Papers by Chen Sun
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. |
Exploiting domain-slot related keywords description for Few-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for dialogue state tracking with domain-slot-value labels are expensive . current models are limited due to high cost of data annotation and lack of data in some domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework based on domain-slot related description to tackle the challenge of few-shot cross-domain DST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on MultiWOZ and gains strong slot accuracy compared to existing models. |
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. |
The Self-Improvement Paradox: Can Language Models Bootstrap Reasoning Capabilities without External Scaffolding? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on external supervision signals in the form of seed data and/or assistance from third-party models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
LongLLaVA: Scaling Multi-modal LLMs to 1000 Images Efficiently via a Hybrid Architecture (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xidong Wang, Dingjie Song, Shunian Chen, Junying Chen, Zhenyang Cai, Chen Zhang, Lichao Sun, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Long-context Large Language Models (MLLMs) are critical for video understanding and image analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid architecture that integrates Mamba and Transformer blocks . they introduce data construction methods that capture both temporal and spatial dependencies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results across various benchmarks while maintaining high throughput and low memory consumption. |
Exploiting Global and Local Hierarchies for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode label hierarchy in a global view, which makes them hard to exploit hierarchical information. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage label hierarchy in multi-label text classification by encoding label hierarchy as a static hierarchical structure containing all labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvement on three benchmark datasets compared with the state-of-the-art method HGCLR. |
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. |
Steering Away from Refusal: A Black-box Jailbreak Method Based on First-Token Distribution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze black-box jailbreaks lack direct optimization signals to refine adversarial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a distribution-jailbreak attack method that selects effective jailbreak templates and iteratively optimizes adversarial suffixes by maximizing the KL divergence from the standard refusal distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate (ASR) on all tested open-source models and delivers over 94% ASR on GPT-4.1. |
META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current task-oriented dialogue systems focus on multi-turn text/speech interaction, then call back-end APIs to perform task. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system that can perform GUI operations on real APPs without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system can perform GUI operations on real APPs and execute tasks without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs. |
ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search (2025.acl-long)
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Yize Zhang, Tianshu Wang, Sirui Chen, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Chaochao Lu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but their application in open-ended, knowledge-intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval-augmented generation within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art KAR methods by up to 23.10% and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by upto 25.37%. |
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. |
All Languages Matter: Understanding and Mitigating Language Bias in Multilingual RAG (2026.acl-long)
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Dan Wang, Guozhao Mo, Yafei Shi, Cheng Zhang, Bo Zheng, Boxi Cao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing mRAG systems suffer from a language bias during reranking, systematically favoring English and the query’s native language. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-agnostic utility-driven reranker alignment technique to mitigate language bias during re-ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates language bias and consistently improves mRAG performance across languages. |
MERaLiON-AudioLLM: Advancing Speech and Language Understanding for Singapore (2025.acl-demo)
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Yingxu He, Zhuohan Liu, Geyu Lin, Shuo Sun, Bin Wang, Wenyu Zhang, Xunlong Zou, Nancy F. Chen, AiTi Aw
| Challenge: | MERaLiON-AudioLLM is the first general-purpose audio-based large language model for multitask learning. |
| Approach: | They introduce MERaLiON-AudioLLM, a general-purpose audio-based large language model for multitask learning with a focus on Singlish understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits strong generalization across a diverse set of tasks . it is a leading solution for region-specific AI applications. |
APOLLO: An Optimized Training Approach for Long-form Numerical Reasoning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate reasoning programs that ignore the differences between facts treated all facts equally, leading to wrong punishment of programs that differed from the ground truth. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimized training framework for long-form numerical reasoning that incorporates a number-aware negative sampling strategy and consistency-based reinforcement learning to increase execution accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of long-form numerical reasoning on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboards. |
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 . |
Mirroring Users: Towards Building Preference-aligned User Simulator with User Feedback in Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models lack specific task alignment and large-scale simulations are challenging due to their ambiguity, noise and massive volume. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages user feedback in RSs with advanced LLM capabilities to generate high-quality simulation data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the alignment with human preferences and in-domain reasoning capabilities of the fine-tuned LLMs. |
IEPile: Unearthing Large Scale Schema-Conditioned Information Extraction Corpus (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit a significant performance gap in Information Extraction (IE) high-quality instruction data is the vital key for enhancing LLMs' specific capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual (English and Chinese) IE instruction corpus that contains 0.32B tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of LLMs for IE with zero-shot generalization. |
AGrail: A Lifelong Agent Guardrail with Effective and Adaptive Safety Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defense agencies fail to adaptively and effectively mitigate these risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a lifelong agent guardrail that enhances LLM agent safety by enabling adaptive safety check generation, effective safety check optimization, and tool compatibility & flexibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent guardrail achieves strong performance against task-specific and systemic risks and is transferable across different LLM agents’ tasks. |
EmoMM: Benchmarking and Steering MLLM for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Conflict and Missingness (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in MER, but their internal decision-making mechanisms under modality conflict and missingness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model that can detect and control modality conflicts and missing subsets by a lightweight mechanism that detects and controls modality conflict. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across settings, showing it can handle conflict and missing behaviors. |
Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jie Lou, Wei Jia, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Boxi Cao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods to recognize entities in text are limited by the diversity of entity types and the lack of high-quality annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context learning-based NER approach that can inject in-const NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts on 4 few-shot NER datasets and significantly outperformed the Plms+initialized extractors. |
Stylized Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Disentangled Template Rewriting (2022.naacl-main)
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Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Yujing Wang, Jian Miao, Xiubo Geng, Yining Chen, Fei Xu, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models only produce pedantic responses, which lacks emotion and attraction compared with the responses with polite style, positive and negative sentiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates responses via combing disentangled style templates and content templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on evaluation metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Continual Few-shot Event Detection via Hierarchical Augmentation Networks (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual few-shot event detection use labeled data, but in real-world applications, new event types emerge continually. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-based framework for continual few-shot event detection . they incorporate prototypical augmentation into the memory set to memorize previous event types . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in multiple continual few-shot event detection tasks. |
LightThinker: Thinking Step-by-Step Compression (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jintian Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Mengshu Sun, Yujie Luo, Shuofei Qiao, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, but their efficiency is hindered by the substantial memory and computational costs associated with generating lengthy tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically compresses verbose thought steps into compact representations and discards original reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces peak memory usage and inference time while maintaining competitive accuracy. |
Sparse Low-rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained large language models in a parameter-efficient manner are gaining traction within the research community. |
| Approach: | They propose a method of low-rank adaptation that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the current method with a fixed and unalterable intrinsic rank and a low-rank adaptation process. |
Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Decomposed Reward Models extract diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed reward model that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
SafeAgent: Safeguarding LLM Agents via an Automated Risk Simulator (2026.acl-long)
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Xueyang Zhou, Weidong Wang, Lin Lu, Jiawen Shi, Guiyao Tie, Xu Yongtian, Lixing Chen, Pan Zhou, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lichao Sun
| Challenge: | SafeAgent improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms closed-source models on two safety benchmarks and one real-world task. |
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. |
From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (2023.findings-acl)
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Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing models of robustness evaluation are incomprehensive, impractical, and invalid . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatic robustness evaluation that shifts towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a model-centric evaluation protocol and a robustness evaluation protocol. |
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. |
TableVista: Benchmarking Multimodal Table Reasoning under Visual and Structural Complexity (2026.findings-acl)
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Zheyuan Yang, Liqiang Shang, Junjie Chen, Xun Yang, Chenglong Xu, Bo Yuan, Chenyuan Jiao, Yaoru Sun, Yilun Zhao
| Challenge: | TableVista evaluates multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity . current models struggle to maintain reasoning consistency when structural complexity combined with visually integrated presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on visual and structural complexity. |
Task Arithmetic can Mitigate Synthetic-to-Real Gap in Automatic Speech Recognition (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for speech recognition suffer from the synthetic-to-real gap . existing methods suffer from this distributional shift due to acoustic mismatches . |
| Approach: | They propose to use task arithmetic to fine-tune an ASR model on synthetic data to mitigate the synthetic-to-real gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an improvement of 10.03% over baselines on the SLURP dataset. |
A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leapt from static chatbots to versatile agents that tackle complex tasks such as science experiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-execute framework and propose 'EAGLET' to enhance the executor agent's planning abilities without human effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three long-horizon tasks and reduces training costs by 8 compared to baselines. |
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 . |
Pruning Adatperfusion with Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive to fine-tune and require large storage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify the influence of each adapter module and a way to prune adapters based on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces size significantly while keeping performance intact. |
Knowing the No-match: Entity Alignment with Dangling Cases (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to find entities that cannot find alignment across knowledge graphs (KGs) despite their importance, knowledge graph is expensive and suffers from incompleteness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for entity alignment and dangling entity detection that can be used to abstain from predicting alignment for detected dangle entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can abstain from predicting alignment for detected dangling entities. |
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Efficient Instruction-Following Text Embedding based on Guided Space Transformation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text embedding require re-encoding the entire corpus for each instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates dynamic text embeddings that adapt to user instructions, highlighting specific attributes of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following text embedding quality over state-of-the-art methods while speeding up processing on large datasets. |
REInstruct: Building Instruction Data from Unlabeled Corpus (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for annotating instruction data are expensive and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically build instruction data from an unlabeled corpus without heavy reliance on proprietary LLMs and human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on AlpacaEval leaderboard and other open-source methods. |
Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Principled Alignment with MoE Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Yuchen Feng, Zhenyu Zhang, Naibin Gu, Ziqi Wang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a cornerstone for scaling LLMs, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood, often leading to sub-optimal specialization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Helmholtz Free Energy and Router Entropy to study the MoE lifecycle and identify a universal Three-Stage Phase Transition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces perplexity and improves expert distinctiveness, offering a principled path toward thermodynamically aligned computation. |
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. |
Named Entity Recognition via Noise Aware Training Mechanism with Data Filter (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition (NER) do not distinguish noisy from hard samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-aware-with-filter method to help model identify noisy samples . they propose 'incomplete trust' loss function which boosts L CRF with a robust term . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on six real-world Chinese and English NER datasets. |
EPO: Hierarchical LLM Agents with Environment Preference Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Long-horizon decision-making tasks require extensive planning over multiple steps, maintaining coherence and goal orientation, which is difficult for LLMs that are typically designed for more immediate and localized predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical framework that decomposes complex tasks into manageable subgoals, utilizing separate LLMs for subgoal prediction and low-level action generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves first place on the ALFRED public leaderboard and demonstrates its potential to improve long-horizon decision-making in diverse environments. |
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. |
On Context Utilization in Summarization with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in abstractive summarization tasks, delivering fluent and pertinent summaries. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive study on context utilization and position bias in summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares two methods to alleviate position bias in summarization tasks. |
Distributional Clarity: The Hidden Driver of RL-Friendliness in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in probability assignments . under identical training, Qwen models achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify distributional clarity in probability space . they show distributional clearness is a trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model families achieve substantial gains under identical training, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
Group, Extract and Aggregate: Summarizing a Large Amount of Finance News for Forex Movement Prediction (D19-51)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on forex prediction ignore related text completely and focus on forex trade data only, which loses important semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a BERT-based Hierarchical Aggregation Model to summarize forex news . they group news from different aspects and extract the most crucial news in each group . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods and grouping methods and summarizes the influence patterns for forex trading. |
