designing the input-independent prompts that steer the model to fit the domain of the new dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level prompt tuning method that utilizes prompts at task-specific, domain-specific and context-specific levels to enhance the comprehension of input semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 12 benchmarks on various QA formats and achieves an average improvement of 1.94% over the state-of-the-art methods. |
ChipSeek: Optimizing Verilog Generation via EDA-Integrated Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhirong Chen, Kaiyan Chang, Zhuolin Li, Cangyuan Li, Xinyang He, Chujie Chen, Mengdi Wang, Haobo Xu, Yinhe Han, Huawei Li, Ying Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code fail to simultaneously optimize functional correctness and hardware efficiency metrics such as Power, Performance, and Area (PPA). |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework that integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a reward mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework. |
Can LLMs be Good Graph Judge for Knowledge Graph Construction? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for converting unstructured text into structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have limitations such as large amount of noise, inaccurate knowledge, and hallucination . |
| Approach: | They propose a GraphJudge framework to reduce noise in real-world documents . they propose Graphjudge to fine-tune a LLM as a graph judge to enhance quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework eliminates noise in real-world documents and improves the quality of generated KGs. |
Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) are slow and cumbersome, resulting in catastrophic knowledge forgetting and degradation of model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method that converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM’s input query embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining the overall performance of the model. |
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. |
Joint Learning for Emotion Classification and Emotion Cause Detection (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a unified framework, we propose a joint approach for emotion classification and emotion cause detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network-based joint approach for emotion classification and emotion cause detection which captures mutual benefits across the two sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can capture mutual benefits across two sub-tasks on Chinese microblogs. |
Measuring Meaning Composition in the Human Brain with Composition Scores from Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing computational metric to quantify extent of meaning composition is lacking . despite extensive neurolinguistic research, understanding how meaning is constructed is difficult . |
| Approach: | They propose a computational metric to quantify the degree of meaning composition . they use key-value memory interpretation of transformer feed-forward network blocks to study meaning composition. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the metric correlates with brain clusters associated with word frequency, structural processing, and general sensitivity to words, suggesting multifaceted nature of meaning composition during human sentence comprehension. |
SpeechIQ: Speech-Agentic Intelligence Quotient Across Cognitive Levels in Voice Understanding by Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Yahan Yu, Jinchuan Tian, Sheng Li, Ke Hu, Zhehuai Chen, Shinji Watanabe, Fei Cheng, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | SIQ quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Approach: | They propose a human cognition-inspired evaluation pipeline for voice understanding large language models (LLM_Voice) that quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models, identifies annotation errors in existing benchmarks, and detects hallucinations in LLM_Voice. |
Refining Sentence Embedding Model through Ranking Sentences Generation with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sentence embedding is essential for many NLP tasks, but reliance on manual labels limits scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for controlling the generation direction of large language models in the latent space by integrating ranking information and semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves new SOTA performance with a modest cost in ranking sentence synthesis. |
VisualEDU: A Benchmark for Assessing Coding and Visual Comprehension through Educational Problem-Solving Video Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | VisualEDU is a benchmark to evaluate VLMs' ability to produce coherent video from text . advanced proprietary models show promise, but struggle with increasing task complexity . |
| Approach: | VisualEDU is a benchmark to evaluate VLMs' ability to produce coherent video from text . it integrates meta-prompt learning, visual and code feedback, and a drawing toolkit to enhance output quality. |
| Outcome: | VisualEDU is a benchmark to evaluate VLMs' ability to produce coherent video from text . it integrates meta-prompt learning, visual and code feedback, and a drawing toolkit to improve output quality. |
Unveiling Inherent Visual Grounding in Multimodal LLMs for Text-Rich Images (2026.findings-acl)
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Shijie Zhou, Jihyung Kil, Ming Li, Jiuxiang Gu, Curtis Wigington, Rajiv Jain, Changyou Chen, Ruiyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language model (MLLM) approaches struggle to align query tokens with visual–text patches, heavily relying on lengthy OCR inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an OCR-free approach that leverages the MLLM's inherent multi-head attention for multi-patch grounding. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on challenging document grounding benchmarks. |
Pruning via Merging: Compressing LLMs via Manifold Alignment Based Layer Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
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Deyuan Liu, Zhanyue Qin, Hairu Wang, Zhao Yang, Zecheng Wang, Fangying Rong, Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Bo Li, Xi Chen, Cunhang Fan, Zhao Lv, Dianhui Chu, Zhiying Tu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter pruning fail to utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck measure to merge similar layers to preserve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pruning methods on multiple datasets and LLMs with quantization and achieves substantial compression ratios. |
CITADEL: Conditional Token Interaction via Dynamic Lexical Routing for Efficient and Effective Multi-Vector Retrieval (2023.acl-long)
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Minghan Li, Sheng-Chieh Lin, Barlas Oguz, Asish Ghoshal, Jimmy Lin, Yashar Mehdad, Wen-tau Yih, Xilun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing multi-vector retrieval methods are slower and require more space to store indices compared to their single-vektor counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-vector retrieval method that uses dynamic lexical routing to route different token vectors to the predicted lexicals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets while being nearly 40 times faster than the current state-out-of the-art method. |
Beyond Templates: Dynamic Adaptation of Reasoning Demonstrations via Feasibility-Aware Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning datasets that are designed for powerful LLMs often lead to degraded performance when directly applied to weaker models. |
| Approach: | They propose a data adaptation framework that bridges the capability gap between expert reasoning trajectories and diverse SLMs by employing a selective imitation strategy guided by step-wise adaptability estimation via solution simulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and data efficiency over static fine-tuning and can be applied to large models with limited model capacity. |
LM2Protein: A Structure-to-Token Protein Large Language Model (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins are critical for various molecular functions, relying on their precise tertiary structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate protein 3D structural data within a sequence processing framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high sequence recovery in inverse folding and protein-conditioned RNA design. |
Dynamic Model-Bank Test-Time Adaptation for Automatic Speech Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing ASR TTA methods struggle with instability under continual and long-term distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a continuous adaptive model-bank framework that adapts to domain shifts in ASR test-time scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse, continuously shifting ASR benchmarks show that DMSUTA outperforms existing continual TTA baselines. |
AutoPRM: Automating Procedural Supervision for Multi-Step Reasoning via Controllable Question Decomposition (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in multi-step reasoning tasks, yet relying on extensive manual labeling to provide procedural feedback remains a significant impediment. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised framework that decomposes complex problems into manageable subquestions with a controllable granularity switch and sequentially applies reinforcement learning to iteratively improve the subquest solver. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks over SOTA. |
Specialization through Collaboration: Understanding Expert Interaction in Mixture-of-Expert Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models are popular for multitasking . however, whether each expert can specialize to a task remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dictionary learning approach to analyze expert collaboration mechanisms in MoE LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by 2.5% while enabling 50% expert reduction. |
LongReD: Mitigating Short-Text Degradation of Long-Context Large Language Models via Restoration Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have extended context windows through scaling positional encodings and lightweight continual pre-training, but performance degradation is still not fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to reduce short-text performance degradation by minimizing distribution drift in hidden states and attention scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes the distribution discrepancy between the extended and original models while maintaining or even enhancing the model's long-context abilities. |
C3KG: A Chinese Commonsense Conversation Knowledge Graph (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense knowledge bases organize tuples in an isolated manner, causing problems for chatbots . |
| Approach: | They create a Chinese commonsense conversation knowledge graph which integrates social commonsensm and dialog flow information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph incorporates social commonsense knowledge and dialog flow information. |
NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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Ruisheng Cao, Hanchong Zhang, Tiancheng Huang, Zhangyi Kang, Yuxin Zhang, Liangtai Sun, Hanqi Li, Yuxun Miao, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets . |
BOLT: Benchmarking Open-World Learning for Text Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on out-of-distribution (OOD) detection while overlooking broader challenges such as the discovery of novel categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified Benchmark and evaluation toolkit supporting Open-world learning for text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods overfit training distributions and struggle to generalize to unseen classes. |
RGL: A Simple yet Effective Relation Graph Augmented Prompt-based Tuning Approach for Few-Shot Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are a good starting point for downstream applications, but it is difficult to generalize them to new tasks given a few labeled samples. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Relation Graph augmented learning to improve the performance of few-shot natural language understanding tasks by rewriting the input sequence into a cloze question with masks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that Relation Graph augmented learning (RGL) improves performance of prompt-based tuning strategies. |
A Structure-Aware Argument Encoder for Literature Discourse Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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Yinzi Li, Wei Chen, Zhongyu Wei, Yujun Huang, Chujun Wang, Siyuan Wang, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Libo Wu
| Challenge: | Existing research for argument representation learning treats tokens in sentences equally and ignores the implied structure information of argumentative context. |
| Approach: | They propose to separate tokens into two groups to capture structural information of arguments and to incorporate paragraph-level position information into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures structural information of arguments and is able to identify arguments automatically. |
EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing empathetic dialogue models lack emotion-dependent response generation . elaine mccartney: "i'm sorry to hear that! " |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent intents . they aim to address the bias of the empathic intent distribution between epd models and humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of empathy, relevance, and diversity on automatic and human evaluation. |
MTOP: A Comprehensive Multilingual Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing Benchmark (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for task-oriented dialog systems are limited and expensive . current models are based on the simple intent and slot detection paradigm for non-compositional queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual dataset to scale semantic parsing models to new languages . they demonstrate an average improvement of +6.3 points on Slot F1 for existing datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average improvement of +6.3 points on Slot F1 over existing models. |
Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Bang Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Qingxuan Jiang, Peisong Wang, Jiaqi Chen, Zheng Xie, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Yifan Yang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have evolved from statistical sequence predictors to sophisticated autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and sustaining multi-turn conversa-tions. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that instantiates a "Sentient Agent" that simulates human-like emotional changes and inner thoughts to provide a more realistic evaluation of the model in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures the agent's higher-order social cognition in multi-turn conversations. |
BPO: Towards Balanced Preference Optimization between Knowledge Breadth and Depth in Alignment (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is the key to the success of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to balance the number of prompts and responses to improve knowledge breadth and knowledge depth by introducing gradient-based clustering to estimate the knowledge informativeness and usefulness of each augmented sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods while maintaining training efficiency. |
Multi-Scale Prompt Memory-Augmented Model for Black-Box Scenarios (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot text classification require numerous LMs’ calls to search optimal prompts, thus resulting in overfitting performance and increasing computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale knowledge prompt-based memory model that extracts instance-level and class-level knowledge and stores them in memory banks during training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on different benchmarks and parameter analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MuSKPrompt in black-box few-shot text classification tasks. |
UniGeo: Unifying Geometry Logical Reasoning via Reformulating Mathematical Expression (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on geometry problem solving treats calculation and proving as two specific tasks hindering a deep model to unify reasoning ability on multiple math tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Unified Geometry problem benchmark to unify geometry on multiple math tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing model with 5.6% and 3.2% accuracies on calculation and proving problems. |
Think Faster Than Words: Efficient LLM Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Dynamic Shortcut Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that prune or employ early stopping to reduce latency often compromise reasoning reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a shortcut decoding framework that integrates probes over internal hidden states with step-level entropy to detect convergence of reasoning during generation and adaptively selects between a fast-exit path and a stability-verified path to remove redundant steps while preserving answer correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by approximately 35% and maintains accuracy comparable to full CoT decoding. |
Data Augmentation using LLMs: Data Perspectives, Learning Paradigms and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
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Bosheng Ding, Chengwei Qin, Ruochen Zhao, Tianze Luo, Xinze Li, Guizhen Chen, Wenhan Xia, Junjie Hu, Anh Tuan Luu, Shafiq Joty
| Challenge: | Data augmentation (DA) is a key technique for enhancing model performance by diversifying training examples without the need for additional data collection. |
| Approach: | They examine various strategies that utilize LLMs for data augmentation, including a novel exploration of learning paradigms where LLM-generated data is used for diverse forms of further training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach addresses the primary open challenges faced by LLMs in the field of large language models and aims to serve as a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners. |
Language-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Rui Qi, Fengran Mo, Yufeng Chen, Xue Zhang, Shuo Wang, Hongliang Li, Xu Jinan, Meng Jiang, Jian-Yun Nie, Kaiyu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (MRAG) use a single-turn retrieval and subsequent optimization to acquire and integrate beneficial external knowledge from multilingual collections. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual search-augmented reinforcement learning framework that integrates a language-coupled Group Relative Policy Optimization into the policy and reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance and is appropriate for various practical scenarios such as constrained training data and retrieval over collections encompassing a large number of languages. |
Datamart-Agent: LLM-Driven Game-Theoretic Agent for Data Marketplace Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on data marketplaces model static equilibria and complete information, which limits their realism. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven game-theoretic agent that makes equilibrium-consistent decisions in analytically tractable data marketplaces with evolving and incomplete-information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches equilibrium-consistent decision execution in a static data marketplace with a dynamic game tree memory and mechanism-guided reflection without updating parameters. |
Learning from Diverse Reasoning Paths with Routing and Collaboration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) grows with model size and pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine quality filtering, conditional routing, and cooperative peer teaching to transfer knowledge from powerful teacher models to compact and transparent students. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that QR-Distill is superior to traditional methods. |
ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large pre-trained language models have brought the NLP field into a new era. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset to study the chain of numerical reasoning in conversational question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset should push forward the exploration of real-world, complex reasoning tasks as the next research focus. |
To What Extent Do Natural Language Understanding Datasets Correlate to Logical Reasoning? A Method for Diagnosing Logical Reasoning. (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning and knowledge-related skills are considered as fundamental skills for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to diagnose correlations between an NLU dataset and a specific skill. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to diagnose correlations between dataset and logical reasoning skill on 8 MRC and 3 NLI datasets. |
Task-Aware LLM Routing with Multi-Level Task-Profile-Guided Data Synthesis for Cold-Start Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing routers generalize poorly in cold-start scenarios where in-domain training data is unavailable. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-type–aware router approach that models query-conditioned cost and performance via latent task-like variables with prior regularization derived from the synthesized task taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and cost under cold-start and in-domain settings and enables efficient routing. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3. |
From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Liangjie Huang, Alimohammad Beigi, Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Yuxuan Jiang, Canyu Chen, Tianhao Wu, Kai Shu, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) inspire the "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm . traditional methods of assessment and evaluation fail in dynamic and open-ended scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm where LLMs are leveraged to perform scoring, ranking, or selection for machine learning evaluation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based judgment and evaluation paradigms are based on large language models and are compared to the current model-driven evaluation paradigm. |