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. |
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. |
RubricBench: Aligning Model-Generated Rubrics with Human Standards (2026.acl-long)
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Junyi Zhou, Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Fuyuan Lyu, Yidong Ming, Can Xu, Qingfeng Sun, Kai Zheng, Peng Kang, Xue Liu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack discriminative complexity and ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they support diverse domains, exhibit discriminative ability, provide high-quality annotations, and include human-authored rubrics. |
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. |
SingaKids: A Multilingual Multimodal Dialogic Tutor for Language Learning (2025.acl-industry)
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Zhengyuan Liu, Geyu Lin, Hui Li Tan, Huayun Zhang, Yanfeng Lu, Xiaoxue Gao, Stella Xin Yin, Sun He, Hock Huan Goh, Lung Hsiang Wong, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogic tutor designed to facilitate language learning through picture description tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies show that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels. |
Cluster-Former: Clustering-based Sparse Transformer for Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for encoding long sequences in deep learning suffer from high latency and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a clustering-based sparse Transformer framework to perform attention across chunked sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several major QA benchmarks. |
OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning (2022.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-learning is a new paradigm in natural language processing, adapting pre-trained language models to cloze-style prediction, autoregressive modeling, or sequence to sequence generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompt-learning that integrates pre-trained language models with a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is easy to use and flexible enough to integrate with other frameworks. |
Diffusion Theory as a Scalpel: Detecting and Purifying Poisonous Dimensions in Pre-trained Language Models Caused by Backdoor or Bias (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune pre-trained language models (PLMs) are not safe, since the fine-uning process is invisible to the user. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to study the dynamic process of fine-tuning for finding poisonous dimensions using diffusion theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can detect poisonous dimensions with abnormal dynamics, purify them and fine-tune them on a clean dataset. |
Exploring Mode Connectivity for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found. |
| Approach: | They investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to find low-loss paths between two minima, and to understand how their mode connectivity affects their task knowledge. |
Multimodal Large Language Models for Text-rich Image Understanding: A Comprehensive Review (2025.findings-acl)
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Pei Fu, Tongkun Guan, Zining Wang, Zhentao Guo, Chen Duan, Hao Sun, Boming Chen, Qianyi Jiang, Jiayao Ma, Kai Zhou, Junfeng Luo
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language models have unified perception and understanding tasks within Visual Question Answering paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose to outline timeline, architecture, and pipeline of nearly all TIU MLLMs and review their performance on mainstream benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well on mainstream benchmarks and are compared with other models. |
On the Vulnerability of Safety Alignment in Open-Access LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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Jingwei Yi, Rui Ye, Qisi Chen, Bin Zhu, Siheng Chen, Defu Lian, Guangzhong Sun, Xing Xie, Fangzhao Wu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to malicious exploitation, but are often rejected and limited harmfulness is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose two types of reverse alignment techniques: reverse supervised fine-tuning (RSFT) and reverse preference optimization (RPO). |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can significantly enhance the success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks, but they face high rejection rates and limited harmfulness. |
SKA-Bench: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Structured Knowledge Understanding of LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations for Structured Knowledge (SK) understanding are non-rigorous and focus on a single type of SK. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured knowledge understanding benchmark that includes four widely used structured knowledge forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on four widely used structured knowledge forms . it includes a question, an answer, positive knowledge units, and noisy knowledge units . |
Generate-then-Ground in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve multi-hop question are constrained by the retriever and the noise in the retrieved documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates parametric knowledge of large language models with external documents to solve a multi-hop question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the parametric knowledge of LLMs and external documents to solve a multi-hop question. |
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. |
Optimizing User Profiles via Contextual Bandits for Retrieval-Augmented LLM Personalization (2026.acl-long)
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Linfeng Du, Ye Yuan, Zichen Zhao, Fuyuan Lyu, Emiliano Penaloza, Xiuying Chen, Zipeng Sun, Jikun Kang, Laurent Charlin, Xue Liu, Haolun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for personalizing large language models require modifying parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight approach to personalizing large language models via retrieval augmentation . relevance serves as an unreliable proxy for utility, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong heuristic and retrieval-augmented baselines on nine personalization tasks. |
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. |
AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Bin Wang, Xunlong Zou, Geyu Lin, Shuo Sun, Zhuohan Liu, Wenyu Zhang, Zhengyuan Liu, AiTi Aw, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation regimes for audio large language models do not cover the breadth of their possible use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AudioBench to evaluate audio large language models . they found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation targets speech understanding, audio scene understanding, and voice understanding (paralinguistic) . no single model excels consistently across all tasks, the paper found . |
DeepPresenter: Environment-Grounded Reflection for Agentic Presentation Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zheng, Guozhao Mo, Xinru Yan, Qianhao Yuan, Wenkai Zhang, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing presentation agents rely on predefined workflows and fixed templates to generate presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic framework that adapts to diverse user intents and iterative refinement based on observation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to generate presentations with environmental observations. |
Both Text and Images Leaked! A Systematic Analysis of Data Contamination in Multimodal LLM (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unimodal large language models are inadequate for MLLMs due to multimodal data complexity and multi-phase training. |
| Approach: | MM-DETECT analyzes data contamination using a framework that defines two contamination categories - unimodal and cross-modal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies contamination severity across multiple-choice and caption-based Visual Question Answering tasks. |
FaithLens: Detecting and Explaining Faithfulness Hallucination (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuzheng Si, Qingyi Wang, Haozhe Zhao, Yuzhuo Bai, Guanqiao Chen, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithfulness hallucination detection model that can provide binary predictions and corresponding explanations to improve trustworthiness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms advanced models on 12 diverse tasks. |
Question Generation from SQL Queries Improves Neural Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using question generation, we learn a semantic parser with 30% of the supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question generation to learn a semantic parser with less supervised training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art model with less training data. |
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. |
StoryMI: Steerable Multi-Agent Therapeutic Dialogue Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a directive, client-centered counseling approach for eliciting clients' motivation for behavioral change. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation . therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate fluent dialogues with minimal intervention time and a high level of evaluation. |
LoRA-Flow: Dynamic LoRA Fusion for Large Language Models in Generative Tasks (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LoRA-Flow uses lightweight modules to customize large language models for downstream tasks . previous work on LoRA combination relied on task-level weights for each involved LoRA . |
| Approach: | They propose a LoRA-Flow approach that uses dynamic weights to adjust the impact of different LoRAs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines with task-level weights on six generative tasks. |
Long-tail Relation Extraction via Knowledge Graph Embeddings and Graph Convolution Networks (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing distance supervised relation extraction models for long-tail data are inadequate for many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage implicit relational knowledge among class labels and learn explicit relational knowing using graph convolution networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines for long-tail relations on a large-scale dataset. |
IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Haoxuan You, Rui Sun, Zhecan Wang, Long Chen, Gengyu Wang, Hammad Ayyubi, Kai-Wei Chang, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to decompose VL reasoning rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on multiple VL reasoning tasks. |
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. |
Joint Entity and Relation Extraction for Legal Documents with Legal Feature Enhancement (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction are based on pipelining to extract entities from unstructured judgment documents . a large number of judgment documents are released on China Judgments Online . |
| Approach: | They propose a legal triplet extraction system for drug-related criminal judgment documents . they annotate a dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction in Chinese legal domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts entities and semantic relations jointly and benefits from the proposed legal lexicon feature and multi-task learning framework. |
Textual Backdoor Attacks Can Be More Harmful via Two Simple Tricks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing textual backdoor attacks are vulnerable to backdoors . researchers add extra training task to distinguish poisoned and clean data . |
| Approach: | They propose two tricks that make existing backdoor attacks much more harmful . first trick is to add an extra task to distinguish poisoned and clean data . second trick is using all the clean training data rather than the original clean data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tricks can significantly improve attack performance in three tough situations including clean data fine-tuning, low-poisoning-rate, and label-consistent attacks. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via Superposition Concept Discrimination (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify entities of target types with limited number of illustrative instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a superposition concept discriminator which solves the intrinsic generalization problem by an active learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves few-shot named entity recognition (FS-NER) with minimal additional efforts. |
Battle of the Large Language Models: Dolly vs LLaMA vs Vicuna vs Guanaco vs Bard vs ChatGPT - A Text-to-SQL Parsing Comparison (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a number of open-source large language models claim to be performing better than commercial ones . however, these models fall short of the performance achieved by closed-source models like GPT-3.5 . |
| Approach: | They evaluate six popular large language models against each other to evaluate their performance . authors say open-source models are not as effective as those built by commercial models . |
| Outcome: | a new set of models claim to match or surpass the language understanding abilities of commercial models . the results show that the models performed far below the performance of closed-source models compared to open-source ones . |
Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Textual adversarial samples are often misrepresented in research on security, evaluation, explainability, and data augmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial samples to evaluate their methods on security tasks to demonstrate the real-world concerns rather than developing impractical methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has higher practical value than the current benchmark. |
A Transformer-based Threshold-Free Framework for Multi-Intent NLU (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-intent natural language understanding mainly detect multiple intents on threshold settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based multi-intent NLU model with multi-task learning that exploits the information of the number of multiple intents in each utterance without additional manual annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior results on two public multi-intent datasets. |
CogToM: A Comprehensive Theory of Mind Benchmark inspired by Human Cognition for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Haibo Tong, Zeyang Yue, Feifei Zhao, Erliang Lin, Lu Jia, Ruolin Chen, Yinqian Sun, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to false belief tasks, highlighting bottlenecks in specific dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' Theory of Mind capabilities . they evaluate 8000 bilingual instances across 46 paradigms and validated by 49 human annotators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals performance heterogeneities and bottlenecks in 22 representative models. |
DecoupleSearch: Decouple Planning and Search via Hierarchical Reward Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hao Sun, Zile Qiao, Bo Wang, Guoxin Chen, Yingyan Hou, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Yan Zhang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a pivotal methodology for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples planning and search processes using dual value models, enabling independent optimization of plan reasoning and search grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples planning and search processes using dual value models, enabling independent optimization of plan reasoning and search grounding. |
DiffLM: Controllable Synthetic Data Generation via Diffusion Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their knowledge and generative capabilities, leading to a surge of interest in leveraging LLMs for high-quality data synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable data synthesis framework based on variational autoencoder which leverages diffusion models to reserve more information of original distribution and format structure in the learned latent distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality data with performance exceeding that of real data by 2%–7% on seven real-world datasets. |
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. |
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. |
From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Bo Chen, Chunlei Xin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weipeng Zhang, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD) can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method which solves the semantic gap and the structure gap by leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can solve the semantic gap and structure gap on multiple datasets. |
CortexDebate: Debating Sparsely and Equally for Multi-Agent Debate (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the reasoning performance of LLMs suffer from two major shortcomings: too lengthy input contexts and overconfidence dilemma. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to debating among LLM agents using a sparse debator graph . they use a module called McKinsey-based Debate Matter to optimize the debators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been well demonstrated across eight datasets from four task types. |
Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on semantic parsing use Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) to train discriminative semantic parses. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on two standard datasets and gets state-of-the-art performance over existing methods. |
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. |
Sequence-to-Action: End-to-End Semantic Graph Generation for Semantic Parsing (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for semantic parsing are difficult to design and learn, especially in wideopen domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural semantic parsing approach which models semantic par- sing as an end-to-end semantic graph generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on Overnight dataset and gets competitive performance on Geo and Atis datasets. |
PersLLM: A Personified Training Approach for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit human-like intelligence, enabling them to simulate human behavior and support various applications that require both humanized communication and extensive knowledge reserves. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for better data construction and model tuning to unlock the potential of LLM personification by using Chain-of-Thought prompting and anti-induction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves data construction and model tuning for insufficient data usage and rigid behavior patterns. |
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. |