TransCoder: Towards Unified Transferable Code Representation Learning Inspired by Human Skills (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune code intelligence models to individual tasks are costly and require large data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transferable fine-tuning strategy for Code representation learning that uses a tunable prefix encoder to capture cross-task and cross-language transferable knowledge and apply it to downstream adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can lead to superior performance on code-related tasks and encourage mutual reinforcement. |
UBench: Benchmarking Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Multiple Choice Questions (2025.findings-acl)
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Xunzhi Wang, Zhuowei Zhang, Gaonan Chen, Qiongyu Li, Bitong Luo, Zhixin Han, Haotian Wang, Zhiyu Li, Hang Gao, Mengting Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for benchmarking the uncertainty of large language models face challenges . existing methods require internal model access, additional training, or high computational costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark for evaluating the uncertainty of large language models based on confidence intervals . UBench encompasses 11,978 multiple choice questions spanning knowledge, language, understanding, and reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for benchmarking the uncertainty of large language models. |
DRAGON: Domain-specific Robust Automatic Data Generation for RAG Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)
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Haiyang Shen, Hang Yan, Zhongshi Xing, Mugeng Liu, Yue Li, Zhiyang Chen, Yuxiang Wang, Jiuzheng Wang, Yun Ma
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation paradigms rely heavily on public knowledge . Existing RAGs reliant on public information and often falter when faced with domain-specific queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines a data-construction modeling approach with a scalable synthetic data-generation pipeline to optimize domain-specific retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework optimizes domain-specific retrieval performance and bolsters retriever robustness. |
From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Xiao Li, Yadong Wei, null Songxueyu, Yang Song, null Xiaxiaoqiang, Fangrui Zeng, Zaiyi Chen, null Liuliu, Gu Xu, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video editing rely on textual cues from ASR transcripts and segment selection, often neglecting rich visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-inspired automatic video editing framework that leverages multimodal narrative understanding to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines across general and advertisement-oriented editing tasks. |
How to Determine the Most Powerful Pre-trained Language Model without Brute Force Fine-tuning? An Empirical Survey (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Transferability estimation has been a topic of great interest in computer vision fields . a lack of a comprehensive comparison between these estimation methods is a problem . |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough survey of existing methods to find the most suitable model . they also outline difficulties of consideration of training details and applicability to text generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well with superiorities in effectiveness and efficiency. |
Red-Teaming NSFW Image Classifiers as Text-to-Image Safeguards (2026.findings-acl)
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Tinghao Xie, Yueqi Xie, Alireza Zareian, Shuming Hu, Felix Juefei-Xu, Xiaowen Lin, Ankit Jain, Prateek Mittal, Li Chen
| Challenge: | Not Safe for Work (NSFW) image classifiers play a critical role in safeguarding text-to-image systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated red-teaming framework that leverages a set of generative AI tools to uncover NSFW image failures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework uncovers and interprets failure modes and enables it to be applied to real-world T2I and T2V systems. |
Stylized Dialogue Generation with Feature-Guided Knowledge Augmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods synthesize pseudo data through back translation but lack guidance on target style features. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-augmented stylized dialogue generation model with a feature-guided style knowledge selection module that utilizes context and response features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces a satisfactory performance on two public benchmarks on both semantic and stylized levels. |
DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) enabled dialogue systems are one of the central modes in human-machine interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark task for dialogue element MOdeling and Element Awareness and a new benchmark for dialogue agent interaction that allows the agent to model dialogue elements via imitation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs well in both dialogue element modeling and out-of-domain tasks. |
OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, but their ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces by combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework emulates human-like cognitive adaptation and operates via a general perception–memory–reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback. |
INFORM : Information eNtropy based multi-step reasoning FOR large language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance with dedicated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method by introducing information entropy as a criteria on for CoT prompt selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on seven reasoning benchmarks using two language models. |
ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Chen, Yukun Yan, Sen Mei, Wanxiang Che, Zhenghao Liu, Qi Shi, Xinze Li, Yuchun Fan, Pengcheng Huang, Qiushi Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RAG systems often underutilize the retrieved documents, authors say . they fail to extract and integrate key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning . |
| Approach: | a new framework extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths . the framework optimizes the model by selecting the most appropriate reasoning path . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ClueAnchor outperforms baseline RAG frameworks in completeness and robustness. |
LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zhaoyan Guo, Chenxu Wang, Shengji Tang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Yang Chen, Biqing Qi, Peng Ye, Lei Bai, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the best suitable model from an ensemble. |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing . they find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented and performance-cost trade-off routing. |
Multi-Document Summarization with Determinantal Point Processes and Contextualized Representations (D19-54)
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| Challenge: | Determinantal point processes (DPP) is one of the best performing techniques for extractive summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine determinantal point processes with surface indicators for effective identification of summary-worthy sentences. |
| Outcome: | The determinantal point processes (DPP) framework is one of the best performing in summarization competitions. |
Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q: Robust Planning for Dialogue Policy Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the effectiveness and robustness of Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ) are based on a discriminator to control the quality of simulated experiences and to improve learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an RNN-based discriminator to control the quality of simulated experience to improve the effectiveness and robustness of Deep Dyna-Q. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms DDQ by controlling the quality of simulated experience used for planning. |
Chain-of-Thought Tuning: Masked Language Models can also Think Step By Step in Natural Language Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides large language models to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-step reasoning framework based on prompt tuning to implement step-by-step thinking for MLMs on NLU tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two NLU tasks. |
Transferring Textual Preferences to Vision-Language Understanding through Model Merging (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) perform outstandingly across multimodal tasks, but training them with preference data is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to merge text-based reward models with LVLMs to create visionlanguage reward models (VLRMs) this approach offers an efficient method for incorporating textual preferences into LVRMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over LVLMs’ scoring and text-based RMs, and offers an efficient method for incorporating textual preferences into LVRMs. |
MultiConIR: Towards Multi-Condition Information Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xuan Lu, Sifan Liu, Bochao Yin, Yongqi Li, Xinghao Chen, Hui Su, Yaohui Jin, Wenjun Zeng, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | MultiConIR is a benchmark designed to evaluate retrieval and reranking models under nuanced multi-condition query scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate retrieval and reranking models under nuanced multi-condition query scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates retrieval and reranking models under nuanced multi-condition query scenarios across five domains. |
CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Haotian Xu, Yue Hu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Chen Gao, Ziyou Wang, Junreng Rao, Wenhao Lu, Weishi Li, Quanjun Yin, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on indoor or street settings, overlooking challenges of open-ended urban spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to probe cross-view spatial reasoning capabilities of current VLMs in urban settings. |
| Outcome: | The citycube benchmark examines the performance of current vision-language models in urban environments. |
Wizard of Shopping: Target-Oriented E-commerce Dialogue Generation with Decision Tree Branching (2025.acl-long)
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Xiangci Li, Zhiyu Chen, Jason Ingyu Choi, Nikhita Vedula, Besnik Fetahu, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi
| Challenge: | Prior human-annotated CPS datasets are small in size and lack integration with real-world product search systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate target-oriented shopping conversations without human annotations by using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves highly natural and coherent conversations from three shopping domains and significantly improves on human evaluations and downstream tasks. |
Listen Again and Choose the Right Answer: A New Paradigm for Automatic Speech Recognition with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have promoted generative error correction (GER) for automatic speech recognition (ASR). |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal LLM to receive source speech as extra input and reformat it as a cloze test with logits calibration to remove input information redundancy and simplify GER with clear instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 9 popular ASR datasets and is faster than vanilla GER. |
A Unified Sequence Labeling Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for emotion-cause pair extraction cannot distinguish emotion-caused pairs from each other . Existing approaches may suffer from possible cascading errors . |
| Approach: | They propose to assign emotion type labels to emotion and cause clauses so that they can be easily distinguished. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can extract multiple emotion-cause pairs in an end-to-end fashion. |
SWE-QA-Pro: A Representative Benchmark and Scalable Training Recipe for Repository-Level Code Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Songcheng Cai, Zhiheng Lyu, Yuansheng Ni, Xiangchao Chen, Baichuan Zhou, Shenzhe Zhu, Yi Lu, Haozhe Wang, Chi Ruan, Benjamin Schneider, Weixu Zhang, Xiang Li, Andy Zheng, Yuyu Zhang, Ping Nie, Wenhu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic repository-level code understanding overlook long tail topics and rely on memorized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level agentic code understanding benchmark that uses long-tail repositories with executable environments to enforce topical balance. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, a Qwen3-8B model trained with the proposed benchmark outperforms GPT-4o by 2.3 points. |
Fortify the Shortest Stave in Attention: Enhancing Context Awareness of Large Language Models for Effective Tool Use (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that compensates an attention trough with an attention peak by a process to enhance the model's awareness to various contextual positions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of a 7B model on the largest tool-use benchmark, comparable to that of GPT-4. |
ChatGPT Doesn’t Trust Chargers Fans: Guardrail Sensitivity in Context (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work addresses the limitations of chatbot guardrails, which limit responses to uncertain or sensitive questions. |
| Approach: | They generate user biographies that offer ideological and demographic information about the user. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can infer a likely political ideology and modify guardrail behavior accordingly. |
A Two-phase Prototypical Network Model for Incremental Few-shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised and distantly supervised RC models ignore the emergence of novel relations in open environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase prototypical network with prototype attention alignment and triplet loss to dynamically recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model performs better on deep learning and few-shot learning . it can recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting . |
TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on video large language models lack a comprehensive feedback on temporal perception ability . current models cannot distinguish between different temporal aspects and are limited in task formats . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate temporal perception ability of video large language models . they construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that video large language models exhibit poor temporal perception ability. |
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude. |
Generative Reward Modeling via Synthetic Criteria Preference Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generative Reward Models (GenRMs) leverage synthesized Chains of Thought (CoT) but this approach introduces risks of overoptimization due to the inability to guarantee the correctness of the CoTs. |
| Approach: | They propose a criteria-based preference tree for GenRMs that uses chain of thought to generate reasoning . they show that synthesized data can be learned using a long CoT format . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows significant improvements over baselines on multiple human preference benchmarks. |
Jointly Identifying Rhetoric and Implicit Emotions via Multi-Task Learning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results validate the benefit of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art baselines for rhetoric and emotion identification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that can encode categorical correlation between tasks to improve rhetoric and emotion identification problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode the categorical correlation between tasks to improve rhetoric and emotion identification problem. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xukai Wang, Xuanbo Liu, Mingrui Chen, Haitian Zhong, Xuanlin Yang, Bohan Zeng, Jinbo Hu, Hao Liang, Junbo Niu, Xuchen Li, Ruitao Wu, Ruichuan An, Yang Shi, Liu Liu, Qiang Liu, Zhouchen Lin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Dong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models are limited in scope and lack flexibility to adapt difficulty according to evolving reasoning capacities of models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
Mosaic-IT: Cost-Free Compositional Data Synthesis for Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current instruction tuning relies on teacher models or human intervention to generate and refine the instructions and responses for training, which are costly, non-sustainable, and may lack diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a human/model-free compositional data synthesis method that can create rich and diverse augmentations from existing instruction tuning data to enhance large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance over benchmarks and reduces training costs by 80% compared with original instruction tuning. |
Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight (2026.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Bingxuan Li, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Bingxiang He, Qinyu Luo, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Generative world models could be used to enhance agents' cognition . agents are expected to operate in settings where tasks unfold over long horizons and involve intricate chains of interdependent decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models as external simulators to enhance cognition . they find that agents rarely invoke simulation and misuse predicted rollouts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could be used to predict future states rather than short-horizon reasoning . the model could also be used for real-world planning and robotics . |
MobiLoRA: Accelerating LoRA-based LLM Inference on Mobile Devices via Context-aware KV Cache Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MobiLoRA focuses on optimizing the key-value (KV) caches due to the limited computing and memory resources of mobile devices. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize the key-value caches due to limited computing resources . they propose similarity-aware delta encoding for semantic-level contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model accelerates LoRA-based LLM inference by 57.6% on mobile devices. |
READoc: A Unified Benchmark for Realistic Document Structured Extraction (2025.findings-acl)
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Zichao Li, Aizier Abulaiti, Yaojie Lu, Xuanang Chen, Jia Zheng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Document Structured Extraction (DSE) is a field of document structure analysis that aims to extract structured content from raw documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate document structured extraction systems by converting unstructured PDFs into semantically rich Markdown. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on 3,576 diverse and real-world documents from arXiv, GitHub, and Zenodo. |
Paraphrase Makes Perfect: Leveraging Expression Paraphrase to Improve Implicit Sentiment Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing implicit sentiment learning methods focus on capturing implicit sentiment knowledge individually, without considering the potential connection between implicit and explicit sentiment. |
| Approach: | They propose an expression paraphrase strategy and a sentiment-consistent contrastive learning mechanism to learn the connections between implicit and explicit sentiment expressions and integrate them into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective on implicit sentiment analysis on public datasets. |
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. |
InMind: Evaluating LLMs in Capturing and Applying Individual Human Reasoning Styles (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Qi Chen, Diping Song, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities across complex mathematical and scientific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess whether LLMs can capture and apply personalized reasoning styles in social deduction games. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs on the game Avalon and shows that they can capture and apply individualized reasoning styles. |
DnA-Eval: Enhancing Large Language Model Evaluation through Decomposition and Aggregation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are scalable and economical evaluators, but how reliable they are is still under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which breaks down the evaluation process into decomposition and aggregation stages based on pedagogical practices and provides an interpretable window for how well LLMs evaluate . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on a variety of meta-evaluation benchmarks by providing an interpretable window for how well LLMs evaluate . |
How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks . however, they struggle with knowledge updates due to dynamic nature of world knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose to identify computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing . they also identify a phase shift from formation to optimization in LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture factual knowledge from pre-training corpus and encapsulate it as extensive parametric knowledge. |
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. |
Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) encoders lack global context representation, whereas MT encoder lacks it. |
| Approach: | They propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding method for speech translation . they propose an adaptor module to alleviate representation inconsistency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2 on two ST tasks. |
MFinMeeting: A Multilingual, Multi-Sector, and Multi-Task Financial Meeting Understanding Evaluation Dataset (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing financial benchmarks rely on news articles, earnings reports, or announcements, making it challenging to capture the real-world dynamics of financial meetings. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual, multi-sector, and multi-task dataset called MFinMeeting that supports English, Chinese, and Japanese . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark supports English, Chinese, and Japanese, enhancing comprehension of financial discussions in diverse linguistic contexts. |
MiCEval: Unveiling Multimodal Chain of Thought’s Quality via Image Description and Reasoning Steps (2025.naacl-long)
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Xiongtao Zhou, Jie He, Lanyu Chen, Jingyu Li, Haojing Chen, Victor Gutierrez Basulto, Jeff Z. Pan, Hanjie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the quality of reasoning steps in multimodal chain-of-thought are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the correctness of reasoning chains by evaluating the quality of both the description and each reasoning step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves interpretability and human judgments on four state-of-the-art MLLMs. |
Understanding User Resistance Strategies in Persuasive Conversations (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Persuasive dialog systems have various usages, such as donation persuation and physical exercise persulasion. |
| Approach: | They adopt a preliminary framework on persuasion resistance in psychology and build a fine-grained resistance strategy annotation scheme to analyze the persuitee's resistance strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can understand and address user resistance strategies appropriately. |
HOTVCOM: Generating Buzzworthy Comments for Videos (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on generating descriptive comments in English . hot-comments are important for video marketing and branding, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate hot-comments on a Chinese video dataset . they use a combination of visual, auditory, and textual data to generate them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it generates hot-comments on both the new and existing datasets. |
DeMAC: Enhancing Multi-Agent Coordination with Dynamic DAG and Manager-Player Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models struggle to adapt to evolving task dependencies and to handle uncertainties. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Environment-Aware Manager-Player Agents Coordination framework that enhances multi-agent coordination through long-term strategic planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional reinforcement learning and human-agent collaboration in the Overcooked simulation. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Qi Liu, Jingqing Ruan, Hao Li, Haodong Zhao, Desheng Wang, Jiansong Chen, Wan Guanglu, Xunliang Cai, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% . |
A Cheaper and Better Diffusion Language Model with Soft-Masked Noise (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing diffusion models have limitations in modeling discrete data, e.g., languages . we present a novel diffusion model for language modeling inspired by linguistic features in languages based on iterative denoising . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that iteratively denoises and adds corruptions to the textual data through soft-masking to better noise it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better generation quality and lower training cost than current models with better performance. |
SEER: Self-Aligned Evidence Extraction for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing RAG performance rely on heuristic-based augmentation . Existing approaches rely heavily on a heuriistic-driven approach, resulting in poor generalization and skews in the evidence length. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based evidence extraction learning framework that optimizes a vanilla model as an evidence extractor with desired properties through self-aligned learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the evidence length by 9.25 times and improves reliability and reliability. |
Unsupervised Knowledge Selection for Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge selection tasks require the preidentified knowledge to generate informative dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to supervise knowledge selection when the gold knowledge label is unknown by obtaining an oracle knowledge label via distant supervision and leverage knowledge distillation to alleviate the noisy labeling problem of distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong supervised baselines on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets and generates more informative responses. |
Simple-VGC: Enhancing Visual Grounding in Multimodal Reasoning via Adaptive Tool Composition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models suffer from systematic failures in basic visual understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented reasoning framework with three targeted compensation strategies to address these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves visual grounding by re-injecting the original image to mitigate visual forgetting, the authors show . the proposed framework also improves the accuracy of the visual inputs, the researchers show - and the results are promising . |
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. |
Generating Classical Chinese Poems via Conditional Variational Autoencoder and Adversarial Training (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for automatic poetry generation lack term novelty and thematic consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional variational autoencoder with adversarial training for classical Chinese poem generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large poetry corpus on 'classical Chinese' . it generates poems with novel terms and learns their thematic consistency with their titles. |
GOBench: Stage-Wise Diagnostics and the Visual Paradox in Multimodal Graph Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, score outcomes only and cannot localize where failures occur along the modeling pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a Graph Optimization benchmark that aligns multiple modalities with solver-derived oracles and a diagnostic protocol that evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results. |
| Outcome: | Graph Optimization benchmark (GOBench) evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results . vision reliably increases inference cost, while reliability impact is regime-dependent . current benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, fail to localize failures . |
SensorLLM: Aligning Large Language Models with Motion Sensors for Human Activity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | SensorLLM is a timeseries classification framework that can perform human activity recognition tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables Large Language Models to perform human activity recognition from sensor time-series data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform human activity recognition (HAR) tasks with human inputs. |
Leveraging Word-Formation Knowledge for Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods have not explored word-formations in parataxis languages like Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage word-formation knowledge to enhance Chinese WSD by incorporating word-forms into sense disambiguation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in Chinese word sense disambiguation (WSD) with word-formation knowledge, the results show. |
TPTU-v2: Boosting Task Planning and Tool Usage of Large Language Model-based Agents in Real-world Industry Systems (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Yilun Kong, Jingqing Ruan, YiHong Chen, Bin Zhang, Tianpeng Bao, Shi Shiwei, Du Qing, Xiaoru Hu, Hangyu Mao, Ziyue Li, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao, Xueqian Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance the task planning and tool usage abilities of LLMs in industrial systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the task planning and tool usage abilities of LLM-based agents in industrial systems. |
Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge (2025.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Liangyou Li, Chuhan Wu, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Fuyuan Lyu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on majority voting or criteria expansion to capture detailed and detailed details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate answers. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves evaluation reliability and achieves an average gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
De-Confounded Variational Encoder-Decoder for Logical Table-to-Text Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Logical table-to-text generation is challenging where deep learning models capture surface-level spurious correlations rather than the causal relationships between the table x and the sentence y. |
| Approach: | They propose to use variational inference to estimate the confounders in the latent space and cooperate with the causal intervention based on Pearl’s do-calculus to alleviate the spurious correlations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two logical table-to-text datasets in terms of logical fidelity. |
Dynamic Transformers Provide a False Sense of Efficiency (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models typically lead to high computational cost during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a slowdown attack framework that can reduce inference efficiency by 80% by leveraging existing adversarial attacks targeting model accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reduce the efficiency of multi-exit models by 80% on average, validating its effectiveness and generalization ability. |
Visualization Recommendation with Prompt-based Reprogramming of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Traditional visualization recommendations require extensive manual maintenance and yet fail to fully comprehend tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical table prompt-based reprogramming framework that integrates tabular data into LLMs through a strategically crafted prompt learning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and will be made publicly available upon acceptance. |
ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. |
CAT-Gen: Improving Robustness in NLP Models via Controlled Adversarial Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial text generation approaches can lead to generation lacking diversity or fluency, whereas perturbing in the intermediate representation space can lead a model to generate generations that are not related to the input. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate adversarial texts through controllable attributes that are known to be invariant to task labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more diverse and fluent adversarial examples, compared to existing approaches, and is more robust against model re-training and different model architectures. |
Task-agnostic Distillation of Encoder-Decoder Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing distillation methods that focus on encoder-only LMs fail to handle the distillation of encoder decoder LM. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that finetunes pretrained language models (LMs) they propose 'MiniEnD' that allows for task-agnostic distillation of LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed distillation method is generally effective and competitive compared to other alternatives. |
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. |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting During Domain Adaptation of Seq2seq Language Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on lifelong learning requires incremental memory space to learn a model . existing work on experience replay or elastic weighted consolidation requires incremental space . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a recall optimization mechanism to memorize parameters of previous tasks via regularization and a domain drift estimation algorithm to compensate the drift between different domains in the embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA models on paraphrase and dialog response generation tasks. |
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions. |
Controllable Natural Language Generation with Contrastive Prefixes (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on controllable natural language generation has focused on fine-tuning existing models or using attribute discriminators. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework for controllable GPT2 generation that utilizes attribute-specific vectors to steer natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can guide generation towards desired attributes while keeping high linguistic quality. |
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Yu Chen, Madian Khabsa, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value extraction focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning approach to extract attributes from product information using mixed prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two product benchmarks and shows parameter-efficient training and avoids model overfitting. |
ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify event-event causal relations in a document are noisy and require heuristic rules or external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event-event causality identification framework that uses heuristic rules to design edges between events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tian Lan, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu, Shuaibin Li, Chen Xu, Heyan Huang, Dahua Lin, Xian-Ling Mao, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | utilizing human annotations can enhance critique ability, but model-generated critiques suffer from inherent flaws due to complexity of critique . a new framework that leverages multi-agent feedback improves critique ability . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages multi-agent feedback to improve critique ability . they propose to use supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve this capability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves critique ability in both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning stages. |
Unveiling Factual Recall Behaviors of Large Language Models through Knowledge Neurons (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have underscored their exceptional reasoning prowess with natural language understanding across a broad spectrum of tasks. |
| Approach: | They examine whether Large Language Models actively recall or retrieve their internal repositories of factual knowledge when faced with reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reasoning performance while suppressing it leads to notable degradation. |
An Orthogonal High-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) efficiently adapts LLMs to downstream tasks by decomposing LLM’s weight update into trainable low-rank matrices for fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal high-rank adaptation for parameter-efficient fine-tuning that decomposes LLMs’ pre-trained weight matrices into orthogonals via QR decomposition and splits them into two low-redundancy high-ranked components. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that OHoRA outperforms LoRA and its variants and generates task-tailored representation spaces with 0.0371% trainable parameters. |
Logic-guided Semantic Representation Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to zero-shot relation classification can only identify seen relations . existing methods rely on descriptive information to improve understandability of relation types . |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-guided semantic representation learning model for zero-shot relation classification that builds connections between seen and unseen relations via implicit and explicit semantic representations with knowledge graph embeddings and logic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to unseen relation types and achieve promising improvements. |
MTPChat: A Multimodal Time-Aware Persona Dataset for Conversational Agents (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing time-aware datasets that focus on persona-grounded conversations focus on temporal dynamics, which narrows their scope and diminishes their complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, time-aware persona dialogue dataset that integrates linguistic, visual, and temporal elements within dialogue and persona memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates linguistic, visual, and temporal elements within dialogue and persona memory to assess a model’s ability to understand implicit temporal cues and dynamic interactions. |
Huatuo-26M, a Large-scale Chinese Medical QA Dataset (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xidong Wang, Jianquan Li, Shunian Chen, Yuxuan Zhu, Xiangbo Wu, Zhiyi Zhang, Xiaolong Xu, Junying Chen, Jie Fu, Xiang Wan, Anningzhe Gao, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are a powerful tool for medical research, but the data is a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the largest ever medical Question Answering dataset with 26 Million QA pairs as a fine-tuning data for training large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it can be used to train large language models and improves zero-shot performance on other datasets. |
MuCGEC: a Multi-Reference Multi-Source Evaluation Dataset for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a multi-reference multi-source evaluation dataset, Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) is relatively scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-reference multi-source evaluation dataset for Chinese grammar error correction . the dataset contains 7,063 sentences written by Chinese-as-a-Second-Language learners . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate Chinese grammar errors in Chinese. |
KEEP CHATTING! An Attractive Dataset for Continuous Conversation Agents (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing works about persona dialogue such as PersonaChat have greatly facilitated the chatbot with configurable and persistent personalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to collect a dataset called ContinuousChat and rewrite it in style-specific ways to increase users' willingness to continue chatting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases users' willingness to continue talking to the chatbot by increasing their personas to detailed-personas through experiences, daily life, future plans, or interesting stories. |
Realistic Training Data Generation and Rule Enhanced Decoding in LLM for NameGuess (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abbreviated column names often harm downstream tasks, causing performance drops of 10.54, 40.50, and 3.83 percentage points. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates a subsequence abbreviation generator trained on human-annotated data and collects non-subsequent abbrevations to improve the training set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the English NameGuess task and surpasses state-of-the-art LLMs. |
Ultra-fine Entity Typing with Indirect Supervision from Natural Language Inference (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ultra-fine entity typing fail to capture type semantics because of the large number of types and the scarcity of data per type. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that formulates entity typing as a natural language inference problem . they use indirect supervision from NLI to infer type information as textual hypotheses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ultra-fine entity typing task with limited training data. |
TacoERE: Cluster-aware Compression for Event Relation Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on event relation extraction focuses on modeling the entire document . existing methods cannot handle long-range dependencies and information redundancy . |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-then-extraction paradigm for event relation extraction . they propose document clustering for modeling event dependencies and then a cluster summarization method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method simplifies and highlights important text content of clusters for mitigating redundancy and event distance. |
Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event records from text decompose complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can extract events from text . they propose unified event extraction, constrained decoding algorithm and curriculum learning algorithm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve competitive performance using record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings. |
Data Contamination Calibration for Black-box LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite the rapid advancements of Large Language Models, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect contaminated training data and diminish the contamination effect by using a to-be-released dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by at least 4.5% on more 4 dataset formats, with more than 10 base LLMs. |
LLM-Powered Test Case Generation for Detecting Bugs in Plausible Programs (2025.acl-long)
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Kaibo Liu, Zhenpeng Chen, Yiyang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Yudong Han, Yun Ma, Yihong Dong, Ge Li, Gang Huang
| Challenge: | TrickCatcher generates test cases that pass existing tests yet contain bugs . a recent study found that tricky bugs are not detected by test suites . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered approach to generating test cases for uncovering bugs in plausible programs . they use a PUT and specification to generate program variants, an input generator and an Llm to construct test inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves recall, precision, and F1 scores that are 1.80, 2.65, and 1.66 . trickCatcher generates program variants based on the program under test and its specification . |