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. |
TACLR: A Scalable and Efficient Retrieval-based Method for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification (2025.acl-long)
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Yindu Su, Huike Zou, Lin Sun, Ting Zhang, Haiyang Yang, Chen Li Yu, David Lo, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Jufeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value identification face critical challenges . seller-provided attribute values are often incomplete or inaccurate . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based method that uses taxonomy-aware contrastive learning . they use product profiles and candidate values to encode and retrieve attributes based on similarity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a taxonomy-aware, hard negative sampling and adaptive inference with dynamic thresholds. |
Optima: Optimizing Effectiveness and Efficiency for LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for a wide range of tasks, from * Equal Contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances communication efficiency and task effectiveness in LLM-based multi-agent systems through training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves communication efficiency and task effectiveness on multi-agent tasks with 2.8x performance gain with less than 10% tokens on tasks requiring heavy information exchange. |
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. |
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. |
Table-based Fact Verification With Salience-aware Learning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact verification use tabular data with tokens, but training requires labeled training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that identifies token-level salience in the statement with probing-based saliency estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on TabFact benchmark by replacing non-salient terms with tokens. |
Segment, Mask, and Predict: Augmenting Chinese Word Segmentation with Self-Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Yang Liu, Yuanhang Zheng, Gang Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Ji Zhang, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) effective neural network methods have been used in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) However, the robustness of the previous neural methods is limited by the large-scale annotated corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised Chinese word segmentation approach with a straightforward and effective architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous methods on 9 different CWS datasets with single criterion training and multiple criteria training and achieves better robustness. |
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. |
ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-source MLLMs fail to fully capture dense information embedded in charts . current models still face significant challenges in understanding and analyzing visual tasks such as captioning and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a chart-to-code MLLM which leverages Code LLMs as the language backbone to enhance the executability of the generated code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses existing open-source models on chart-to-code benchmarks with only 7B parameters and provides lossless representations that contain all critical details. |
Looking Beyond Text: Reducing Language Bias in Large Vision-Language Models via Multimodal Dual-Attention and Soft-Image Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been criticized for their language bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dual-attention mechanism to construct separate attention for visual and text inputs to enhance integration of visual inputs across models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model debiases LVLMs from their language bias, enhancing visual comprehension and reducing hallucinations without additional resources. |
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. |
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs. |
| Approach: | They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI. |
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. |
Analyzing Modular Approaches for Visual Question Decomposition (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modular neural networks without additional training have been shown to surpass end-to-end neural networks on challenging vision–language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BLIP-2-based modular neural networks without additional training to build programs and a number of skill-specific, task-oriented modules to execute them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform end-to-end neural networks on vision language tasks and retain performance when they use task-agnostic selections. |
KBAlign: Efficient Self Adaptation on Specific Textual Knowledge Bases (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zheni Zeng, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu, Ruobing Wang, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are limited and fine-tuning incurs prohibitive costs of external signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised framework that enhances RAG systems through efficient model adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 90% of the performance gain obtained through GPT-4-supervised adaptation while relying entirely on self-annotation of much smaller models. |
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. |
KAPA: A Deliberative Agent Framework with Tree-Structured Knowledge Base for Multi-Domain User Intent Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiakai Tang, Shiqi Shen, ZhipengWang ZhipengWang, Gong Zhi, Xueyang Feng, Zexu Sun, Haoran Tan, Xu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on the use of LLMs for estimating user intents are either too far from real human thought processes or require labeled samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative agent framework that leverages human thought process to build high-level domain knowledge and a tree-structured knowledge base to store refined experience and data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to build high-level domain knowledge and efficiently store it across multiple steps. |
HiEdit: Lifelong Model Editing with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lifelong model editing apply parameter perturbations to static and dense layers for all instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that identifies the most knowledge-relevant layers for each editing instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the performance of the competitive RLEdit by 8.48% with perturbing only half of the layers per edit. |
Alleviating the Inequality of Attention Heads for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. |
| Approach: | They propose a masking method to mask attention heads in Transformer . they empirically validate the inequality and propose 'head mask' method to avoid bottleneck . |
| Outcome: | The proposed masking method improves translation performance on multiple languages . it can be used to remove a small subset of heads without affecting performance . |
Listening Like Humans: Semantics-Guided Noise-Robust Multimodal Speech Recognition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Severe acoustic degradation results in unreliable ASR outputs . et al., 2024b): critical concerns regarding reliability and fairness of ASR . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that reframes ASR as semantics-guided speech reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average reduction in WER while also attaining 98.71% BERTScore and 96.7% USE over advanced baselines. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Self-describing Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot named entity recognition (NER) models capture information from limited instances while transferring useful knowledge from external resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-describing mechanism for few-shot NER which can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts and adaptively recognize entities on-demand. |
ConsistentChat: Building Skeleton-Guided Consistent Multi-Turn Dialogues for Large Language Models from Scratch (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiawei Chen, Xinyan Guan, Qianhao Yuan, Mo Guozhao, Weixiang Zhou, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing instruction data synthesis methods focus on single-turn instructions and neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models trained on single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets. |
Controllable Preference Optimization: Toward Controllable Multi-Objective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yiju Guo, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Ning Ding, Zexu Sun, Bowen Sun, Huimin Chen, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for achieving optimal alignment are mostly unidirectional . a recent study suggests that large language models can be ground with evident preferences . |
| Approach: | They propose to ground large language models with evident preferences . they propose to use controllable preference optimization to specify different objectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can provide responses that match various preferences among the ”3H” desiderata. |
FedED: Federated Learning via Ensemble Distillation for Medical Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods require centralizing training data from different medical platforms while holding the privacy-sensitive data puts patients' privacy at risk. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated relation extraction model that trains a central model without sharing or exchange of private local data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model trains a central model without uploading local parameters, and it performs well on three publicly available datasets. |
DocumentNet: Bridging the Data Gap in Document Pre-training (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Document understanding tasks are a tedious task that requires extensive training and privacy constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to collect weakly labeled data from the web to benefit VDER training . the collected dataset does not depend on specific document types or entity sets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method does not depend on specific document types or entity sets, making it universally applicable to all VDER tasks. |
Document-Level Relation Extraction via Pair-Aware and Entity-Enhanced Representation Learning (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level relation extraction methods are sparse in relational entity pairs and the representation of entity pairs is insufficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pair-Aware and Entity-Enhanced(PAEE) model to solve two challenges . they propose predicting potential relational entity pairs and assembling directional entity pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can obtain state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets . it can predict potential relational entity pairs and assemble directional entity pairs . |
Rethinking RL Evaluation: Can Benchmarks Truly Reveal Failures of RL Methods? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for reinforcement learning for large language models do not accurately assess generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose three core principles for designing more faithful benchmarks: sufficient difficulty, balanced evaluation, and distributional robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks do not accurately assess generalization across distribution shifts, difficulty levels, and counterfactual scenarios. |
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. |
Know the Known and the Unknown: Reasonable Answer Generation with Knowledge-Informed Citations (2026.acl-long)
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Yichi Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lingbing Guo, Jun Xu, Mengshu Sun, Zhizhen Liu, Lei Liang, Wen Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on generating multi-level citations linked to specific references, making it verifiable and trustworthy. |
| Approach: | They propose a new data construction pipeline and a benchmark to improve citation granularity and awareness of unknown information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the existing benchmark and data construction pipeline and provides citation granularity and awareness of unknown information. |
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. |
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% . |
Reliable Use of Lemmas via Eligibility Reasoning and Section-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on mathematical benchmarks but often import conclusions without validating assumptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encodes a lemma specification and trains with reinforcement learning and section-aware loss masking to assign penalty to the section responsible for errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on benchmarks but often misapplyes lemmas . the model is able to encode the specification and train with reinforcement learning . |
Aurora-M: Open Source Continual Pre-training for Multilingual Language and Code (2025.coling-industry)
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Taishi Nakamura, Mayank Mishra, Simone Tedeschi, Yekun Chai, Jason T. Stillerman, Felix Friedrich, Prateek Yadav, Tanmay Laud, Vu Minh Chien, Terry Yue Zhuo, Diganta Misra, Ben Bogin, Xuan-Son Vu, Marzena Karpinska, Arnav Varma Dantuluri, Wojciech Kusa, Tommaso Furlanello, Rio Yokota, Niklas Muennighoff, Suhas Pai, Tosin Adewumi, Veronika Laippala, Xiaozhe Yao, Adalberto Barbosa Junior, Aleksandr Drozd, Jordan Clive, Kshitij Gupta, Liangyu Chen, Qi Sun, Ken Tsui, Nour Moustafa-Fahmy, Nicolo Monti, Tai Dang, Ziyang Luo, Tien-Tung Bui, Roberto Navigli, Virendra Mehta, Matthew Blumberg, Victor May, Hiep Nguyen, Sampo Pyysalo
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are integral part of AI applications, but their high computational cost limits accessibility. |
| Approach: | They evaluate Aurora-M, a 15B parameter multilingual open-source model trained on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. |
LCS: A Language Converter Strategy for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LT strategies cannot indicate the desired target language on zero-shot translation, i.e., the off-target issue. |
| Approach: | They propose a language converter strategy that embeds the target language into the top encoder layers to mitigate confusion in the encoder and ensures stable language indication for the decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language converter strategy significantly mitigates off-target issue on multiUN, TED, and OPUS-100 datasets. |
Sub-Character Tokenization for Chinese Pretrained Language Models (2023.tacl-1)
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Chenglei Si, Zhengyan Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Fanchao Qi, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Yasheng Wang, Qun Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs treat each character as an indivisible token, but ignore the unique feature of the writing system where additional linguistic information exists below the character level. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode Chinese characters into short sequences and construct Chinese vocabulary based on the encoded text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizers can tokenize inputs into much shorter sequences, improving computational efficiency. |
PEVL: Position-enhanced Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Vision-language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances on self-supervised learning have led to powerful vision-language pre-training models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of cross-modal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-training framework that reformulates discretized object positions and language in a unified language modeling framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on position-sensitive vision-language (VL) tasks and also improves on position insensitive tasks. |
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. |
GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yufan Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) inherit contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
PRP-Graph: Pairwise Ranking Prompting to LLMs with Graph Aggregation for Effective Text Re-ranking (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for pairing ranking prompting only output the same label for comparison results of different confidence intervals without considering the uncertainty of pairwise comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose a pairwise ranking prompting approach that exploits the output probabilities of target labels to capture the degree of certainty of comparison results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows strong robustness and acceptable efficiency on the BEIR benchmark. |
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. |
ACORD: An Expert-Annotated Retrieval Dataset for Legal Contract Drafting (2025.acl-long)
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Steven H Wang, Maksim Zubkov, Kexin Fan, Sarah Harrell, Yuyang Sun, Wei Chen, Andreas Plesner, Roger Wattenhofer
| Challenge: | Contract clause retrieval is critical to contract drafting because of its high quality and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose the first expert-annotated benchmark specifically designed for contract clause retrieval . ACORD focuses on complex contract clauses such as Limitation of Liability, Indemnification, Change of Control . |
| Outcome: | The atticus clause retrieval dataset shows promising results but needs improvement . the benchmark can be used as an IR benchmark for the NLP community . |
Honey or Poison? Solving the Trigger Curse in Few-shot Event Detection via Causal Intervention (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent supervised ED approaches have achieved promising performance but require large number of manually annotated event data. |
| Approach: | They propose to overfit the trigger confounder of the context and the result . they propose to intervene on the context via backdoor adjustment during training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the FSED on ACE05 and MAVEN datasets. |
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. |
Beyond Natural Language: LLMs Leveraging Alternative Formats for Enhanced Reasoning and Communication (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Weize Chen, Chenfei Yuan, Jiarui Yuan, Yusheng Su, Chen Qian, Cheng Yang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, but its utility in LLMs has not been thoroughly examined. |
| Approach: | They propose to allow LLMs to choose the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating, and to automate the selection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed format improves reasoning efficiency and reduces token usage while maintaining communicative effectiveness. |