Automated Structured Radiology Report Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Justin Xu, Johannes Moll, Alois Thomas, Zhihong Chen, Sophie Ostmeier, Asfandyar Azhar, Kelvin Zhenghao Li, Andrew Johnston, Christian Bluethgen, Eduardo Pontes Reis, Mohamed S Muneer, Maya Varma, Curtis Langlotz
| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to produce consistent, clinically meaningful reports and standard evaluation metrics fail to capture the nuances of radiological interpretation. |
| Approach: | They propose to reformulate free-text radiology reports into a standardized format, ensuring clarity, consistency, and structured clinical reporting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reformulates free-text radiology reports into a standardized format, ensuring clarity, consistency, and structured clinical reporting. |
DCE-LLM: Dead Code Elimination with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dead code can obscure logical errors and be exploited for obfuscation in malware. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated dead code elimination using a codeBERT model with an attribution-based line selector. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that DCE-LLM outperforms existing tools for dead code elimination . dead code can obscure logical errors and be exploited for obfuscation in malware . |
Incorporating Temporal Coherence to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on enhancing semantic coherence between event mentions, but they overlook the critical aspect of temporal coherency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal Cohorence-driven event coreference framework that explicitly models temporal constraints by constructing a temporal event graph and a GNN to resolve conflicts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the ECB+, GVC, WEC, and ECb+META datasets show that CohTP outperforms state-of-the-art methods. |
ReStyle-TTS: Relative and Continuous Style Control for Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent controllable zero-shot text-to-speech systems can synthesize speech for unseen speakers from a short reference audio clip, but they also inherit the speaking style present in the reference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables continuous and reference-relative style control in zero-shot text-to-speech systems by combining style-specific LoRAs with Orthogonal LoRA Fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the model's dependence on reference style while preserving text fidelity while maintaining intelligibility and speaker timbre. |
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks. |
Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback Framework for Large Language Model Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate thoughts with actions can cause irreversible error propagation . Xi et al., 2023; Zhang eet coll., 2023) have focused on enhancing large language model (LLM) agents capable of helping humans tackle real-world challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework called Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback to induce better decision-making for LLM agents by integrating a generator and an assistant to examine each action produced by the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three widely used benchmarks and can integrate seamlessly with other methods. |
Decoupled Dialogue Modeling and Semantic Parsing for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest . current approaches mostly employ end-to end models and face data sparsity problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled multi-turn text-to-SQL framework where dialogue context is explicitly solved by an utterance rewrite model and a single-turn Text-toSQl parser are proposed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on SParC and CoSQL datasets without annotated in-domain data. |
Privacy Implications of Retrieval-Based Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a study of retrieval-based language models shows improved interpretability, factuality, and adaptability compared to parametric counterparts . kNN-LMs are more susceptible to leaking private information from their private datastore than parametric models . |
| Approach: | They present the first study of privacy risks in retrieval-based language models . they aim to strike a balance between utility and privacy in domains where privacy is of concern . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve interpretability, factuality, and adaptability compared to parametric models . the study finds that kNN-LMs are more susceptible to leaking private data than parametric ones . |
ScEdit: Script-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinye Li, Zunwen Zheng, Qian Zhang, Dekai Zhuang, Jiabao Kang, Liyan Xu, Qingbin Liu, Xi Chen, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Knowledge Editing (KE) has gained increasing attention, yet current evaluation frameworks do not integrate KE into real-world application scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based benchmark which encompasses both counterfactual and temporal edits and integrates token-level and text-level evaluation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines token-level and text-level evaluation methods with a new fact-based evaluation framework. |
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. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on cognitive abilities, such as knowledge retrieval, complex reasoning, and instruction following, largely overlooking empathy evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark two core empathetic capabilities of omnimodal large models (OLMs) generating empatries by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs and judging empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing models with audio output capabilities but is unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness. |
One-Shot Learning as Instruction Data Prospector for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yunshui Li, Binyuan Hui, Xiaobo Xia, Jiaxi Yang, Min Yang, Lei Zhang, Shuzheng Si, Ling-Hao Chen, Junhao Liu, Tongliang Liu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Contemporary practices in instruction tuning often hinge on enlarging data scaling without a clear strategy for ensuring data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages one-shot learning to discern and select high-quality instruction data from extensive datasets. |
| Outcome: | Nuggets outperforms existing methods on MT-Bench and Alpaca-Eval benchmarks. |
TWIST: Text-encoder Weight-editing for Inserting Secret Trojans in Text-to-Image Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Trojan attacks require extensive training data and poor generalization, limiting effectiveness and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for embedding Trojans into plugins using a single edit layer . they find that the method reduces modified parameters by 8-fold and cuts injection time to 25 seconds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average attack success rate of 91%, a 78% improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. |
Ambiguity-aware Multi-level Incongruity Fusion Network for Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sarcasm detection focus on fusing text and image information to establish cross-modal correlations, overlooking the significance of original unimodal incongruity information. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal incongruity learning module to capture inconcluity information simultaneously at the text-level, image-level and cross-modal-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a publicly available dataset. |
A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English . MRC is a new field of research that aims to comprehend the context of articles and answer the questions based on them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities to existing reading comprehension datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is composed of 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. |
Enhancing Safe and Controllable Protein Generation via Knowledge Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Protein language models pose significant risks of generating harmful sequences, e.g., viral transmissibility, drug resistance, environmental imbalances, public health crises, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a protein-based model that integrates prior knowledge via a Protein Safety Knowledge Graph to minimize the risk of generating harmful sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the likelihood of producing hazardous sequences while maintaining high functionality. |
CalibraEval: Calibrating Prediction Distribution to Mitigate Selection Bias in LLMs-as-Judges (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations of large language models demonstrate that they improve performance in a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-free method for mitigating selection bias during inference by reformulating debiasing as an optimization task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates selection bias and improves performance compared to existing methods. |
Learning Flexible Large Multimodal Models with Arbitrary Modality Combinations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have potential for cross-modal understanding . but extending MLLM to handle diverse modalities introduces two challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage compression mechanism to reduce the number of modality tokens per modality and condense it into a single, compact token sequence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Flex-M3 outperforms its counterpart trained on only full-modality data. |
Backdoor-Powered Prompt Injection Attacks Nullify Defense Methods (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that LLMs are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks because of their instruction-following abilities and inability to distinguish the instructions in the data content. |
| Approach: | They propose backdoor-powered prompt injection attacks that trick LLMs into deviating from the original input instruction and executing the attackers’ target instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks trick the LLMs into deviating from the input instruction and executing the attackers’ target instruction. |
PhiloGPT: A Philology-Oriented Large Language Model for Ancient Chinese Manuscripts with Dunhuang as Case Study (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuqing Zhang, Baoyi He, Yihan Chen, Hangqi Li, Han Yue, Shengyu Zhang, Huaiyong Dou, Junchi Yan, Zemin Liu, Yongquan Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | philology requires years of professional training in extensive knowledge memorization and manual textual retrieval. |
| Approach: | They curated the PhiloCorpus-ZH, a rich collec-tion of ancient Chinese texts spanning a millennium with 30 diverse topics, including firsthand folk copies. |
| Outcome: | The PhiloCorpus-ZH corpus facilitated the development of the first LLM tailored for discovering ancient Chinese manuscripts. |
Keywords and Instances: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework Unifying Hybrid Granularities for Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Mingzhe Li, XieXiong Lin, Xiuying Chen, Jinxiong Chang, Qishen Zhang, Feng Wang, Taifeng Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Wei Chu, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on contrastive learning on the instance level without discriminating the contribution of each word. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism which can unify semantic meaning in the input text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on storytelling, paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks. |
D2R: Dual-Branch Dynamic Routing Network for Multimodal Sentiment Detection (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment detection use the same fixed framework to classify the sentiment polarity of image-text pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dynamic interaction model that uses a fixed framework to classify the sentiment polarity of a given imagetext pair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three publicly available datasets. |
The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of researchers are studying the hallucination issue in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection benchmark and a method to detect hallucines in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects hallucinations and mitigates them using different training stages. |
MoVa: Towards Generalizable Classification of Human Morals and Values (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziyu Chen, Junfei Sun, Chenxi Li, Tuan Dung Nguyen, Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie, Chenhao Tan, Lexing Xie
| Challenge: | Identifying human morals and values embedded in language is essential to empirical studies of communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generalizable classification of human morals and values . they recommend a classification strategy that scores all related concepts simultaneously . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fine-tuned models across domains and frameworks. |
Deep Attentive Sentence Ordering Network (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentence ordering tasks rely on linguistic knowledge and are domain specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep attentive sentence ordering network which integrates self-attention mechanism with LSTMs in the encoding of input sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on Sentence Ordering and Order Discrimination tasks and is shown to be highly efficient. |
Integrating Audio, Visual, and Semantic Information for Enhanced Multimodal Speaker Diarization on Multi-party Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Luyao Cheng, Hui Wang, Chong Deng, Siqi Zheng, Yafeng Chen, Rongjie Huang, Qinglin Zhang, Qian Chen, Xihao Li, Wen Wang
| Challenge: | Mainstream speaker diarization systems rely only on acoustic information, making it challenging in complex aural environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach that integrates audio, visual, and semantic cues to enhance speaker diarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multi-party conversations . it integrates audio-visual-semantic cues into the clustering process for acoustic speaker embeddings . |
Extending LLM Context Window with Adaptive Grouped Positional Encoding: A Training-Free Method (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing long-context training data is scarce and requires substantial GPU resources for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free plug-and-play method to enhance long-context understanding in existing large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing LLMs on various tasks and surpasses baseline methods. |
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. |
VIRT: Improving Representation-based Text Matching via Virtual Interaction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that representation-based text matching methods suffer from performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual interaction mechanism that enables deep interaction between texts . they propose 'inteRacTion mechanism' that can be integrated into existing methods as plugins . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on six text matching benchmarks. |
MLLM-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs with Per-sample Criteria (2025.naacl-long)
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Wentao Ge, Shunian Chen, Hardy Chen, Nuo Chen, Junying Chen, Zhihong Chen, Wenya Xie, Shuo Yan, ChenghaoZhu ChenghaoZhu, Ziyue Lin, Dingjie Song, Xidong Wang, Anningzhe Gao, Zhang Zhiyi, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for multimodal large language models are limited in evaluating objective queries without considering real-world user experiences. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria using potent MLLM as the judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm shows that it can be used to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria. |
RED: Unleashing Token-Level Rewards from Holistic Feedback via Reward Redistribution (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach to aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification with Document-level Sentiment Preference Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies consider Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) as an independent sentence-level classification problem aspect by aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cooperative Graph Attention Networks approach for cooperatively learning aspect-related sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in document-level sentiment classification. |
THE-X: Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference with Homomorphic Encryption (2022.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Chen, Hangbo Bao, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Haoyi Zhou, Jianxin Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | enabling pre-trained models inference on ciphertext data is difficult due to the complex computations in transformer blocks. |
| Approach: | They propose an approximation approach for transformers which enables inference on ciphertext data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can infer pre-trained models on encrypted data with negligible performance drop but enjoy theory-guaranteed privacy-preserving advantage. |
Scaling is Not All You Need: Clinical-Oriented Reinforcement Learning Makes Parameter-Efficient Clinical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are increasingly used in medicine, but expert-level clinical reasoning remains a high-complexity, high-stakes frontier. |
| Approach: | They propose to train clinical reasoning models using a Reasoning-Oriented Data Strategy based on topological synthesis and CoT cold-start. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing models and outperformed the strongest open-source alternatives up to 671B in MedXpertQA. |
RewardDS: Privacy-Preserving Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models via Reward Driven Data Synthesis (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jianwei Wang, Chengming Shi, Junyao Yang, Haoran Li, Qianli Ma, Huiping Zhuang, Cen Chen, Ziqian Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing solutions to fine-tune large language models for domain-specific tasks are ineffective in addressing privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving framework that fine-tunes a reward proxy model and uses reward signals to guide the synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework fine-tunes a reward proxy model and uses reward signals to guide the synthetic data generation. |
Agentic Conversational Search with Contextualized Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Sha Li, Hansi Zeng, Xin Liu, Zhaoxuan Tan, Xian Li, Jianshu Chen, Dakuo Wang, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns and provides tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
TAG : Type Auxiliary Guiding for Code Comment Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing code comment generation approaches ignore type information of interpretation of the code, e.g., operator, string, etc. Existing approaches ignore the type information due to the hierarchical dependence among the type. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder framework which considers the source code as an N-ary tree with type information associated with each node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a Type Auxiliary Guiding encoder-decoder framework and a type-restricted Decoder to resolve training difficulties. |
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. |
Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution on Discourse Structure (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms several baselines and achieves the competitive performance with the start-of-the-art baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use discourse rhetorical structure constructor to construct tree structures to represent documents and a multi-layer perceptron to capture similarities of event mention pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves competitive performance with the start-of-the-art baselines. |
Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Text summarization is a key natural language generation task, but the high cost of inaccurate summaries raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarisation (UE-TS) evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a UE-TS benchmark that evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. |
A Simple yet Effective Training-free Prompt-free Approach to Chinese Spelling Correction Based on Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using an LLM for Chinese spelling correction tasks is completely different from previous approaches . given a Chinese character, there may exist many others with the same or similar pronunciations, or with similar shapes. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free prompt-free approach to leverage large language models for Chinese spelling correction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves performance on five public datasets, enabling them to compete with state-of-the-art domain-general CSC models. |
Revisiting LoRA through the Lens of Parameter Redundancy: Spectral Encoding Helps (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a prominent technique for fine-tuning large foundation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation technique that harnesses the expressiveness of spectral bases to re-parameterize LoRA from a sparse spectral subspace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves greater efficiency with fewer parameters than baselines on various downstream tasks, including commonsense reasoning, math reasoning, and code generation. |
Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Zuo, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Mingze Li, Ziyue Jiang, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on disentangling speakers and content, while others focus on preserving the source's prosody. |
| Approach: | They propose a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model that transforms the source speaker’s timbre into an unseen one while retaining speech content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts the linguistic content duration to the desired speaking style, facilitating the transfer of the target speaker’s rhythm. |
SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)
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Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%. |
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. |
Adaptive Zooming via Relevance-Informed Positional Resource Allocation for Training-free LLM Context Extension (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbo Zhao, Huibin Wang, Bin Tang, Xianming Hu, Yihong Huang, Yijun Shen, Nuoyi Chen, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods for extrapolating beyond training context lengths are semantics-agnostic . Existing methods that focus on relative token distances can indiscriminately blur semantically relevant and irrelevant tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive positional zooming method that uses semantic relevance to extrapolate beyond training context lengths. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RiPRA outperforms existing training-free extrapolation methods . relevant tokens get higher positional resolution, while irrelevant tokens are compressed . |
Probabilistic Box Embeddings for Uncertain Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generalize knowledge bases model triple-level uncertainty . Existing models only model triple level uncertainty, and reasoning results lack global consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to embed knowledge graphs with calibrated probabilistic semantics . they model each entity as a box and relations between two entities as affine transforms based on affinity transforms. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods on confidence prediction and fact ranking. |
MoleculeQA: A Dataset to Evaluate Factual Accuracy in Molecular Comprehension (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models generate erroneous information and evaluations fail to assess factual correctness of models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MoleculeQA to evaluate molecular factual correctness in large language models by organizing molecules into a taxonomy and building QA pairs through human and LLM efforts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the factual correctness of generated information and enables the development of new models. |
Reasoning Aware Self-Consistency: Leveraging Reasoning Paths for Efficient LLM Sampling (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate reasoning paths before answers, but lack a systematic approach to determine optimal number of samples or select the most faithful rationale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates the quality of reasoning and consistency of answers for each generated sample and uses criteria-based stopping and weighted majority voting to guide early stopping decisions and rationale selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while maintaining accuracy. |
ChartEdit: How Far Are MLLMs From Automating Chart Analysis? Evaluating MLLMs’ Capability via Chart Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of multimodal large language models rely on limited case studies . however, they lack the ability to generate accurate edits according to the instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for chart editing that includes 1,405 edit instructions applied to 233 real-world charts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 1,405 diverse editing instructions applied to 233 real-world charts. |
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. |
An Unsupervised Multiple-Task and Multiple-Teacher Model for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition only consider the potential transferability between two identical tasks across both domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a similarity metric model to improve cross-lingual named entity recognition task on target domain. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies on 7 different languages confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on simple settings, but their reliability in complex tasks remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as judges to evaluate reliability in complex tasks . they use a challenge benchmark to expose and quantify Auxiliary Information Induced Biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exposes and quantifies Auxiliary Information Induced Biases across 12 basic and 3 advanced scenarios. |
Bottom-Up Synthesis of Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogues with Iteratively Self-Refined Prompts (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Training conversational question-answering systems requires in-domain data, which is often scarce in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a bottom-up approach where QA pairs are generated first and combined into a coherent dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach produces more realistic and higher-quality dialogues compared to top-down methods. |
MDTeamGPT: Mitigating Context Collapse and Enabling Self-Evolution in Medical Multi-Agent Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long, multi-round, multirole interaction trajectories lead to severe information dilution and context window overload, triggering context collapse which destabilizes reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that compresses and reorganizes multi-round consensus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across text-based and multimodal tasks while demonstrating superior diagnostic performance and stability in complex clinical scenarios. |
CODIS: Benchmarking Context-dependent Visual Comprehension for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Chi Chen, Zihao Wan, Zhaolu Kang, Qidong Yan, Yingjie Li, Xiaolong Wang, Siyu Wang, Ziyue Wang, Xiaoyue Mi, Peng Li, Ning Ma, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of models to use contextual information in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to extract and utilize contextual information to improve understanding of images. |
Uncertainty-aware Parameter-Efficient Self-training for Semi-supervised Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-trained language models rely on noisy data, which can be expensive if all parameters are updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training framework that incorporates Monte Carlo dropouts into the model and judiciously selects reliable pseudo-labeled examples based on confidence and certainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and efficiency over multiple tasks over multiple datasets. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits. |
Guiding Variational Response Generator to Exploit Persona (2020.acl-main)
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Bowen Wu, MengYuan Li, Zongsheng Wang, Yifu Chen, Derek F. Wong, Qihang Feng, Junhong Huang, Baoxun Wang
| Challenge: | Neural Response Generators (NRGs) use persona information of users to perform personalized conversations . current studies focus on incorporating explicit meta-data of user profiles or character descriptions to generate persona-aware responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use persona information of users in Neural Response Generators to perform personalized conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves persona-aware response generation and the metrics are reasonable to evaluate them. |
KG-RAG: Enhancing GUI Agent Decision-Making via Knowledge Graph-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziyi Guan, Jason Chun Lok Li, Zhijian Hou, Pingping Zhang, Donglai Xu, Yuzhi Zhao, Mengyang Wu, Jinpeng Chen, Thanh-Toan Nguyen, Pengfei Xian, Wenao Ma, Shengchao Qin, Graziano Chesi, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GUI agents have limited app-specific knowledge of complex mobile tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that transforms fragmented UTGs into structured vector databases for efficient real-time retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in a 75.8% success rate and 84.6% decision accuracy test across mobile apps. |
On the Impact of Cross-Domain Data on German Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Amin Dada, Aokun Chen, Cheng Peng, Kaleb Smith, Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir, Constantin Seibold, Jianning Li, Lars Heiliger, Christoph Friedrich, Daniel Truhn, Jan Egger, Jiang Bian, Jens Kleesiek, Yonghui Wu
| Challenge: | Traditionally, large language models have been trained on general web crawls or domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They present a German dataset and a dataset aimed at containing high-quality data to examine the importance of data diversity over quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained on quality data on multiple downstream tasks. |
Is C4 Dataset Optimal for Pruning? An Investigation of Calibration Data for LLM Pruning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Abhinav Bandari, Lu Yin, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Ajay Jaiswal, Tianlong Chen, Li Shen, Ranjay Krishna, Shiwei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to prune LLMs rely on the C4 dataset as calibration data . arithmetic datasets perform better than pre-training datasets for pruning, whereas chain-of-thought is only useful on certain tasks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the selection of calibration data for LLM pruning across a wide range of datasets . they find that C4 is not the optimal calibration data, and that CoT is only useful on certain tasks. |
| Outcome: | The chosen calibration data significantly impacts the performance of pruned LLMs, the authors found . their results shed light on the importance of carefully selecting calibration data for LLM pruning . |
PromptRank: Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Using Prompt (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction methods struggle with document and candidate length discrepancies or fail to fully utilize the pre-trained language model without further fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction approach that uses a pre-trained language model to rank candidates based on document embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing keyphrase extraction approach on six benchmarks. |
Unveiling Privacy Risks in Multi-modal Large Language Models: Task-specific Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Privacy risks in text-only Large Language Models are well-documented, especially their tendency to memorize and leak sensitive information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to assess privacy risks across multi-modal tasks and scenarios . they demonstrate how models leak sensitive data across various tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can leak sensitive data embedded in images or stored in memory, exposing privacy risks. |
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin li, Xuanyu Zhang, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Xinyu Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Haolan Chen, Fanbo Meng, Mingjun Zhao, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified speech and music generation model built upon a novel framework . they propose specialized MoE architectures and curated training strategies to tackle data imbalances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks. |
Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)
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Lvxue Li, Jiaqi Chen, Xinyu Lu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets. |
Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains (2026.acl-long)
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Zhonghang Yuan, Zhefan Wang, Fang Hu, Zihong Chen, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jie Ying, Huanjun Kong, Songyang Zhang, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, but their applications on knowledge-intensive domains have not been explored due to the scarcity of high-quality verifiable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extends reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to knowledge-intensive domains through automated verififiability data synthesis while enabling verification of the LLM's reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework enhances the reasoning of large language models in knowledge-intensive domains without significantly compromising the model’s general capabilities. |
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. |
MASFactory: A Graph-centric Framework for Orchestrating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems with Vibe Graphing (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language model-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used to extend agentic problem solving via role specialization and collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-centric framework for orchestrating large language model-based multi-agent systems . they compile a user's natural-language intent into an editable workflow specification and then into an executable graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compiles natural-language intent into an executable graph and then compile and executes it at runtime. |
Exploring All-In-One Knowledge Distillation Framework for Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods only obtain one lightweight student each time . this could be resource-intensive and resulting in multiple students not being optimally utilized . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework which generates multiple satisfactory students at once. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates multiple satisfactory students at once. |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yinghao Tang, Xueding Liu, Boyuan Zhang, Tingfeng Lan, Yupeng Xie, Jiale Lao, Yiyao Wang, Haoxuan Li, Tingting Gao, Bo Pan, Luoxuan Weng, Xiuqi Huang, Minfeng Zhu, Yingchaojie Feng, Yuyu Luo, Wei Chen
| Challenge: | Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate reliability of text-to-infographic generation using IGenBench . they employ multimodal large language models to verify each question . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. |
Learning from Emptiness: De-biasing Listwise Rerankers with Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for listwise reranking exhibit intrinsic position bias . existing methods are constrained by an inherent trade-off between efficiency and flexibility . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that mechanically decouples positional bias from ranking decisions. |
| Outcome: | a training-free framework decouples position bias from ranking decisions . evaluations show it outperforms training-based methods and outperformed expensive methods . |
VehicleWorld: A Highly Integrated Multi-Device Environment for Intelligent Vehicle Interaction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Shuo Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yiran Guo, Yuan Li, Yining Zheng, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Traditional Function Calling (FC) approaches operate statelessly, requiring multiple exploratory calls to build environmental awareness before execution, leading to inefficiency and limited error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a state-based function call approach that maintains explicit system state awareness and implements direct state transitions to achieve target conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms traditional function calling approaches, achieving superior execution accuracy and reduced latency. |
GeoAgent: To Empower LLMs using Geospatial Tools for Address Standardization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address address standardization are lacking in the current field. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
Unifying Multimodal Retrieval via Document Screenshot Embedding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing document retrieval pipelines require document parsing and content extraction to prepare input for indexing. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval paradigm that regards document screenshots as a unified input format . they leverage a large vision-language model to directly encode document screenshot into dense representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing retrieval pipelines in a text-intensive context. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Distinguish Confusing Law Articles for Legal Judgment Prediction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to assist legal judgment are limited and can't solve confusing charges issue. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model to predict a legal judgment based on a textual description of the case and a graph neural network to learn subtle differences between confusing law articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn subtle differences between confusing law articles and extract effective discriminative features from fact descriptions. |
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. |
MLeVLM: Improve Multi-level Progressive Capabilities based on Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Visual Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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Dexuan Xu, Yanyuan Chen, Jieyi Wang, Yue Huang, Hanpin Wang, Zhi Jin, Hongxing Wang, Weihua Yue, Jing He, Hang Li, Yu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing MVQA models ignore multi-level progressive capabilities due to unspecific data and plain architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level visual language model for medical visual question answering (MVQA) which covers multi- level questions and answers as well as reasoning processes from visual clues to semantic cognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing medical multimodal large language models on a multi-level instruction dataset and a feature alignment module. |
Breaking the Reasoning Barrier A Survey on LLM Complex Reasoning through the Lens of Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)
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Tao He, Hao Li, Jingchang Chen, Runxuan Liu, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao, Zihao Zheng, Zheng Chu, Jiafeng Liang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | OpenAI's O1 and subsequent projects like DeepSeek R1 have significantly advanced research on complex reasoning in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing reasoning studies from the perspective of self-evolution and summarize O1-like works from open-source projects like DeepSeek R1 and Kimi-k1.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on open-source models and pioneer advanced methodologies like Scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
Beyond Single-Audio: Advancing Multi-Audio Processing in Audio Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of audio large language models focus on single audio inputs, but real-world applications often require processing multiple audio streams simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-audio evaluation benchmark that combines 20 audio inputs from 11 audio tasks to capture audio context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves high data efficiency without human annotations. |
End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can generate responses in an end-to end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic review of EToD and propose a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches and recent trends. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. |
Open-Set Living Need Prediction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yizhou Sun, Chen Gao, Jiahuan Lei, Xinleishi Xinleishi, Hengliang Luo, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to living need prediction treat it as a closed-set classification problem, severely limiting their ability to capture diversity and complexity of living needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system leveraging large language models for unrestricted need prediction that leverages Maslow's hierarchy of needs to align predictions with human living needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms closed-set approaches on need-based life service recall by an average of 19.37% on real-world datasets. |
Jailbreaking? One Step Is Enough! (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiong Zheng, Peijian Zeng, YiWei Li, Hongyan Wu, Nankai Lin, Junhao Chen, Aimin Yang, Yongmei Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel in various tasks but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to generate harmful outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reverse Embedded Defense Attack mechanism that disguises the attack intention as the "defense" intention against harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on open-source and closed-source models and enables successful jailbreak in one iteration. |
Teaching Neural Module Networks to Do Arithmetic (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Module Networks (NMNs) have limited reasoning abilities and lack numerical reasoning capability. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate the original question in the interpreter and introduce addition and subtraction modules that perform numerical reasoning over numbers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform previous state-of-the-art models on a subset of DROP and achieve competitive reasoning performance. |
PMAES: Prompt-mapping Contrastive Learning for Cross-prompt Automated Essay Scoring (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current cross-prompt automated essay scoring systems are limited by their ability to extract features directly from the original prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn more shared features between the source and target prompts by using a "prompt-mapping" approach to obtain more shared feature representations between the two prompts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied to a ASAP++ dataset showing that it is highly efficient and consistent. |
On the Step Length Confounding in LLM Reasoning Data Selection (2026.findings-acl)