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% . |
LEMON: Reviving Stronger and Smaller LMs from Larger LMs with Linear Parameter Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a stronger and smaller model with the help of large models are limited by the model size and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn competent initial points for smaller models by fusing parameters from larger models and introduce controllable receptive fields to model prior parameter characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. |
Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023.emnlp-main)
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Weiwei Sun, Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing work utilizes generative LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. |
| Approach: | They investigate generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in IR and use a test set to verify the model’s ability to rank unknown knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a 3B supervised model on the BEIR benchmark. |
Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Boxi Cao, Qiaoyu Tang, Hongyu Lin, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han, Jiawei Chen, Tianshu Wang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memory formation, but vanilla networks without pre-training suffer catastrophic forgetting problem. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments to investigate the retentive-forgetful contradiction between vanilla and pre-trained language models by controlling the target knowledge types, learning strategies and learning schedules. |
| Outcome: | The results show that pre-trained language models are forgetful and pre-training leads to retentive models . |
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. |
Challenging the Boundaries of Reasoning: An Olympiad-Level Math Benchmark for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for large reasoning models are saturated by a lack of reliable and verifiable benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a rigorously curated, Olympiad-level math benchmark comprising 350 problems, each with parallel English and Chinese versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark unifies two evaluation paradigms and offers 150 problems formalized in Lean 4 for rigorous process-level evaluation. |
Stochastic Bridges as Effective Regularizers for Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for tuning pre-trained language models ignore the running cost and only optimize the terminal cost. |
| Approach: | They propose to use stochastic bridges to regularize intermediate states and use regularization as running cost of PETs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to tune large pre-trained language models . they can be compared to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a small number of parameters . |
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 . |
MultiCodeAttack: Iterative Jailbreak Attacking on LLMs with Multi-Code Prompt Injection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to jailbreak rely on fixed template design and a single programming language . however, existing approaches do not consider language diversity or adaptive template evolution . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured jailbreak framework that explores and optimizes multi-language code templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing jailbreak baselines and produces higher harmful outputs than baseline methods. |
Dangling-Aware Entity Alignment with Mixed High-Order Proximities (2022.findings-naacl)
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Juncheng Liu, Zequn Sun, Bryan Hooi, Yiwei Wang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Xiaokui Xiao, Muhao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dangling-aware entity alignment are underexplored but important problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses high-order proximities to detect dangling entities and align matchable entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects dangling entities and aligns matchable entities better than existing methods. |
Across Programming Language Silos: A Study on Cross-Lingual Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiming Zhu, Jialun Cao, Xuanang Chen, Weili Zhang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Shing-Chi Cheung
| Challenge: | Current research on large language models with retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) has focused on single-language settings, leaving their cross-lingual effectiveness underexplored. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset covering 13 PLs with nearly 14K instances to study cross-lingual code knowledge transfer in RACG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows unequal cross-lingual knowledge transfer even with direct injection and shows limited reliance on natural language information embedded in code when equipped with a code-specific retriever. |
AttnPO: Attention-Guided Process Supervision for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Shuaiyi Nie, null Dingsiyu, Wenyuan Zhang, Linhao Yu, Tianmeng Yang, Yao Chen, Weichong Yin, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing trajectory-level length penalties fail to effectively shorten reasoning length and degrade accuracy, as they treat all reasoning steps uniformly and lack fine-grained signals to distinguish redundancy from necessity. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-overhead process-supervised RL framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic attention signals for step-level credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length while improving performance across 9 benchmarks. |
READIN: A Chinese Multi-Task Benchmark with Realistic and Diverse Input Noises (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Chinese inputs often lack a realistic representation of real-world noises. |
| Approach: | They construct a Chinese multi-task benchmark with REalistic and Diverse input noises . they use pinyin input and speech input to recruit speakers from diverse dialects based on their inputs - a feature that is important for Chinese NLP benchmarks if it is implemented in real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on four different tasks and are designed to maximize diversity. |
DIALOGPT : Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation (2020.acl-demos)
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Yizhe Zhang, Siqi Sun, Michel Galley, Yen-Chun Chen, Chris Brockett, Xiang Gao, Jianfeng Gao, Jingjing Liu, Bill Dolan
| Challenge: | DIALOGPT is a large, tunable neural conversational response generation model . trained on 147M conversation-like exchanges extracted from Reddit comment chains . |
| Approach: | They present a large, tunable neural conversational response generation model, DIALOGPT . the model is trained on 147M conversation-like exchanges extracted from Reddit comment chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more relevant, contentful and context-consistent responses than baseline systems. |
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. |
Semi-Supervised Lexicon Learning for Wide-Coverage Semantic Parsing (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsers rely on accurate and high-coverage lexicons, but they often use annotated logical forms to learn the lexic. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning framework that makes use of large text corpora and lexical resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two benchmarks: Webquestions and Free917. |
Fusing Highly Specialized Language Models for Comprehensive Expertise (2025.acl-long)
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Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Ganqu Cui, Xingtai Lv, Weilin Zhao, Kaiyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing models that focus on language, programming code, and mathematical symbols are not able to achieve mastery of all three domains simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse highly-specialized models that are already sufficiently trained on different domains to achieve a highly-specific model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could achieve mastery of the three crucial domains simultaneously. |
Backdooring Neural Code Search (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural code search models are used to find code snippets from online repositories . however, their security aspect is rarely studied . |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf code snippets from online repositories to find desired code . they propose to inject a backdoor into neural code search models which return buggy code if attacker modifies one variable/function name . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack outperforms baselines on two neural code search models by 60%. |
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. |
TestAgent: An Adaptive and Intelligent Expert for Human Assessment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adaptive testing methods face several challenges due to mechanized nature of most algorithms and noisy response data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to enhance adaptive testing through interactive engagement to capture test-takers’ responses and anomalies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves more accurate results with 20% fewer questions than state-of-the-art baselines and testers preferred it in speed, smoothness, and other dimensions. |
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. |
Detecting Stealthy Backdoor Samples based on Intra-class Distance for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors use classifier-style probability signals or rely on rewriting, which can degrade quality and introduce new triggers. |
| Approach: | They propose to efficiently remove poisoned examples before or during fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms prior detectors on two machine translation datasets and one QA dataset. |
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. |
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. |
SciExplore: Evaluating Autonomous Agents from Scientific Navigation to Information Integration (2026.findings-acl)
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Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun, Wenran Liu, Weiming Zhang, Bin Liu, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks emphasize general-domain retrieval or static scientific question answering . SciExplore focuses on scientific database navigation, ambiguous literature retrieval, missing reference completion, and cross-source structured knowledge synthesis tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate scientific information-seeking and reasoning capabilities of LLMs and agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark assesses the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs and agents in scientific research workflows. |
ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embodied agents focus on directly executing instructions without considering whether objects can be manipulated. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments . they use plug-and-play module that augments existing planners with explicit affordance reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments with unpredictable affordances . ADAPT significantly improves robustness and task success across seen and unseen environments . |
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. |
Not All Terms Matter: Recall-Oriented Adaptive Learning for PLM-aided Query Expansion in Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering (ODQA) systems typically adopt a retriever-reader architecture, where the retriever finds relevant documents, and the reader extracts or synthesizes answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that iteratively adjusts the importance weights of QE terms based on their relevance, refining term distinction and enhancing the separation of relevant terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves retrieval accuracy and overall performance on four ODQA datasets and five QE methods. |
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. |
Does Vision-and-Language Pretraining Improve Lexical Grounding? (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained language models (LMs) have been criticized for lack of grounding, i.e., connecting words to their meanings in the physical world. |
| Approach: | They compare vision-and-language (VL) models trained jointly on text and image or video data to find out how they compare to text-only counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the text-only variants on a commonsense question answering task. |
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Han Weng, Puzhen Wu, Cui Longjie, Yi Zhan, Boyi Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Dun Zeng, Yingxiang Yang, Qianru Zhang, Dong Huang, Xiaoming Yin, Yang Sun, Xing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD. |
When is Tree Search Useful for LLM Planning? It Depends on the Discriminator (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to build language agents that can plan efficiently and accurately have not met the needs of advanced planning methods to achieve such improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use iterative correction and tree search to solve multi-step problems in a language agent framework with three components: a generator, a discriminator, and a planning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on two tasks, text-to-SQL parsing and mathematical reasoning, while using discriminators with 90% accuracy. |
Can Large Language Models Translate Unseen Languages in Underrepresented Scripts? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in machine translation, but struggle with unseen low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate translation for Mongolian and Yi using linguistic resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate Mongolian (in traditional script) and Yi with the help of linguistic resources, but is limited in its ability to handle these languages effectively. |
Contextual Interaction for Argument Post Quality Assessment (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing the quality of natural language arguments are limited . existing methods focus on evaluating individual argument posts, but they often fail to distinguish between arguments with a narrow quality gap. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised contrastive learning to model arguments' quality . large language models with in-context examples harness the power of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on a publicly available dataset . it shows that the LLMs with in-context examples are more effective than baseline models . |
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. |
Automatic Construction of Sememe Knowledge Bases via Dictionaries (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sememe knowledge bases (SKBs) are used to analyze natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build sememe knowledge bases from an existing dictionary . they propose to use existing dictionaries to build an English and a French SKB . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to HowNet, the most widely used SKB that takes decades to build manually. |
Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods aim to gather relevant passages but fail to prioritize consistent and useful information for the reader. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method which re-ranks passages based on the reader's prediction probability distribution and clusters passage according to the predicted answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of evidence passages under zero-shot scenarios. |
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. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Xiaoqian Liu, Xiaowen Liu, Qingxuan Sun, Yuhao Zhang, Murun Yang, Qianqian Dong, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) and non-autoregressive (NAR) generation are promising in language and speech processing for their advantages of less error propagation and low latency. |
| Approach: | They develop a model that uses connectionist temporal classification to predict the source and target texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average BLEU score of 29.5 with a speed-up of 5.67. |
DeepNote: Note-Centric Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ruobing Wang, Qingfei Zhao, Yukun Yan, Daren Zha, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Yixuan Wang, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | . - (EN) |
| Approach: | . - (EN) |
| Outcome: | . - (EN) |
Outdated Issue Aware Decoding for Factual Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods retain outdated responses for reasoning questions . naively retraining LLMs can be computationally intensive and can lead to catastrophic forgetting . |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective decoding strategy to enhance edited models on reasoning questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outDates ISsue aware deCOding (DISCO) to improve models on reasoning questions. |
Improving Low-resource Question Answering by Augmenting Question Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Andong Chen, Yuan Sun, Xiaobing Zhao, Rosella Galindo Esparza, Kehai Chen, Yang Xiang, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-resource questions pose a significant challenge within the field of Question-Answering (QA) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large models' internal knowledge to enhance the quality of augmented data by Prompt Answer, Question Generation, and Question Filter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing augmentation strategies on high-resource QA tasks like SQUAD1.1 and TriviaQA. |
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. |
Tooling or Not Tooling? The Impact of Tools on Language Agents for Chemistry Problem Solving (2025.findings-naacl)
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Botao Yu, Frazier N. Baker, Ziru Chen, Garrett Herb, Boyu Gou, Daniel Adu-Ampratwum, Xia Ning, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) with tools are limited and qualitative . existing evaluations have been limited and only focus on 14 tasks focusing on compound synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop an enhanced chemistry agent over ChemCrow to improve chemistry problem solving by integrating tools into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent does not consistently outperform its base LLMs without tools on specialized chemistry tasks and general chemistry questions. |
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. |
Feedback to Reasoning: LLM-Assisted Molecular Optimization with Domain Feedback and Historical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenhan Gao, Xiran Fan, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Jiarui Sun, Yuzhong Chen, Menghai Pan, Mahashweta Das, Yi Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for molecular optimization do not leverage domain feedback and historical knowledge with reasoning traces and chemical insights. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational molecular optimization pipeline that enables LLMs to accumulate and retrieve past actions, rationales, and feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms LLMs from passive text generators into agentic experts that learn both actions and reasoning from experience. |