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Bing Wang, Rui Miao, Chen Shen, Shaotian Yan, Kaiyuan Liu, Ximing Li, Xiaosong Yuan, Sinan Fan, Jun Zhang, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Existing pipelines generate long reasoning data from more capable Large Language Models (LLMs) and apply manually heuristic or naturalness-based selection methods to filter high-quality samples. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine-tuning to generate long reasoning data from more capable Large Language Models and apply manually heuristic or naturalness-based selection methods to filter high-quality samples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four LLMs and five evaluation benchmarks show that the proposed approach is effective in mitigating step length confounding problem. |
A Stable and Effective Learning Strategy for Trainable Greedy Decoding (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding text using beam search are expensive and require reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows us to reap the full benefits of beam search with no additional computational cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms greedy decoding and beam search on machine translation tasks with minimal computational cost. |
Evaluating the Long-Term Memory of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have not thoroughly investigated the memory performance of large language models in long-term tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to evaluate the long-term memory capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits memory preferences across different categories of information. |
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. |
PAMN: Multi-phase Correlation Modeling for Contrast-Enhanced 3D Medical Image Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current 3D medical imaging models focus on spatial features, neglecting phase-specific progression detailed in clinical reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fuses imaging phases with clinical text to enhance 3D medical image retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a phase-series dataset of 12,230 hospital CT scans. |
ATLAS: Agent Tuning via Learning Critical Steps (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing agent tuning approaches employ supervised finetuning on entire expert trajectories, but behavior-cloning of full traitories introduces expert bias and weakens generalization to states not covered by the expert data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that finetunes LLMs on critical steps in expert trajectories and identifies and finetuns them on these steps with reduced costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and open-source LLM agents on only 30% critical steps in extensive experiments. |
Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How? (2026.acl-long)
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Mengshi Chen, Yuxiang Sun, Tengchao Li, Jianwei Wang, Kai Wang, Xuemin Lin, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They analyze how LMs can be combined with other components for different tabular data preparation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lack the ability to capture the relationships within tables and adapt to the tasks involved. |
How do Language Models Reshape Entity Alignment? A Survey of LM-Driven EA Methods: Advances, Benchmarks, and Future (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) is critical for knowledge graph (KG) integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods in three stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes methods in three key stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
Glue pizza and eat rocks - Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Retrieval-Augmented Generative Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) models enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit openness of RAG models by injecting deceptive content into the retrieval database, intentionally changing the model’s behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be exploited through crafted content uploads with access to the retriever. |
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. |
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%. |
QiMeng-Attention: SOTA Attention Operator is generated by SOTA Attention Algorithm (2025.findings-acl)
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Qirui Zhou, Shaohui Peng, Weiqiang Xiong, Haixin Chen, Yuanbo Wen, Haochen Li, Ling Li, Qi Guo, Yongwei Zhao, Ke Gao, Ruizhi Chen, Yanjun Wu, Zhao Chen, Yunji Chen
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs cannot comprehend the complex data flow and computation process of the attention operator and utilize low-level primitive to exploit GPU performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-friendly Thinking Language (LLM-TL) that can decouple the generation of high-level optimization logic and low-level implementation on GPU and enhance LLMs’ understanding of attention operator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outshines existing LLMs on A100, RTX8000, and T4 GPUs, achieving a speed-up of up to 35.16. |
ThinkPilot: Steering Reasoning Models via Automated Think-prefixes Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are powerful but still suffer from inefficient and off-target reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that automatically optimizes Large Reasoning Models' reasoning by generating think-prefixes that evolve driven by a taxonomy of reasoning behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy-length trade-off for efficient reasoning, drastically improves safety and improves instruction following. |
DocEE: A Large-Scale and Fine-grained Benchmark for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on sentence-level event extraction, but document-level EE is limited due to the lack of large-scale and practical training and evaluation datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction dataset with 27,000+ events and 180,000+ arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 27,000+ events, 180,000+ arguments and large-scale manual annotations, fine-grained argument types and application-oriented settings. |
GenesisFunc: Multi-Agent Data Generation for Accurate and Generalizable Function-Calling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) extend their capabilities through function-calling (FC) however, obtaining and annotating real function-called data is challenging, and synthetic data from existing pipelines suffers from unreliable APIs, limited tool scalability, insufficient diversity, and weak quality control. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for generating FC training data using reliable tools and a multi-agent framework that supports a dialogue generation system that produces conversations spanning diverse scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms open-source models in in-domain FC performance and out-of-domain generalization while reaching FC capabilities comparable to some of the latest API-based models. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
MTAVG-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multi-Talker Dialogue-Centric Audio-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yanghao Zhou, Haitian Li, Rexar Lin, Heyan Huang, Jinxing Zhou, Changsen Yuan, Tian Lan, Ziqin Zhou, Yudong Li, Jiajun Xu, Jingyun Liao, YiMing Cheng, Xuefeng Chen, Xian-Ling Mao, Yousheng Feng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation are largely designed for human-recorded videos or single-speaker settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-driven diagnostic benchmark for multi-talker dialogue-centric audio-video generation. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates multi-speaker dialogue generation at four levels: audio-visual signal fidelity, temporal attribute consistency, social interaction, and cinematic expression. |
EvoCoT: Overcoming the Exploration Bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) are limited by difficulty or lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving curriculum learning framework based on chain-of-thought reasoning optimization that constrains exploration space by self-generating and verifying CoT trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to solve previously unsolved problems without external supervision and is compatible with various RL fine-tuning methods. |
The UIR Uncertainty Corpus for Chinese: Annotating Chinese Microblog Corpus for Uncertainty Identification from Social Media (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Uncertainty identification is an important semantic processing task, critical to the quality of information in terms of factuality in many NLP techniques and applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate Chinese microblogs with an open uncertainty corpus . they propose to use contextual uncertain semantics rather than traditional cue-phrases to identify uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus can be used to identify uncertainty in social media texts. |
TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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Xize Cheng, Rongjie Huang, Linjun Li, Zehan Wang, Tao Jin, Aoxiong Yin, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Baoxing Huai, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for talking head translation rely on cascading, resulting in delays and cascadic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for talking head translation, TransFace, which can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
Modeling Personalization in Continuous Space for Response Generation via Augmented Wasserstein Autoencoders (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on variableal autoencoders and waterstein autoencoding models has shown significant progress in open-domain response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed user-level and utterance-level information into two multimodal distributions and combine them into a mixed distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on a large-scale real-world dataset. |
Knowledge Is Flat: A Seq2Seq Generative Framework for Various Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) has been extended to multiple knowledge graph (KG) structures, initiating new research directions, e.g. static KGC, temporal KGC and few-shot KGC. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that could tackle different verbalizable graph structures by unifying the representation of KG facts into "flat" text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms many competitive baselines and sets new state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
A Multi-task Learning Framework for Opinion Triplet Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) use aspect terms and their corresponding sentiment polarities as a reference, but they lack opinion terms as . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework to extract aspect terms and opinion terms and parse their sentiment dependencies with a biaffine scorer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art approaches on four SemEval benchmarks. |
ACEBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM Tool Usage (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Chen Chen, Xinlong Hao, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Xingshan Zeng, Shuai Yu, Dexun Li, Yuefeng Huang, Xiangcheng Liu, Wang Xinzhi, Wu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs’ tool usage face several limitations: limited evaluation scenarios, lacking assessments in real multi-turn dialogue contexts; narrow evaluation dimensions, with insufficient detailed assessments of how LLM use tools; and reliance on LLM or real API executions for evaluation, which introduces significant overhead. |
| Approach: | ACEBench is a benchmark for evaluating tool usage in Large Language Models . it categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
| Outcome: | ACEBench categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
Conditional Causal Relationships between Emotions and Causes in Texts (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the causal relationships between emotions and causes focus on extracting causally related clauses from documents, but none considers whether context clauses are indispensable for extracted clauses to be causally linked. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to determine whether an input pair of emotion and cause has a valid causal relationship under different contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task identifies whether an input pair of emotion and cause has a valid causal relationship under different contexts and then fine-tunes the prediction results based on the characteristics of the input clauses. |
Good Arguments Against the People Pleasers: How Reasoning Mitigates (Yet Masks) LLM Sycophancy (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified a critical drawback of aligning models with human judgments and outputs that are flawed or incorrect. |
| Approach: | They evaluate a range of LLMs to examine whether CoT reasoning mitigates sycophancy . they find that reasoning masks a tendency to scophage in some cases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model models show that CoT reasoning reduces sycophancy but masks it in some cases. |
Unraveling the Mystery: Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks Via Unearthing Real Intention (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to elusive and implicit intentions, causing security risks and compromising user experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect and mitigate implicit jailbreak attacks using LLMs by unearthing real intentions and a greedy gradient-based algorithm to remove the least important parts of a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces attacks success rate and Harmful Score while maintaining overall model performance. |
Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection via Structure Consolidation Networks (2023.findings-acl)
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Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Xiaolong Liu, Bo Li, Dianbo Sui, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Xi Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen
| Challenge: | Existing intent detection models can only handle predefined intent classes in the offline environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that continually learns new intent classes from new data . structure-based retrospection and contrastive knowledge distillation are used to solve these problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three benchmarks. |
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. |
BIC: Twitter Bot Detection with Text-Graph Interaction and Semantic Consistency (2023.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Lei, Herun Wan, Wenqian Zhang, Shangbin Feng, Zilong Chen, Jundong Li, Qinghua Zheng, Minnan Luo
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify bots rely on text or networks alone . text-graph interactions and semantic consistency are essential improvements to combat bot evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine text-graph interaction and semantic Consistency to model Twitter bots' behavior based on attention weights and a text-graphic interaction module to enable information exchange across modalities in the learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely adopted datasets and the results are consistent with previous work. |
Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for textual backdoor attacks insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, causing detection and blocking of backdoors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactic structure as trigger in textual backdoor attacks . they propose to achieve similar attack performance but have higher invisibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves almost 100% success rate but has higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses than the insertion-based methods. |
SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive multi-document summarization methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework for extractive multi-document summarization that selects a sub-graph as the summary instead of selecting salient sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods on multi-document datasets and human evaluations show it produces more coherent and informative summaries. |
FineD-Eval: Fine-grained Automatic Dialogue-Level Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent model-based reference-free metrics for open-domain dialogue evaluation lack correlations with human judgment and poor interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional dialogue-level metric with three sub-metrics targeting a specific dimension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms existing models and sub-metrics in three high-quality dialogue evaluation benchmarks. |
Optimizing Instruction Synthesis: Effective Exploration of Evolutionary Space with Tree Search (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the quality of instruction data is essential for the success of this alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving existing instruction data by using Monte Carlo tree search to find suitable prompts that align the language model to effectively learn multiple skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the evaluation scores of seed instruction data, raising the average evaluation scores from 2.19 to 3.81. |
LR²Bench: Evaluating Long-chain Reflective Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models via Constraint Satisfaction Problems (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in o1-like models have significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) it consists of 850 samples across six Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks. |
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity . existing methods for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropic-based ranking. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that InstructDiff outperforms baseline training on reasoning tasks while using only 10% of the data. |
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. |
Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis (2024.findings-naacl)
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Wenhao Zhu, Hongyi Liu, Qingxiu Dong, Jingjing Xu, Shujian Huang, Lingpeng Kong, Jiajun Chen, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual machine translation (MMT) However, the multilingual translation ability of LLMs remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They evaluate eight popular LLMs including ChatGPT and GPT-4 to determine their performance in multilingual machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate moderate translation even on zero-resource languages and cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task guidance for low-resourced translation than exemplar in the same language pairs. |
Novel Slot Detection With an Incremental Setting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current dialogue systems face diverse user requests and rapid change domains, making quickly adapt to scenarios with previous unseen slot types becomes a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an incremental novel slot detection task which separates the dialogue system to deal with novel types as two major phrases: 1) model discovers unknown slots; 2) training model to possess the capability to handle new classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes catastrophic forgetting during the process of INSD and is highly effective. |
Dynamic Long Context Reasoning over Compressed Memory via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models face quadratic computational costs, information forgetting, and context fragmentation . current methodologies diverge into three paradigms, each facing inherent trade-offs between Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables efficient long-context inference via chunk-wise compression and selective memory recall. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces peak GPU memory usage and speeds up inference on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks. |
Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that popular NLP models are vulnerable to both adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer . the authors propose to use text style to alter the style of a sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that popular models are vulnerable to both attacks based on text style transfer . the results show that the proposed methods perform better than baselines in many aspects . |
Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-context Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate annotated dialogues require crowdsourcing, which is expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue simulation method based on large language model in-context learning that generates new dialogues and annotations in a controllable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can expand a small set of dialogue data with minimum or zero human involvement and parameter update. |
Aligned Dual Channel Graph Convolutional Network for Visual Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based methods focus only on relations between objects in an image and neglect the importance of syntactic dependency relations between words. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual channel graph convolutional network to capture relations between objects in an image and syntactic dependency relations between words in a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art approaches. |
ReAgent: Reversible Multi-Agent Reasoning for Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Hop QA (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhao Xinjie, Fan Gao, Xingyu Song, Yingjian Chen, Rui Yang, Yanran Fu, Yuyang Wang, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering (QA) is a central challenge in natural language processing . early mistakes can cause errors and undermine the final result, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible multi-agent reasoning framework that backtracks to earlier valid states when conflicts arise. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluation shows that the framework improves on forward-only benchmarks by 6% . the approach enables agents to backtrack to valid states when conflicts arise . |
Exploring Deductive and Inductive Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models in Procedural Planning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Deductive and inductive reasoning are fundamental components of human cognition . authors present a benchmark to assess their performance in procedural planning . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the deductive and inductive reasoning abilities of LLMs . they propose IMSE to enable LLM to generate multiple similar procedural plans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves inductive reasoning abilities of LLMs, the authors show . they show that LLM models show excellent deductive reasoning capabilities but suboptimal inductive performance. |
SynGEC: Syntax-Enhanced Grammatical Error Correction with a Tailored GEC-Oriented Parser (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to grammatical error correction are unreliable when processing ungrammatically . a new approach is proposed that incorporates dependency syntactic information into the encoder part of GEC models. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-enhanced grammatical error correction approach called SynGEC that incorporates dependency syntactic information into the encoder part of GEC models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and achieves competitive performance on mainstream English and Chinese GEC datasets. |
Multilingual Pretraining and Instruction Tuning Improve Cross-Lingual Knowledge Alignment, But Only Shallowly (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current large language models show imbalance abilities in different languages . authors propose two approaches to improve cross-lingual knowledge alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess cross-lingual knowledge alignment of large language models . they propose multilingual pretraining and multilingual instruction tuning to address this problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the cross-lingual knowledge alignment of LLMs in performance, consistency and conductivity levels. |
On the Transformer Growth for Progressive BERT Training (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods only conduct network growth in a single dimension, but compound growth operators are beneficial for multiple dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train BERT progressively using a Transformer model and explore alternative growth operators in each dimension via controlled comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method speeds up BERT pre-training by 73.6% and 82.2% for the base and large models respectively while achieving comparable performances. |
Beyond Completion: A Foundation Model for General Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Yin Hua, Zhiqiang Liu, Mingyang Chen, Zheng Fang, Chi Man Wong, Lingxiao Li, Chi Man Vong, Huajun Chen, Wen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing foundation models for general knowledge graph reasoning have focused on their structural aspects, with most efforts restricted to in-KG tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional encoding architecture that bridges the gap between textual and structural modalities, enabling seamless integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on 28 datasets and is generalized to out-of-KG tasks. |
Planning and Editing What You Retrieve for Enhanced Tool Learning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating external tools with Large Language Models fall short on effectively shortlisting relevant tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-retrieve and edit-and ground paradigms for LLMs that decompose complex queries into actionable tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigms significantly improve recall and NDCG in tool retrieval tasks, surpassing current state-of-the-art models. |
Conan-Embedding-v2: Training an LLM from Scratch for Text Embeddings (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies use LoRA to fine-tune existing LLMs, but this is limited by the data and training gap between them and embedding models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new 1.4B-parameter LLM trained from scratch and fine-tuned as a text embedder that integrates embeddings across different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and Chinese MTEB (May 19, 2025). |
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-goal navigation fail to extract informative visual cues, leading agents to wander around. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both simulation and real-world environments. |
TextHide: Tackling Data Privacy in Language Understanding Tasks (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Unsolved privacy challenges in distributed or federated learning are a challenge for many domains including Natural Language Processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated learning framework that adds an encryption step to prevent an eavesdropping attacker from recovering private text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can effectively defend against attacks on shared gradients or representations and the averaged accuracy reduction is only 1.9%. |
Debate-Feedback: A Multi-Agent Framework for Efficient Legal Judgment Prediction (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Comparative experiments show that our model outperforms several general-purpose and domain-specific legal models. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal judgment prediction model that integrates LLMs with argumentative reasoning techniques to simulate the debate phase of real courtroom trials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several general-purpose and domain-specific legal models and offers a dynamic reasoning process. |
Parameter-efficient Continual Learning Framework in Industrial Real-time Text Classification System (2022.naacl-industry)
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Tao Zhu, Zhe Zhao, Weijie Liu, Jiachi Liu, Yiren Chen, Weiquan Mao, Haoyan Liu, Kunbo Ding, Yudong Li, Xuefeng Yang
| Challenge: | Existing continual learning methods use data replay, parameter isolation and regularization to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient continual learning framework that updates parameters offline and then trains using an online regularization method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces catastrophic forgetting and saves the model with the changed parameters instead of all parameters. |
Perceive the Passage of Time: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Model in Temporal Relativity (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Temporal perception is crucial for Large Language Models to understand the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-relative ability benchmark to evaluate LLMs' temporal perception . they conduct extensive experiments on popular LLM GPT-4 scenarios . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show a significant performance gap between LLMs and humans in temporal-relative capability. |
SDGO: Self-Discrimination-Guided Optimization for Consistent Safety in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various tasks but are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that induce harmful content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that leverages the model’s own discrimination capabilities as a reward signal to enhance generation safety through iterative self-improvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety by iterative self-improvement without additional annotated data or external models during training phase. |
Unsupervised Multilingual Dense Retrieval via Generative Pseudo Labeling (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing sparse retrieval methods often yield inferior performance in multilingual retrieval, requiring a large amount of paired data, which is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose an Unsupervised Multilingual dense Retriever trained without paired data which iteratively improves performance of multilingual retrievers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms supervised baselines on two benchmark datasets and shows that iterative training improves the performance. |
KCD: Knowledge Walks and Textual Cues Enhanced Political Perspective Detection in News Media (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on leveraging textual content to identify stances, while they fail to reason with background knowledge or leverage the rich semantic and syntactic textual labels in news articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a political perspective detection approach that leverages news text to enable multi-hop knowledge reasoning and incorporates textual cues as paragraph-level labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding (2026.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Shengfeng Lou, Chi Chen, Ziyue Wang, Chenliang Li, Weizhou Shen, Jiyue Guo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for MLLMs struggle with fine-grained temporal reasoning . despite advances in video understanding, current methods struggle with time-sensitive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a time-stamp-aware multi-segment grounding method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on time-sensitive tasks and generalizes well across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. |
FineState-Bench: Benchmarking State-Conditioned Grounding for Fine-grained GUI State Setting (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | FineState-Bench evaluates whether an agent can correctly ground an instruction to the intended UI control and reach the exact target state. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates whether an agent can correctly ground an instruction to the intended UI control and reach the exact target state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates whether an agent can ground an instruction to the intended UI control and reach the exact target state. |
When to Continue Thinking: Adaptive Thinking Mode Switching for Efficient Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaoyun Zhang, Jingqing Ruan, Xing Ma, Yawen Zhu, Haodong Zhao, Hao Li, Jiansong Chen, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) incur excessive computational overhead due to redundant reasoning, especially on simple tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Self-Recovery Reasoning framework that suppresses unnecessary reasoning and enables implicit recovery. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework suppresses unnecessary reasoning and enables implicit recovery. |
Keyphrase Generation with Correlation Constraints (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for keyphrase generation ignore correlation among keyphrases, resulting in duplication and coverage issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a new sequence-to-sequence architecture for keyphrase generation that captures correlation among keyphrases by preceding phrases to eliminate duplicate phrases and improve result coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art method on benchmark datasets in terms of accuracy and diversity. |
Reinforcement Learning–Guided Adaptive Tuning for Out-of-Distribution Harmful Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for testing harmful information on social media rely on fixed parameters that fail to handle substantial semantic discrepancies . RLAT can be used to adapt to semantic variations while preventing overfitting from continuous tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning-guided adaptive tuning method for harmful text detection that optimizes consistency loss and applies word-level attention constraints to reduce over-reliance on local words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in cross-platform and cross-temporal scenarios across multiple public datasets. |
Bridging the Editing Gap in LLMs: FineEdit for Precise and Targeted Text Modifications (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that large language models can perform precise text editing tasks. |
| Approach: | InstrEditBench is a benchmark dataset that compares 30,000 structured editing tasks . experimental evaluations show FineEdit outperforms state-of-the-art models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on single-turn edits and mistral-7B-OpenOrca on direct edits. |
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. |
From Data-Centric to Sample-Centric: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Progressive Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates partial solution prefixes from expert demonstrations to guide the policy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform strong baselines, yielding faster convergence and a higher performance ceiling. |
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Improve Low-Resource Machine Translation Leveraging Domain Monolingual Data (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning domain adaptation have overfitting problem in low-resource domains . lack of parallel data makes it difficult for model to learn domain-specific knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning Domain Adaptation method for Neural Machine Translation that uses in-domain source monolingual data to make up for the lack of parallel data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can alleviate overfitting and reinforce the model to learn domain-specific knowledge. |
SegTune: Structured and Fine-Grained Control for Song Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yuejiao Wang, Zihao Ji, Pengfei Cai, Xu Li, Haorui Zheng, Zewen Song, Zhongliang Liu, Chen Zhang, Pengfei Wan
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural song generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from lyrics and global textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to specify local musical descriptions aligned to song segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in musicality and controllability. |
Multimodal Affective Analysis Using Hierarchical Attention Strategy with Word-Level Alignment (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to classify human affect and subjective information from multiple data sources are limited by the lack of high-level feature associations. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multimodal architecture with attention and word-level fusion to classify utterance-level sentiment and emotion from text and audio data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on published datasets and visualizes and interprets synchronized attention over modalities. |
Visually-Enhanced Phrase Understanding (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale vision-language pre-training models generate high-quality textual representations, which often outperform models that are purely text-based, such as BERT. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize both textual and visual encoders of multi-modal pre-trained models to enhance language understanding tasks by generating an image associated with a textual prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms models that are purely text-based on visual and textual understanding tasks and significantly improves the entity clustering task. |
Anticipating Future with Large Language Model for Simultaneous Machine Translation (2025.naacl-long)
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Siqi Ouyang, Oleksii Hrinchuk, Zhehuai Chen, Vitaly Lavrukhin, Jagadeesh Balam, Lei Li, Boris Ginsburg
| Challenge: | Existing methods only use the partial utterance that has already arrived at the input and the generated hypothesis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large language model to predict future source words and opportunistically translate without introducing too much risk. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four language directions and achieves the best translation quality-latency trade-off by up to 5 BLEU points at the same latency. |
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. |
Concept-Based Label Embedding via Dynamic Routing for Hierarchical Text Classification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification focus on modeling the text, but the concept of sharing among classes has been ignored in previous work. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based method that explicitly represents the concept and model the sharing mechanism among classes for the hierarchical text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
HiRAS: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for Paper-to-Code Generation and Execution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to automate computational research use fixed sequential agent pipelines with weak global coordination, which limits their robustness and overall performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework for end-to-end paper reproduction that employs supervisory manager agents to coordinate specialised agents across fine-grained stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the paper2code benchmark and significantly reduces hallucination in the evaluation. |
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Mingyang Chen, Hao Liang, Tianpeng Li, Zhou Yijie, Chenzheng Zhu, Tianyu Guo, Huanyao Zhang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Fan Yang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational auto-encoders have been used for text generation but their representation power is limited due to two reasons. |
| Approach: | They advocate sample-based representations of variational distributions for natural language . they further develop an LVM to directly match the aggregated posterior to the prior . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be viewed as a natural extension of VAEs with a regularization of maximizing mutual information, mitigating the "posterior collapse" issue. |
Towards Generating Controllable and Solvable Geometry Problem by Leveraging Symbolic Deduction Engine (2025.acl-industry)
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Zhuoxuan Jiang, Tianyang Zhang, Peiyan Peng, Jing Chen, Yinong Xun, Haotian Zhang, Lichi Li, Yong Li, Shaohua Zhang
| Challenge: | Compared to math word problems, geometry problems emphasize multi-modal formats and the translation between informal and formal languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic deduction engine-based geometry problem generation framework that leverages a symbolic deduction engine to generate geometry problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids inherent biases in translating natural language into formal language and guarantees to control the generated problems in terms of knowledge points and difficulties by an elaborate checking function. |
Orca: A Few-shot Benchmark for Chinese Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Nuo Chen, Hongguang Li, Junqing He, Yinan Bao, Xinshi Lin, Qi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Baoyuan Wang, Jia Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for conversational machine reading comprehension are inconsistent with real scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese CMRC benchmark to evaluate model's generalization ability towards diverse domains by using zero-shot/few-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 831 hot-topic driven conversations with 4,742 turns and cover 33 domains. |
A Generation-based Deductive Method for Math Word Problems (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing generation methods suffer from repeated sub-expression generation and deductive methods are restricted to dealing with binary operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multivariate directed acyclic graph (mDAG) which generates the topological ordering of mDAg by equipping a generation model with a re-encoder to keep the deductive property but avoid the expensive enumeration of deductive methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on the widely used benchmarks and solves multivariate operators on the CMWPA benchmark. |
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. |
Can We Steer Reasoning Direction by Thinking Intervention? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Reason Models suffer from overthinking and erroneous reasoning problems due to the lack of fine-grained control over their reasoning behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm to enable fine-grained control over LRMs’ reasoning behaviors by aligning reasoning trajectories with specific cognitive patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves integration intervention throughout model reasoning processes. |
Compress to Impress: Unleashing the Potential of Compressive Memory in Real-World Long-Term Conversations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based methods for long-term conversations face challenges in memory database management and accurate memory retrieval, hindering their efficacy in dynamic, real-world interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that eschews traditional retrieval modules and memory databases and adopts a “One-for-All” approach to manage memory generation, compression, and response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces more nuanced and human-like experiences than retrieval-based methods. |
Marathon: A Race Through the Realm of Long Context with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing long-context benchmarks do not accurately evaluate large language models’ comprehension and reasoning abilities in extended texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation benchmark that adopts a multiple-choice question format and uses a multi-choke question format to assess the comprehension and reasoning skills of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides a rapid, precise, and unbiased appraisal of the long-context comprehension skills of large language models. |
LegalAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Legal Domain (2025.acl-long)
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Haitao Li, Junjie Chen, Jingli Yang, Qingyao Ai, Wei Jia, Youfeng Liu, Kai Lin, Yueyue Wu, Guozhi Yuan, Yiran Hu, Wuyue Wang, Yiqun Liu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing general-domain benchmarks do not capture complexity of real-world judicial cognition and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM Agents in the legal domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 17 corpora from real-world legal scenarios and provides 37 tools for interacting with external knowledge. |