Inner Thinking Transformer: Leveraging Dynamic Depth Scaling to Foster Adaptive Internal Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yanxi Xie, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models face inherent performance bottlenecks under parameter constraints . challenging tokens induce abrupt gradient spikes across layers, exposing stress points . |
| Approach: | They propose an inner thinking transformer that reimagines layer computations as implicit thinking steps. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that ITT outperforms Transformer/Loop variants in 11 benchmarks. |
Mask-Align: Self-Supervised Neural Word Alignment (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Word alignment is an important task in many natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised word alignment model that takes advantage of the full context on the target side. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous unsupervised models and obtains state-of-the-art results on four language pairs. |
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. |
AfriInstruct: Instruction Tuning of African Languages for Diverse Tasks (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) for African languages perform worse compared to high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that specializes in instruction-tuning of multiple African languages covering various tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3.5-Turbo and other models of similar size in multiple tasks. |
Do Trajectories Encode Verb Meaning? (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Distributional models learn representations of words from text but lack grounding or the linking of text to the non-linguistic world. |
| Approach: | They investigate the extent to which trajectories naturally encode verb semantics . they build a procedurally generated agent-object-interaction dataset and compare methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture verb semantics by tracing trajectories and self-supervised pretraining. |
NACL: A General and Effective KV Cache Eviction Framework for LLM at Inference Time (2024.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Guoxia Wang, Junyuan Shang, Shiyao Cui, Zhenyu Zhang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Dianhai Yu, Hua Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context windows are expensive and infeasible on fixed memory hardware due to the surprisingly large memory consumption of KV Cache. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework for long-context KV cache eviction that achieves more optimal and efficient evict in a single operation during the encoding phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on short- and long-text tasks by 80% and 76% respectively, reducing KV Cache by up to 5 with over 95% performance maintenance. |
Learning from Cognition: Enhancing RL Efficiency for LLM Reasoning via Hierarchical Metacognitive Decomposition and Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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Zexu Sun, Yongcheng Zeng, Erxue Min, Heyang Gao, Bokai Ji, Dugang Liu, Xing Tang, Xiuqiang He, Xu Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have demonstrated notable inferential capacities via reinforcement learning (RL) however, “zero-RL” approaches relying on fixed prompt templates introduce substantial sampling inefficiencies for weak LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical metacognitive RL framework that decomposes zero-accuracy problems into subproblems and prompts the policy to refine answers by referencing previous wrong solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves sample utilization and sample efficiency and accelerates convergence compared to baselines. |
PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogue models in providing emotional support due to the lack of human resources for mental health support. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dynamically inferring and modeling seekers’ persona from the conversation history and a model that leverages persona information to provide personalized emotional support. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the studied benchmark. |
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 . |
AI-Press: A Multi-Agent News Generating and Feedback Simulation System Powered by Large Language Models (2025.coling-demos)
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Xiawei Liu, Shiyue Yang, Xinnong Zhang, Haoyu Kuang, Libo Sun, Yihang Yang, Siming Chen, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | We introduce AI-Press, an automated news drafting and polishing system based on multi-agent collaboration and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. |
| Approach: | They introduce AI-Press, an automated news drafting and polishing system based on multi-agent collaboration and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates public responses considering demographic distributions. |
Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not linked the behavior of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with imperfect retrieval, including irrelevant, misleading, or even malicious information. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates external knowledge with source-awareness to overcome imperfect retrieval errors in RAG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is superior to previous robustness-enhanced approaches under the worst-case scenario. |
A Hierarchical Reinforced Sequence Operation Method for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing text style transfer methods face three challenges: 1) the transfer is weakly interpretable; 2) generated outputs struggle in content preservation; 3) the trade-off between content and style is intractable. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reinforced sequence operation method that proposes operation positions and alters the sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on two text style transfer datasets. |
Knowledge Extraction on Semi-Structured Content: Does It Remain Relevant for Question Answering in the Era of LLMs? (2026.eacl-long)
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Kai Sun, Yin Huang, Srishti Mehra, Mohammad Kachuee, Xilun Chen, Renjie Tao, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Jessee, Nirav Shah, Alex L Betty, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on knowledge extraction for question answering questions whether it is still relevant for question answerrs. |
| Approach: | They extend an existing benchmark with knowledge extraction annotations and evaluate commercial and open-source LLMs of varying sizes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve high QA accuracy, but can still benefit from knowledge extraction through augmentation with extracted triples and multi-task learning. |
Cross-Lingual Contrastive Learning for Fine-Grained Entity Typing for Low-Resource Languages (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that by applying our framework, we can easily learn effective FGET models for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual contrastive learning framework to learn FGET models for low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn effective FGET models for low-resource languages even without human-labeled data. |
Holistic Sentence Embeddings for Better Out-of-Distribution Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have shown superior performance for textual OOD detection, but they estimate sample distance scores in the last-layer CLS embedding space. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token averaging and layer combination to boost OOD detection by deriving more holistic sentence embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art on a comprehensive suite of benchmarks by a 9.33% FAR95 margin. |
CoCoNUTS: Concentrating on Content while Neglecting Uninformative Textual Styles for AI-Generated Peer Review Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors rely on stylistic cues to distinguish between surface-level language refinement and genuine content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a content-based detection paradigm to detect substantive AI-generation . they propose 'CoCoDet' detector that can detect surface-level language refinement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector achieves a macro F1 score of 98.24% on permissible machine-polished reviews and maintains 3.89% false positive rate on real-world reviews. |
Value type: the bridge to a better DST model (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Value type of the slots can provide lots of useful information for DST tasks. however, it has been ignored in most previous works. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework for DST task based on slot value type . they propose to extract the type of token from each turn and train a Ner model to extract corresponding type-entity from each conversation according to the token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective on two multi-domain task-oriented conversation datasets. |
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. |
The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Dan Wang, Boxi Cao, Ning Bian, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Le Sun, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent studies have discovered notable disparities in their performance across different languages. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic investigation into the behaviors of large language models across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios and reveals a Linguistic Map correlates with the richness of available resources and linguistic family relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model demonstrates that there are significant disparities in performance across languages across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios. |
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. |
Rethinking Data Mixing from the Perspective of Large Language Models (2026.acl-short)
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Yuanjian Xu, Tianze Sun, Changwei Xu, XinLong Zhao, Jianing Hao, Ran Chen, Yang Liu, Ruijie Xu, Stephen Chen, Guang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to mix data with LLMs have relied on domain definitions derived from intuition. |
| Approach: | They propose a reweighting framework that restructures data scheduling as a graph-constrained optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on GPT-2 models. |
Emergence of Abstract State Representations in Embodied Sequence Modeling (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sequence modeling is a simple yet versatile task that can be applied to more complex decision-making domains. |
| Approach: | They build a sequence modeling Transformer which takes a language instruction, actions, and environmental observations as inputs and then trains a model to reconstruct environmental layouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reconstruct environmental layouts from the inputs of the model and language instructions play a role in the reconstruction accuracy. |
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. |
Incorporating Fine-grained Events in Stock Movement Prediction (D19-51)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies mainly adopt coarse-grained events, which loses the specific semantic information of diverse event types. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a finance event dictionary to extract fine-grained events from finance news to train a neural model that uses the extracted events as the distant supervised label to train stock prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and has good generalizability. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Have We Designed Generalizable Structural Knowledge Promptings? Systematic Evaluation and Rethinking (2025.acl-long)
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Yichi Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lingbing Guo, Yajing Xu, Shaokai Chen, Mengshu Sun, Binbin Hu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Lei Liang, Wen Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external knowledge into LLMs focus on specific problems, lacking a comprehensive exploration of the generalization and capability boundaries of SKP. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for structural knowledge prompting to integrate external structural knowledge into LLMs by incorporating structural representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark SUBARU enables the evaluation of the generalization capabilities of SKP from four perspectives. |
Scaling Laws or Threshold Effects: Exploring the Optimal Vocabulary Size for Balancing Performance and Efficiency in Low-Resource Languages (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | vocab expansion scaling laws are well-established for high-resource languages, but they remain unverified in low-resourced settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale trilingual vocabulary for languages with 140 to 195,000 tokens . they find that BBPE follows a "decline-then-rise" pattern, whereas BPE improves monotonically . |
| Outcome: | The proposed configuration reduces pre-training duration by over 71% across 1.5B to 8B models while improving downstream performance. |
MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Xiang Yue, Tianyu Zheng, Yuansheng Ni, Yubo Wang, Kai Zhang, Shengbang Tong, Yuxuan Sun, Botao Yu, Ge Zhang, Huan Sun, Yu Su, Wenhu Chen, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models have led to progress in tackling complex reasoning tasks that combine textual and visual information. |
| Approach: | They introduce a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs lower on MMMU-Pro than on the previous benchmark, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9%. |
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. |
MoLA: MoE LoRA with Layer-wise Expert Allocation (2025.findings-naacl)
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Chongyang Gao, Kezhen Chen, Jinmeng Rao, Ruibo Liu, Baochen Sun, Yawen Zhang, Daiyi Peng, Xiaoyuan Guo, Vs Subrahmanian
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to integrate low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have achieved performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning much fewer parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient MoE method for low-rank adaptation with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) they use layers of LoRA experts to allocate more LoRA expert to middle layers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on six well-known NLP and commonsense QA benchmarks on LLAMA-2, Mistral, and Gemma. |
CapArena: Benchmarking and Analyzing Detailed Image Captioning in the LLM Era (2025.findings-acl)
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Kanzhi Cheng, Wenpo Song, Jiaxin Fan, Zheng Ma, Qiushi Sun, Fangzhi Xu, Chenyang Yan, Nuo Chen, Jianbing Zhang, Jiajun Chen
| Challenge: | Image captioning has been a challenge for vision-language researchers for decades . current VLMs focus on tasks like visual question answering (YA) but image captioning is not as advanced as expected. |
| Approach: | They evaluate VLMs' performance on image captioning using human annotations . they find that some metrics show high caption-level agreement with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models on image captioning . it achieves 93.4% correlation with human rankings at $4 per test . |
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. |
Hybrid Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder Modeling for Speech-to-Text Tasks (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural based end-to-end frameworks have achieved remarkable success in speech-totext tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech- totext translation (ST). |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) for speech-to-text tasks and leverage AED's strength in non-monotonic sequence to sequence learning while retaining Transducers streaming property. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) on the MuST-C dataset and shows that it is not bound by any specific language model. |
Learning First-Order Logic Rules for Argumentation Mining (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Sun, Guanrong Chen, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Jianzhu Bao, Yuqi Huang, Bin Liang, Kam-Fai Wong, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Argumentation Mining (AM) aims to extract argumentative structures from texts by identifying argumentation components (ACs) and their argumentative relations (ARs). |
| Approach: | They propose a First- Order Logic reasoning framework for AM to capture logical reasoning paths within argumentative texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines while significantly improving explainability. |
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. |
Jailbreak LLMs through Internal Stance Manipulation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to exploit LLMs' inherent safety mechanism, including GCG and AutoDAN, are ineffective for certain malicious requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates jailbreak prompts to suppress a refusal stance and induce affirmative responses by modifying adversarial prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the best baseline approach in Llama-2-7b-chat and achieves a 92.2% success rate across all models. |
Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained vision and language models have demonstrated state-of-the-art capabilities over existing tasks involving images and texts. |
| Approach: | They analyze a visual question answering dataset tailored for info-seeking questions . they show that pre-trained visual and language models can use fine-grained knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset elicits models to use fine-grained knowledge learned during pre-training. |
Large Language Models as an Indirect Reasoner: Contrapositive and Contradiction for Automated Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on improving the ability of Large Language Models to perform complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Direct-Indirect Reasoning method that integrates DR and IR as parallel reasoning paths that are merged to derive the final answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on four datasets related to logical reasoning and proof. |
Thought-Action Graph Reasoning: Faithful and Efficient Reasoning of Large Language Models via Reusing Past Experience (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhixiao Qi, Feng Huang, Yunqi Zhang, Shijie Zhang, Qingqing Sun, Yongfeng Huang, Minghu Jiang, Shuai Chen, Tianyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs with LLMs suffer from poor generalization or low reasoning efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a thought-action Graph (TAG) that decomposes LLM-KG interaction trajectories into fine-grained semantic operators and guides LLM to execute on them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on KGQA benchmarks while reducing the number of LLM calls and generated tokens. |