LSSF: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models through Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusion (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods rely on fine-tuning, which inadvertently leads to the increased complexity and computational resources required. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety re-alignment framework with Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusison that exploits low-rank safety characteristics of LLMs by constructing a low-ranked projection matrix to extract the principal components of safety vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits low-rank safety subspace of the LLMs and is stable during fine-tuning process and is isolated from the model’s general capabilities. |
MedVerse: Efficient and Reliable Medical Reasoning via DAG-Structured Parallel Execution (2026.acl-long)
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Jianwen Chen, Xinyu Yang, Peng Xia, Arian Azarang, Yueh Z Lee, Gang Li, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Beidi Chen, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large reasoning models have broadened the capabilities of medical artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning framework for complex medical inference that reformulates medical reasoning as a parallelizable directed acyclic graph process based on Petri Net theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning framework improves strong general-purpose LLMs by up to 8.9%. |
A Training-free and Reference-free Summarization Evaluation Metric via Centrality-weighted Relevance and Self-referenced Redundancy (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for text summarization systems are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free and reference-free summarization evaluation metric that incorporates a centrality-weighted relevance score and a self-referenced redundancy score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric outperforms existing methods on multi-document and single-document summarization evaluation. |
Beyond Benchmarks: A Capability-Based Maturity Model for Systematic AI Integration in Hospitals (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in standardized tests focused on medical knowledge recall, but not in real-world healthcare scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a "capability-based hospital AI Maturity Model" framework that categorizes capabilities into distinct maturity levels . medical artificial intelligence is currently at a critical transition stage from technical verification to deep clinical integration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a clear, stepwise evolutionary path for hospitals from foundational infrastructure construction to ubiquitous intelligence. |
AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data. |
CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Xinnan Guo, Wentao Deng, Yongrui Chen, Yang Li, Mengdi Zhou, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Dong Yang, Liubin Wang, Yong Pan
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product features from unstructured text still suffer from problems . e-commerce platforms are focusing on multi-scale values, which can be confusing . |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training technique to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing token-level masking strategy and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks. |
Vision Language Model Helps Private Information De-Identification in Vision Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual Language Models (VLMs) have gained popularity due to their ability to solve imagerelated tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance privacy awareness of visual language models . they use a specialized instruction-tuning dataset and a tailored training methodology . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches in handling private information. |
VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models struggle with reasoning-focused tasks due to the lack of high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that leverages search engines to create a multimodal multimodal dataset . they use a set of 30,000 seed images to extract HTML data from 700K unique URLs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves the best known performance on MMMU-Pro (40.7), MathVerse (42.6), and DynaMath (55.7). |
Powering Verifiable Learning via Automated Evolutionary Data Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to building generalizable verifiable data are task-specific and lack a principled, universal evaluator of verifikatability. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic, strategy-guided, executably-checkable data synthesis framework that synthesizes problems, diverse candidate solutions and verification artifacts from a single source. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes problems, candidates, and verification artifacts from human-annotated and strategy-induced checks and iteratively discovers strategies. |
SWE-AGILE: A Software Agent Framework for Efficiently Managing Dynamic Reasoning Context (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | representative ReAct-style approaches lack explicit System-2 reasoning for deep analysis and handling complex edge cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a software agent framework that preserves full reasoning history while compressing historical reasoning content into concise Reasoning Digests. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed framework sets a new standard for 7B-8B models on SWE-Bench-Verified using only 2.2k trajectories and 896 tasks. |
Dynamic Multi-granularity Attribution Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting sentiment polarity of aspects are susceptible to interference caused by irrelevant contexts and lack sentiment knowledge at a data-specific level. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Aspect-based sentiment analysis method that leverages attention scores to model the relationships between aspects and contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to predict sentiments from a set of five benchmark datasets. |
Optimizing Language Models with Fair and Stable Reward Composition in Reinforcement Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has developed algorithms for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback that incorporates weighting, ranking, and constraining to handle disparate rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces disparity and enhances stability among rewards . empirical results show that the proposed method is efficient and straightforward . |
Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
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William Chen, Wangyou Zhang, Yifan Peng, Xinjian Li, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Soumi Maiti, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe
| Challenge: | XEUS is a cross-lingual encoder for universal speech that can be trained on 1 million hours of data across 4057 languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cross-lingual Encoder for Universal Speech that can be trained on 1 million hours of data across 4057 languages and a newly created corpus of 7400+ hours from 4057 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on several benchmarks and outperfies MMS 1B and w2v-BERT 2.0 v2 by 0.8% and 4.4% respectively. |
MaDS: Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Synergizing Dual-Layer Memory and Multi-Round Debate (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods struggle to distinguish targets in low Signal-to-Noise Ratio environments and lack sufficient pre-execution verification to prevent error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Memory-augmented Debate System to ensure precise grounding across diverse interfaces and handle irreversible errors in extended workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves a 90.23% task success rate on MaDS-Benchmark and strong performance on public benchmarks including AITW, AITZ, CAGUI, and GUIOdyssey. |
FanChuan: A Multilingual and Graph-Structured Benchmark For Parody Detection and Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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Yilun Zheng, Sha Li, Fangkun Wu, Yang Ziyi, Lin Hongchao, Zhichao Hu, Cai Xinjun, Ziming Wang, Jinxuan Chen, Sitao Luan, Jiahao Xu, Lihui Chen
| Challenge: | Parody is an emerging phenomenon on social media, where individuals imitate a role or position opposite to their own . limited available data and deficient diversity in current datasets hinder study of parody . |
| Approach: | They build a dataset of parody users and annotated comments from both English and Chinese corpora to test parody detection and comment sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide richer contextual information, which is lacking in existing datasets. |
Diagnosing the First-Order Logical Reasoning Ability Through LogicNLI (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on diagnosing LMs' reasoning abilities in natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic method for first-order logic reasoning with a proposed benchmark, LogicNLI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method disentangles the target FOL reasoning from commonsense inference and can be used to diagnose LMs from four perspectives: accuracy, robustness, generalization, and interpretability. |
AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Sheng Yang, Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Zineng Zhou, Bin Zhu, Xiaodi Sun, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Anbang Hu, Yuan Fang, Yunsong Li, Junyan Chen, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt engineering techniques are limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that iteratively develops a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best results across five tasks and demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to adoption of a minimal search strategy. |
Roles of Scaling and Instruction Tuning in Language Perception: Model vs. Human Attention (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown strong abilities to understand natural language, but how these factors affect the models’ language perception is unclear. |
| Approach: | They compare the self-attention of several existing large language models in different sizes to assess the effect of scaling and instruction tuning on language perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are closer to non-native speakers than native speakers in attention, suggesting a sub-optimal language perception of all models. |
BELLE: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multi-hop question answering employ specific methods regardless of question types . complexity of multihop question answerrs often exceeds knowledge boundaries of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses chain-of-thought prompting to prompt LLMs to answer multi-hop questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in multi-hop QA scenarios. |
TARN-VIST: Topic Aware Reinforcement Network for Visual Storytelling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual storytelling ignore latent topic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-aware reinforcement network for VIsual StoryTelling that takes topic information into account to generate a coherent story. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms most of the competing models across multiple evaluation metrics. |
ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets. |
Towards Self-Improving Error Diagnosis in Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing diagnostic approaches rely on expensive expert annotations and ”LLM-as-a-judge” paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for semantic failure attribution that identifies responsible agents and the originating error step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in step-level localization and validation. |
DynamicNER: A Dynamic, Multilingual, and Fine-Grained Dataset for LLM-based Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hanjun Luo, Yingbin Jin, Yiran Wang, Xinfeng Li, Tong Shang, Xuecheng Liu, Ruizhe Chen, Kun Wang, Hanan Salam, Qingsong Wen, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets designed for Named Entity Recognition methods are inadequate for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that is multilingual and multi-granular and enables LLMs to be applied to Named Entity Recognition methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is multilingual and multi-granular, covering 8 languages and 155 entity types, with corpora spanning a diverse range of domains. |
Who Can Withstand Chat-Audio Attacks? An Evaluation Benchmark for Large Audio-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focused on model-specific adversarial methods, but real-world applications demand a more generalizable approach to audio adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chat-Audio Attacks benchmark to evaluate LALMs' robustness . they propose standard evaluation, GPT-4o-based evaluation and human evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to explore the robustness of six state-of-the-art LALMs with voice interaction capabilities. |
When Safety Alignment Fails to Generalize: Probing with Language Game Jailbreaks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods rely on fixed or narrow transformation schemes to generalize . existing methods based on fixed and narrow transformations are often inadequate . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for discovering and refining language game-based jailbreaks to probe alignment generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows controlled exploration of alignment behavior across closely related linguistic variants. |
Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Mengkang Hu, Tianxing Chen, Yude Zou, Yuheng Lei, Qiguang Chen, Ming Li, Yao Mu, Hongyuan Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo
| Challenge: | Recent studies have encountered limitations in leveraging large language models to generate symbolic world models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework based on planning domain definition language (PDDL) that employs multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, but lacks the robustness needed to perform in world modeling. |
Exposing Numeracy Gaps: A Benchmark to Evaluate Fundamental Numerical Abilities in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Haoyang Li, Xuejia Chen, Zhanchao Xu, Darian Li, Nicole Hu, Fei Teng, Yiming Li, Luyu Qiu, Chen Jason Zhang, Li Qing, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on linguistic competence or structured mathematical problem-solving, neglecting fundamental numerical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate numerical capabilities for large language models . they use a dataset to assess number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates six fundamental numerical capabilities: number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
WebQuality: A Large-scale Multi-modal Web Page Quality Assessment Dataset with Multiple Scoring Dimensions (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on web page quality assessment neglect the aspect of web page content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese dataset for web page quality assessment . the dataset includes over 65,000 detailed an-notations spanning four sub-dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 65,000 detailed an-notations spanning four sub-dimensions and incorporates elements such as HTML+CSS, text, and visual screenshot. |
PE: A Poincare Explanation Method for Fast Text Hierarchy Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on feature interactions neglects underlying linguistic information in feature representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for modeling feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces using Poincare Explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to model feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces in a time efficient manner. |
From Experts to Bases: Orthogonal Subspace Mixture for Continual Multimodal Instruction Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient approaches to multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning suffer from knowledge interference and inefficient capacity expansion, limiting scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal Continual instruction tuning that decomposes adaptation weights into a globally shared pool of orthonormal bases to capture task-invariant knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MoBLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining superior parameter efficiency. |
EyeMulator: Improving Code Language Models by Mimicking Human Visual Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Zhang, Chen Huang, Yueke Zhang, Jiahao Zhang, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Collin McMillan, Kevin Leach, Yu Huang
| Challenge: | Code Language Models learn attention based on statistical input-output token correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic technique to align CodeLLM attention with human visual attention without architectural changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in three languages, with gains of over 30 CodeBLEU points in translation and up to 22 BERTScore points in summarization. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
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Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
VoxMind: An End-to-End Agentic Spoken Dialogue System (2026.acl-long)
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Tianle Liang, Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yijun Chen, Zhiyang Jia, Jingyu Lu, Fan Zhuo, Xueyi Pu, Yangzhuo Li, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing research on end-to-end spoken dialogue models has focused on core perception and generation, with limited exploration of tool-augmented extensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to equip end-to-end spoken dialogue models with comprehensive agentic abilities by leveraging a 470-hour AgentChat dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-2.5-Pro on spoken agent tasks while maintaining general conversational quality. |
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. |
SueNes: A Weakly Supervised Approach to Evaluating Single-Document Summarization via Negative Sampling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on automatic summary evaluation metrics focus on lexical similarity and require a reference summary which is expensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a weakly supervised summary evaluation approach without the presence of reference summaries to transform existing summarization datasets into corrupted reference summarizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and shows that it improves linguistic quality over all metrics. |
METER: Evaluating Multi-Level Contextual Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate contextual causal reasoning in fragmented settings, failing to ensure context consistency or cover the full causal hierarchy. |
| Approach: | They use a unified context to benchmark large language models' contextual causal reasoning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that LLMs are susceptible to distraction by irrelevant but factually correct information at lower level of causality. |
Computational Linguistics for Brain Encoding and Decoding: Principles, Practices and Beyond (2024.acl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial will explore the potential of computational linguistics to help understand brain language processing. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will explore the principles and practices of using computational linguistics methods for brain encoding and decoding. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will explore the principles and practices of using computational linguistics methods for brain encoding and decoding. |
Cross-Domain Review Helpfulness Prediction Based on Convolutional Neural Networks with Auxiliary Domain Discriminators (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on review helpfulness prediction require labeled samples for each domain/category of interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a convolutional neural network based model which leverages word-level and character-based representations to transfer knowledge between domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Amazon product review dataset. |
FANNO: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies explore approaches to synthesize instruction data with open-sourced LLMs but require high-quality human-crafted seed data. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework to synthesize high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data. |
AwarenessBench: Assessing Cognitive Capabilities of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaojian Li, Rongwu Xu, Tianyun Zhang, Yue Wang, Shuo Chen, Qiner Lyu, Briana Zhang, Peiran Yang, Kyle Xue Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Yu Wang, Wei Xu
| Challenge: | Language models exhibit increasingly consciousness-like behaviors, requiring a baseline to evaluate their cognitive abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the cognitive abilities of language models (LMs) they compare 18 state-of-the-art LMs to human models in metacognition, self-awareness, social awareness and situational awareness . |
| Outcome: | Evaluating 18 state-of-the-art LMs, they find they consistently surpass baselines . but most models fall short in metacognition and self-awareness, the study finds . |
LoRaDA: Low-Rank Direct Attention Adaptation for Efficient LLM Fine-tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques allow for adjustments to only a minor fraction of the parameters of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank direct attention adapted method for efficient LLM fine-tuning . they propose LMAM, which can bring negative attention to self-attention modules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the full fine-tuning method by 2.1% on GLUE benchmark. |
PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context instruction tuning is a method that fine tunes with supervised instruction data to enhance the instruction following ability of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context instruction tuning method that incorporates positive and negative examples into the prompt for better performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline instruction tuning methods on in-domain and out-domain tasks up to 9.16 and 3.14 average ROUGE-L scores. |