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. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
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. |
Improving Question Answering with External Knowledge (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | ARC-Easy, ARC Challenge, and OpenBookQA use Wikipedia to augment training data . performance degrades when additional instances exhibit higher difficulty than original training data. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods for exploiting external knowledge for QA in science . they enrich the original corpus with relevant text snippets from an open-domain resource . the second method simply increases the amount of training data by appending additional in-domain instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve gains in accuracy of 8.1%, 13.0%, and 12.8% on science QA tasks. |
AdaLoGN: Adaptive Logic Graph Network for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and limitations for machine reading comprehension are insufficient for logical reasoning over text. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic approach which passes messages over a graph representing logical relations between text units to predict an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on ReClor and LogiQA. |
EDU-CIRCUIT-HW: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Real-World University-Level STEM Student Handwritten Solutions (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are a promising tool for traditional education but lack authentic and domain-specific benchmarks to accurately interpret student handwritten solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MLLMs to interpret unconstrained STEM student handwritten solutions with intertwined mathematical formulas, diagrams, and textual reasoning to bridge this gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect and rectify recognition errors with minimal human intervention on unseen student solutions. |
AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents have strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based generalizable reward model to guide the policy model for effective test-time search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agentRM outperforms existing agents on held-in tasks by 8.8 points on average. |
The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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Bingxiang He, Ning Ding, Cheng Qian, Jia Deng, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Haiwen Hong, Huan-ang Gao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Huimin Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing work on instruction tuning has focused on task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training data arrangement framework that allows for continual learning and loss reduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework promotes continual learning and loss reduction on unseen tasks. |
HiChunk: Evaluating and Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Chunking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for document chunking are inadequate due to evidence sparsity . evaluators are unable to evaluate different chunking methods due to the evidence sparing . |
| Approach: | They propose a QA benchmark for document chunking and a hierarchical document structuring framework for it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves document chunking quality within reasonable time consumption. |
M3AV: A Multimodal, Multigenre, and Multipurpose Audio-Visual Academic Lecture Dataset (2024.acl-long)
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Zhe Chen, Heyang Liu, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hongcheng Liu, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emerging approach to sharing knowledge online. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset with human annotations for multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. |
Data-Centric Improvements for Enhancing Multi-Modal Understanding in Spoken Conversation Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Conversational assistants are increasingly popular across diverse real-world applications . speech data constitute high-dimensional signals that are difficult to model even for frontier models . |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric customization approach for enhancing multimodal understanding in conversational speech modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the Spoken-SQuAD benchmark using 10% of training data with open-weight models. |
CoTD-PO: Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lujie Niu, Haochen Sun, Fangkun Zhao, Sheng Chen, Zimeng Bai, Jiawei Zhang, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought distillation suffer from a distribution mismatch between teacher-generated training trajectories and the student model's own generative distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the training paradigm from passive imitation to active trajectory exploration by allowing students to sample their own answer paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard CoT distillation baselines while mitigating mode collapse and preserving semantic diversity. |
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. |
Reverse Chain: A Generic-Rule for LLMs to Master Multi-API Planning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enable large language models to implement function calling are limited in their tool-use capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable, target-driven approach to empower LLMs to operate external APIs only via prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach limits LLMs to executing simple tasks, e.g., API Selection and Argument Completion. |
How Trustworthy are Open-Source LLMs? An Assessment under Malicious Demonstrations Shows their Vulnerabilities (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Rapid progress in open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) is driving AI development, but lacks sufficient trustworthiness to detect and mitigate adversarial demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose an extended Chain of Utterances-based (CoU) prompting strategy to attack open-source LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack strategy is based on malicious demonstrations and toxicity tests on open-source models. |
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. |
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. |
Linking Knowledge to Care: Knowledge Graph-Augmented Medical Follow-Up Question Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) fail to identify information gaps across diverse symptoms. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-augmented LLM with active in-context learning to generate relevant and important follow-up questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5% - 8% on relevant benchmarks. |
PRA-RAG: Provably Robust Aggregation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation against Retrieval Corruption (2026.findings-acl)
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Xue Tan, Yi Zheng, Chang Huo, Yunruo Zhang, Yu Liu, Hao Luan, Zhuyang Yu, Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, Ping Chen
| Challenge: | Existing defense mechanisms lack theoretical robustness guarantees and perform unreliably when the LLM has limited knowledge of the retrieved content. |
| Approach: | They propose a provably robust retrieval aggregation algorithm designed to defend against poisoning attacks on retrieved texts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PRA-RAG reduces the attack success rate to as low as 1% while maintaining an accuracy of 71%, significantly outperforming representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. |
Enhancing the Prototype Network with Local-to-Global Optimization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Relation Extraction (RE) is a task that aims to extract semantic relationships from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a local optimization strategy that indirectly optimizes the prototypical networks by optimizing the other information contained within the prototypes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the FewRel 1.0 and FewRela 2.0 datasets. |
Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity matching (EM) is a critical step in entity resolution (ER). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates record interactions from different perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on 8 ER datasets and 10 LLMs and achieves higher efficiency and effectiveness. |
UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising potential for performing end-to-end KIE directly from document images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) using a constrained-category KIE track and an open-categorical KIE Track. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 state-of-the-art LMMs show performance degradation under diverse schema definitions, long-tail key fields, and complex layouts, along with pronounced performance disparities across different document types and scenarios. |
Too Consistent to Detect: A Study of Self-Consistent Errors in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hexiang Tan, Fei Sun, Sha Liu, Du Su, Qi Cao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing detection methods fail to account for **self-consistent error** . study identifies self-consistency errors and evaluates them . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fuses hidden state evidence from an external verifier LLM to detect self-consistent errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly enhances performance on self-consistent errors across three LLM families. |
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. |
Transfer Learning for Text Classification via Model Risk Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text classification are limited by distribution drift and misprediction risk. |
| Approach: | They propose a model risk analysis approach to adapt a pre-trained DNN model to a new dataset given only a small set of representative data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs considerably better than existing approaches on real datasets. |
BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Baitao Gong, Yingfa Chen, Xu Han, Guoyang Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Yanxu Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to compress medium-sized models for specific tasks have limited results. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic compression toolkit for big models that implements quantization, pruning, distillation and MoEfication methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool improves performance on a model with 3 billion parameters by 12x . it also outperforms the original model on three typical NLP benchmarks. |
Reflective RAG: Self-Evaluation Driven Strategy Optimization in Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent agentic RAG systems lack the capacity to evaluate the utility of retrieved information, leading to brittle reasoning and suboptimal decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates self-evaluation to dynamically optimize retrieval and generation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong agentic baselines on five knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks and improves training stability and generalization to multi-hop reasoning tasks. |
Towards Imperceptible Document Manipulations against Neural Ranking Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to detect vulnerabilities in neural ranking models often introduce noticeable errors and require a well-imitated surrogate NRM to guarantee the attack effect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework called Imperceptible DocumEnt Manipulation to produce adversarial documents that are less noticeable to both algorithms and humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines while maintaining fluency and correctness of the target documents. |
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. |
Act as you think: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Medical Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Songtao Jiang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Yan Zhang, Ruilin Luo, Bohan Lei, Yeying Jin, Sibo Song, ZhiBo Yang, Jimeng Sun, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances have improved the accuracy of medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) however, the high stakes nature of the medical domain has precipitated a shift towards interpretability and transparency of reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards framework that rewards internal consistency and logical coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework rewards internal consistency and logical coherence, and is highly versatile, the authors show. |
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. |
An Exploratory Study on Model Compression for Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL translates user queries into SQL statements that can retrieve relevant answers from relational databases. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply model compression techniques to sketch-based and sequence-to-sequence Text-toSQL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models have higher inference efficiency and respond better to model compression than sequence-to-sequence models. |
Boosting Inference Efficiency: Unleashing the Power of Parameter-Shared Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-shared pre-trained language models (PLMs) have emerged as a successful approach in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the inference efficiency of parameter-shared PLMs by pre-training models that can achieve even greater acceleration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves inference efficiency on autoregressive and autoencoding models. |
English-Myanmar Supervised and Unsupervised NMT: NICT’s Machine Translation Systems at WAT-2019 (D19-52)
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| Challenge: | NICT participated in the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT-2019) shared translation task, specifically Myanmar (My) - English task in both translation directions. |
| Approach: | They present the participation of the NICT in the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT-2019) shared translation task, specifically Myanmar (Burmese) - English task in both translation directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems perform the third in English-to-Myanmar and the second in Myanmar-to English according to BLEU score. |
RolePlot: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing the Plot-Progression Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on role-playing agents’ ability to portray specified characters, but their ability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing framework to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of role-players. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves RPAs’ ability to time plot developments and yields a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels. |
Cost-Optimal Grouped-Query Attention for Long-Context Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Yutong Wu, Chenyang Song, Zhen Leng Thai, Xingyu Shen, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current GQA configurations overlook how context length influences inference cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a recipe for deriving cost-optimal GQA configurations that decouple the total head size from the hidden size and allow more flexible control over attention FLOPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed configurations reduce memory usage and FLOPs by more than 50% compared to Llama-3's GQA, with *no degradation in model capabilities*. |
Robust Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Adversarial Denoising Training (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) has attracted great interest in the machine translation community. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly take noisy data into consideration to improve the robustness of UNMT based systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly improved the robustness of the conventional UNMT systems in noisy scenarios. |
SpecHub: Provable Acceleration to Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have limited inference speed due to sequential token generation . Spechub is a novel, efficient sampling-verification method for MDSD that improves acceptance rates with only linear computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a smaller draft model to generate multiple token sequences . Spechub generates 0.05-0.27 and 0.02-0.16 more tokens per step than RRS and RRS without replacement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves acceptance rates with only linear computational overhead. |
CodeRise: Bootstrapping LLMs for Ultra Low-Resource Programming Languages via Progressive Self-Refinement Curriculum (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training data generation for low-resource languages suffer from a cold-start problem and lack diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that generates a high-quality, diverse, and progressively complex curriculum for Ultra Low-Resource Programming Languages (ULRPLs) they leverage the full formal syntax of the target language as structural guidance and apply a biased sampling strategy over library modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms training-free and training-based baselines on two ULRPLs, Tengo and Janet. |
Third-Person Appraisal Agent: Simulating Human Emotional Reasoning in Text with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Emotional reasoning is essential for improving human-AI interactions, especially in mental health support and empathetic systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a third-person appraisal agent that simulates human-like emotional reasoning through three phases: Primary Appraisal, Secondary Appraisals, and Reappraisal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline LLMs in various emotional reasoning tasks, demonstrating superior generalization and interpretability. |
Adaptive Simultaneous Sign Language Translation with Confident Translation Length Estimation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-simultaneous sign language translation methods suffer from inherent inference delays in real-time scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive policy for simultaneous sign language translation that progressively converts incrementally received sign video into its corresponding natural sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed policy excels in situations requiring extremely low latency. |
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. |
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 . |
KERAG: Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Advanced Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely on semantic parsing to retrieve knowledge strictly necessary for answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-filtering-summarization pipeline that enhances QA coverage by retrieving a broader subgraph likely to contain relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art solutions by about 7% in quality and exceeds GPT-4o (Tool) by 10-21%. |
GUICourse: From General Vision Language Model to Versatile GUI Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Wentong Chen, Junbo Cui, Jinyi Hu, Yujia Qin, Junjie Fang, Yue Zhao, Chongyi Wang, Jun Liu, Guirong Chen, Yupeng Huo, Yuan Yao, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are a pivotal medium for human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of datasets for training visual-based GUI agents using general VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUICourse datasets show that even a small-sized GUI agent performs better on GUI tasks. |
RIVA: A Pre-trained Tweet Multimodal Model Based on Text-image Relation for Multimodal NER (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (MNER) for tweets is a key task of many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained multimodal named entity recognition model based on Relationship Inference and Visual Attention (RIVA) for tweets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) task on tweets with the aid of visual clues. |
ANALOGYKB: Unlocking Analogical Reasoning of Language Models with A Million-scale Knowledge Base (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ANALOGYKB is a million-scale analogy knowledge base based on existing knowledge graphs (KGs) based upon relational knowledge triples, we can discover new analogies using the corresponding relations between concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a million-scale analogy knowledge base derived from existing knowledge graphs (KGs) ANALOGYKB identifies analogies of the same relations and analogies from analogous relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables both smaller LMs and LLMs to gain better analogical reasoning capabilities. |
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. |
A Span-level Bidirectional Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a new fine-grained sentiment analysis task . recent studies have focused on solving aspects term extraction, opinion term extraction and aspect-level sentiment classification tasks individually or in combination of two subtasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-level bidirectional network which utilizes all possible spans as input and extracts triplets from spans bidirectionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and improves performance . it can extract triplets of aspect terms, sentiments, and opinion terms from review sentences . |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
How Do Large Language Models Perform in Dynamical System Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent data-driven methods often use graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn interactions between objects. |
| Approach: | They propose prompting techniques for dynamical system modeling and evaluate their performance . they find that large language models demonstrate competitive performance without training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show competitive performance without training compared to state-of-the-art methods in dynamical system modeling. |
LEAF: Large Language Diffusion Model for Time Series Forecasting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has applied large language models (LLMs) into time series forecasting, but they lack an understanding of holistic temporal patterns with potential error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that marries Larg e Langu age Diffusion Model with time series forecasting (LEAF) they propose converting time series into tokens and adopting language diffusion models to capture temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates future predictions with a diffusion model from a holistic view. |
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. |
Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code (2023.acl-short)
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Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Michael White, Raymond Mooney, Ali Payani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Yu Su, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers are not accurate enough for use in text-to-SQL parsing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to build clause-level edit models to correct SQL queries instead of token-level ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the exact set match accuracy of different parsers by 2.4-6.5 and obtains up to 4.3 point absolute improvement over two strong baselines. |
Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed an explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs), with impressive performance on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image-based representations to compare LLMs' performance on table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking to determine their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on image-based representations than on text-based models. |
User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2025.acl-industry)
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Jianling Wang, Yifan Liu, Yinghao Sun, Xuejian Ma, Yueqi Wang, He Ma, Zhengyang Su, Minmin Chen, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Ningren Han, Haokai Lu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to broaden user experiences beyond established preferences and reinforce feedback loops. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical approach that combines hierarchic planning with LLM inference-time scaling to improve recommendation relevancy without compromising novelty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows significant gains in both user satisfaction and exploration diversity. |
ItD: Large Language Models Can Teach Themselves Induction through Deduction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) have limited ability to conduct induction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable LLMs to teach themselves induction through deduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on two induction benchmarks and shows that it can be used to teach induction through deduction. |
Parsing into Variable-in-situ Logico-Semantic Graphs (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new type of graph-based meaning representation allows analysis for scope-related phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose variable-in-situ logico-semantic graphs to bridge gap between semantic graph and logical form parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph-based meaning representation achieves 92.39% accuracy in terms of elementary dependency match . the output of the proposed parser is highly coherent . |
Expose Backdoors on the Way: A Feature-Based Efficient Defense against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing online backdoor defense methods for NLP models focus on anomalies at input or output level, causing fragility to adaptive attacks and high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature-based online defense method to detect poisoned samples . they use a distance-based anomaly score to distinguish poisones from clean samples based on feature-level regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in sentiment analysis and offense detection tasks. |
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. |
Exploring Chain of Thought Style Prompting for Text-to-SQL (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning with large language models (LLMs) has recently caught increasing attention due to its superior few-shot performance on various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new chain of thought prompting method that enhances LLMs’ reasoning ability through chain of thinking prompting, including the original chain-of-thought prompting and least-to-most prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method brings 5.2 and 6.5 point absolute gains on the Spider development set and the Spider Realistic set, respectively, compared to the standard prompting method without reasoning steps; 2.4 and 1.5 point absolute gain, versus the least-to-most prompting. |
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. |
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. |
The Security Threat of Compressed Projectors in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mainstream VLPs have significant security implications, but their security implications have not been thoroughly examined. |
| Approach: | a study evaluates the security of visual language projectors by comparing them to uncompressed projector. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation reveals significant differences in security profiles between compressed and uncompressed projectors. |
Discourse Structure-Aware Prefix for Generation-Based End-to-End Argumentation Mining (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in AM models overlook the integration of supplementary discourse structure information, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which generates discourse structure-aware prefixes for each layer of the generation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two AM benchmarks. |
Aligning Large Language Models to Follow Instructions and Hallucinate Less via Effective Data Filtering (2025.acl-long)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Gang Chen, Cheng Gao, Yuzhuo Bai, Zhitong Wang, Kaikai An, Kangyang Luo, Chen Qian, Fanchao Qi, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that training LLMs on data containing unfamiliar knowledge during instruction tuning can encourage hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures how familiar the LLM is with instruction data and introduce an expert-aligned reward model to ensure the quality of selected samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucinations while maintaining a competitive ability to follow instructions. |
Code-SPA: Style Preference Alignment to Large Language Models for Effective and Robust Code Debugging (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in coding tasks like code generation and debugging. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which aligns noisy code with the well-structured style familiar to LLMs, mitigating the impact of stylistic inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves debugging performance on poorly styled code across the HumanEval, MBPP and EvalPlus datasets. |
HearSay Benchmark: Do Audio LLMs Leak What They Hear? (2026.findings-acl)
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Jin Wang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Weiliu Wang, Yitian Chen, Moayad Aloqaily, Xuehai Tang, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio large language models have led to their potential privacy implications unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to examine whether ALLMs leak user privacy through acoustic voiceprints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from over 22,000 real-world audio clips. |
Adaptive Helpfulness–Harmlessness Alignment with Preference Vectors (2026.eacl-long)
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Ren-Wei Liang, Chin Ting Hsu, Chan-Hung Yu, Saransh Agrawal, Shih-Cheng Huang, Chieh-Yen Lin, Shang-Tse Chen, Kuan-Hao Huang, Shao-Hua Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to balancing helpfulness and harmlessness suffer from performance conflicts, limited controllability, and poor extendability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to control their own preferences and dynamically merge them at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves helpfulness without conservatism and smooth control over preference trade-offs. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT-3 have shown strong in-context learning capabilities, which are appealing for domains such as biomedicine that feature high and diverse demands of language technologies but also high data annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the few-shot performance of GPT-3 in-context learning with fine-tuning smaller (i.e., BERT-sized) PLMs on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model underperforms on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks. |
Stop When Enough: Adaptive Early-Stopping for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that adaptively determines when to stop reasoning to mitigate overthinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by 20-55% while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to standard CoT prompting. |
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets agents learn shortcuts from their past tasks and use them for future task execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. |
EUSP: An Easy-to-Use Semantic Parsing PlatForm (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsing aims to map natural language utterances into structured meaning representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular platform that allows developers to build semantic parser from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform achieves competitive performance on semantic parsing task and improves performance of a business search engine. |
Probabilistic Graph Reasoning for Natural Proof Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reasoning over formal representations do not explicitly consider inter-dependency between answers and proofs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for joint answer prediction and proof generation using an induced graphical model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 10%-30% improvement on QA accuracy in evaluations under diverse conditions. |
Sample-Efficient Human Evaluation of Large Language Models via Maximum Discrepancy Competition (2025.acl-long)
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Kehua Feng, Keyan Ding, Tan Hongzhi, Kede Ma, Zhihua Wang, Shuangquan Guo, Cheng Yuzhou, Ge Sun, Guozhou Zheng, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluation of large language models are inefficient and inefficient due to inaccuracy of standard metrics in human perception of text quality and inefficiency in sampling informative test examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-efficient human evaluation method for large language models based on the principle of MAximum Discrepancy (MAD) competition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the “golden” ranking of LLMs with a minimum set of input instructions, which in turn reveal their relative strengths and weaknesses. |
V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun, Yida Xu, Yadong Xue, Ye Tian, Zhimin Bao, Lan Yang, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Deciphering oracle bone scripts using AI technology is not an overnight task due to the evolution of written language over millennia. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting Oracle Bone Script (OBS). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability. |
Benchmarking Contextual and Paralinguistic Reasoning in Speech-LLMs: A Case Study with In-the-Wild Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Qiongqiong Wang, Hardik Bhupendra Sailor, Tianchi Liu, Wenyu Zhang, Muhammad Huzaifah, Nattadaporn Lertcheva, Shuo Sun, Nancy F. Chen, Jinyang Wu, AiTi Aw
| Challenge: | Recent speech-LLMs have shown impressive performance in tasks like transcription and translation, yet they remain limited in understanding the paralinguistic aspects of speech crucial for social and emotional intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating speech-LLMs on contextual paralinguistic reasoning . the benchmark includes curated question answering datasets requiring both linguistic and empathetic understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals a key gap in existing evaluations and offers insights into building more context-aware and emotionally intelligent LLMs. |
Beat LLMs at Their Own Game: Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection via Querying ChatGPT (2023.emnlp-main)
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Biru Zhu, Lifan Yuan, Ganqu Cui, Yangyi Chen, Chong Fu, Bingxiang He, Yangdong Deng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Ming Gu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of performing tasks but are likely to be misused. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot black-box method to detect LLM-generated texts . they revise the text to be detected using the ChatGPT model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect LLM-generated texts with a zero-shot black-box model . it is based on intuition that the model will make fewer revisions to LLMs than to human-written texts . |
MMChat: Multi-Modal Chat Dataset on Social Media (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Incorporating multi-modal contexts in conversation is important for developing engaging dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a large scale Chinese multi-modal dialogue corpus that contains image-grounded dialogues from real conversations on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle sparsity issues in dialogue generation tasks by incorporating image features. |
Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Xu Han, Zihang Xu, Yuanwei Xu, Weilin Zhao, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly permeating daily lives and require real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use time-division-multiplexing to process queries and responses pseudo-simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can listen to users while generating output and adjust to provide instant feedback. |
LoRATK: LoRA Once, Backdoor Everywhere in the Share-and-Play Ecosystem (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyi Liu, Shaochen Zhong, Xintong Sun, Minghao Tian, Mohsen Hariri, Zirui Liu, Ruixiang Tang, Zhimeng Jiang, Jiayi Yuan, Yu-Neng Chuang, Li Li, Soo-Hyun Choi, Rui Chen, Vipin Chaudhary, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | distributing LLMs without a proven track record like ‘meta-llama‘ or ‘qwen‘ rarely gains community traction. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple, efficient, yet specific recipe for a backdoor LoRA to be injected into task-enhancing LoRAs and examine the mechanisms of such infections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model allows attackers to scale the distribution of compromised LoRAs with minimal effort by leveraging the rich pool of shared LoRA assets. |
LLM-as-a-Coauthor: Can Mixed Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text Be Detected? (2024.findings-naacl)
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Qihui Zhang, Chujie Gao, Dongping Chen, Yue Huang, Yixin Huang, Zhenyang Sun, Shilin Zhang, Weiye Li, Zhengyan Fu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun
| Challenge: | Current research focuses on purely MGT detection without adequately addressing mixed scenarios including AI-revised Human-Written Text (HWT) and human-revealed MGT. |
| Approach: | They define mixtext, a form of mixed text involving both AI and human-generated content, and then use a MixSet dataset to assess their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detectors struggle to identify mixtext, particularly in dealing with subtle modifications and style adaptability. |
From Perceptions to Decisions: Wildfire Evacuation Decision Prediction with Behavioral Theory-informed LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing statistical methods for evacuation decision prediction fail to capture complex and diverse behavioral logic of different individuals. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework that integrates behavioral theories and models to streamline the Chain-of-Thought reasoning and integrates with memory-based Reinforcement Learning module to provide accurate evacuation decision prediction and understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three post-wildfire survey datasets with strong cross-event generalizability over existing models. |
Knowledge Representation Learning with Contrastive Completion Coding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge representation learning methods suffer from immaturity on tackling potentially-imperfect knowledge graphs and highly-imbalanced positive-negative instances during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for knowledge representation learning that incorporates two functional components to achieve robust embedding for each entity/relation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves better convergence against state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. |
Pre- and In-Parsing Models for Neural Empty Category Detection (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on empty category detection have shown positive effects on syntactic parsing . empty categories are used to indicate long-distance dependencies, discontinuous constituents, and certain dropped elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ECD to detect empty categories without syntactic analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the prior state-of-the-art by significant margins. |
League of LLMs: A Benchmark-Free Paradigm for Mutual Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Qianhong Guo, Wei Xie, Xiaofang Cai, Enze Wang, Shuoyoucheng Ma, Xiaobing Sun, Tian Xia, Kai Chen, Xiaofeng Wang, Baosheng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but reliable evaluation remains a challenge due to data contamination, opaque operation, and subjective preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark-free evaluation paradigm that organizes multiple LLMs into a self-governed league for multi-round mutual evaluation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight mainstream LLMs in mathematics and programming show that the proposed model can distinguish capabilities while maintaining high internal ranking stability. |
Quantifying Similarity between Relations with Fact Distribution (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a conceptually simple and effective method to quantify the similarity between relations is presented . identifying relations is a crucial problem for several information extraction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the similarity between relations in knowledge bases . they use a neural network to parameterize conditional probability distributions over entity pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly correlates with human judgments, the authors show . it could be incorporated into negative sampling and softmax classification to alleviate these mistakes. |
Enhancing Semantic Consistency of Large Language Models through Model Editing: An Interpretability-Oriented Approach (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models generate inconsistent and sometimes contradictory outputs when presented with a prompt that has equivalent semantics but is expressed differently from the original prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine a Large Language Model (LLM) with prompt-output pairs with equivalent semantics to achieve semantic consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the semantic consistency and task performance of LLMs. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving document-level DECI with low-resourced languages under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning for zero-shot cross-lingual ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on monolingual and multilingual scenarios by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score. |
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models . |
OneGen: Efficient One-Pass Unified Generation and Retrieval for LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jintian Zhang, Cheng Peng, Mengshu Sun, Xiang Chen, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the generative capabilities for various NLP tasks, but they still suffer from hallucinations due to their exclusive reliance on parametric knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates retrieval tokens generated autoregressively into a single LLM to handle both tasks simultaneously in a unified forward pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the traditionally separate training approaches for generation and retrieval by incorporating retrieval tokens generated autoregressively. |
Demystify the Role of Memory in Machine Learning Engineering Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinyu Zhao, Junpeng Wang, Yuzhong Chen, Menghai Pan, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Jiarui Sun, Yan Zheng, Mahashweta Das, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Unlike short, reactive exchanges, MLE agents solve tasks through cycles of experimentation and improvement where past errors can inform future success. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic coding memory that captures and reuses debugging experiences and integrates it into two representative agent paradigms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent model captures and reuses debugging experiences and integrates it into two agent paradigms. |
MuKA: Multimodal Knowledge Augmented Visual Information-Seeking (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual information-seeking tasks rely on textual knowledge . existing methods can impair information retrieval and confuse MLLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which leverages a multimodal knowledge base to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the InfoSeek and E-VQA benchmarks. |
Enhancing Legal Case Retrieval via Scaling High-quality Synthetic Query-Candidate Pairs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on case-to-case retrieval using lengthy queries, which does not match real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct query-candidate pairs and build the largest LCR dataset to date, LEAD. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the method can provide ample training signals for LCR models. |
Towards Fine-grained Audio Captioning with Multimodal Contextual Fusion (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for audio captioning lack fine-grained detail and contextual accuracy due to limited unimodal or superficial information. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage automated pipeline that uses pretrained models to extract contextual cues from video . a large language model synthesizes these inputs to generate detailed and context-aware captions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is scalable and generates detailed and context-aware captions on large-scale audio datasets. |
Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a promising capability for large language models (LLMs) but its underlying mechanism remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a demonstration compression technique to expedite inference and an analysis framework for diagnosing ICL errors in GPT2-XL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ICL performance and expedites inference. |
Enhancing Code Generation Performance of Smaller Models by Distilling the Reasoning Ability of LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation through the ‘Chain-of-Thought’ prompting technique. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which aims to transfer LLMs’ reasoning capabilities to smaller models through distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the smaller model's code generation performance by over 130% on the APPS benchmark. |
Chain-of-Procedure: Hierarchical Visual-Language Reasoning for Procedural QA (2026.findings-acl)
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Guanhua Chen, Yutong Yao, Shenghe Sun, Ci-jun Gao, Shudong Liu, Lidia S. Chao, Feng Wan, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results on standard image-text tasks, yet their capability in visual procedure question answering (VP-QA) remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark specifically designed for visual procedural reasoning that synergizes cross-modal procedure retrieval, context-aware step decomposition, and the next step prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms baselines on visual procedure question answering (VP-QA) Experiments on six VLMs show that it performs better than baselines. |
Beyond the Context Window: Scaling Agentic RL via End-to-end Optimized Context Compression (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning pipelines suffer from degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and strict context limits. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use where context length quickly becomes a bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length compared to baselines. |
Perovskite-LLM: Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models for Perovskite Solar Cell Research (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiang Liu, Penglei Sun, Shuyan Chen, Longhan Zhang, Peijie Dong, Huajie You, Yongqi Zhang, Chang Yan, Xiaowen Chu, Tong-yi Zhang
| Challenge: | a rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells has led to an exponential growth in research publications. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced system for perovskite solar cells that integrates three key components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing models in domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks. |
SURE or Not? Investigating Semantic Understanding in Dense Retrieval Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval models have been successful in a number of applications but it is unclear whether they truly understand semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for semantic understanding in dense retrieval that characterizes semantic precision, semantic abstraction and semantic equivalence along three dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model characterizes semantic understanding in dense retrieval along three dimensions: semantic precision, semantic abstraction, and semantic equivalence. |
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo
| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Xuchao Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning have focused on quantifying the uncertainty associated with the model's response, but they neglect the complexity of the LLM and the uniqueness of in-constitut learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the uncertainty associated with in-context learning and propose corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. |
Grammar-Based Code Representation: Is It a Worthy Pursuit for LLMs? (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingyuan Liang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Zheng Lin, Qi Luo, Xiao Yueyi, Yizhou Chen, Yuqun Zhang, Haotian Zhang, Lu Zhang, Chenbin Chenbin, Yingfei Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They develop a series of billion-scale grammar-based code representations that incorporate grammar rules into the code generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that grammar-based representations reduce syntax errors and improve performance even in billion-scale models. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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Qiyue Gao, Xinyu Pi, Kevin Liu, Junrong Chen, Ruolan Yang, Xinqi Huang, Xinyu Fang, Lu Sun, Gautham Kishore, Bo Ai, Stone Tao, Mengyang Liu, Jiaxi Yang, Chao-Jung Lai, Chuanyang Jin, Jiannan Xiang, Benhao Huang, Zeming Chen, David Danks, Hao Su, Tianmin Shu, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, but a systematic evaluation of VLMs’ fundamental WM abilities remains absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses perception and prediction to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses perception and prediction abilities on 15 latest VLMs and compares them to human-level models. |
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Shiwan Zhao, Hao Chen, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Ruiqi Sun, Xin Zhou, Enzhi Wang, Xiaohang Dong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in natural language processing, driven by large language models such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for role-play prompting and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard zero-shot prompting approach across 12 reasoning benchmarks. |
Automatic Evaluation of Attribution by Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generative large language models (LLMs) incorporate external references to generate and support claims. however, evaluating the attribution remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They investigate automatic evaluation of attribution given by large language models . they define different types of attributed errors and then explore two approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods highlight promising signals and challenges. |
Empirical Analysis of Decoding Biases in Masked Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Pengcheng Huang, Tianming Liu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Tong Xiao, Zulong Chen, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MDMs employ uncertainty-based decoding strategies that limit their reasoning ability and ultimately degrade generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regularizes uncertainty-based decoding by incorporating two complementary priors to shape global decoding trajectories and promote content informativeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing decoding strategies by more than 7% while achieving comparable performance to autoregressive models of similar parameter scales. |
Applying Contrastive Learning to Code Vulnerability Type Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to classification of vulnerabilities ignore their relationships and treat each class in isolation, resulting in non-scalable code vector representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning framework to bring vector representations of related CWEs closer together and use max-pooling to enable the model to handle longer vulnerability code inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.97%-17.90% on accuracy and 0.98%-22.27% on weighted-F1 with even better performance on higher-quality datasets. |
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuan Xiao, Jiaming Wang, Yuchen Chen, Wei Song, Jun Sun, Shiqing Ma, Yanzhou Mu, Juan Zhai, Chunrong Fang, Jin Song Dong, Zhenyu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dataset poisoning require full-dataset poison, which breaks code compilability. |
| Approach: | They propose a functionality-preserving poisoning approach that injects short, compilable weak-use fragments into executed code paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method contaminates 10% of the dataset while maintaining 100% compilability and functional correctness. |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline. |
CERD: A Comprehensive Chinese Rhetoric Dataset for Rhetorical Understanding and Generation in Essays (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Nuowei Liu, Xinhao Chen, Hongyi Wu, Changzhi Sun, Man Lan, Yuanbin Wu, Xiaopeng Bai, Shaoguang Mao, Yan Xia
| Challenge: | Existing rhetorical understanding and generation datasets focus on single coarse-grained categories or fine-grain categories, neglecting the intrinsic connections between different rhetorical devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Essay Rhetoric Dataset with four coarse-grained categories . they propose to treat these categories as separate sub-tasks, thereby improving writing skills . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves the author's writing proficiency and language usage skills by recognizing and generating rhetorical sentences under given conditions. |
Accurate SHRG-Based Semantic Parsing (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Graph-structured semantic representations can encode rich semantic information of natural language sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a SHRG-based parser that relates synchronous production rules to syntacto-semantic composition processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the best existing model by 4.87 points . it relates synchronous production rules to syntacto-semantic composition process . |
Long Context is Not Long at All: A Prospector of Long-Dependency Data for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) however, training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient since some samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a data mining framework ProLong that assigns each training sample with a long dependency score and ranks and filters them according to their results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can rank and filter training samples that exhibit more powerful long-context modeling abilities. |
Regularizing Dialogue Generation by Imitating Implicit Scenarios (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue generation lack the flexibility to handle such freedoms. |
| Approach: | They propose to take into account dialogue history and future conversation to implicitly reconstruct the scenario knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on diversity and relevance and expresses scenario-specific knowledge. |
ProMind-LLM: Proactive Mental Health Care via Causal Reasoning with Sensor Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for mental health risk assessment rely on subjective textual records . however, these uncertainties can cause inconsistent and unreliable predictions . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates objective behavior data alongside subjective mental records for robust mental health risk assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over general LLMs. |
TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that TESTA reduces the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerates video encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to condense video semantics by aggregating similar frames and patches within each frame. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces visual tokens by 75% and accelerates video encoding. |
Analyze, Generate and Refine: Query Expansion with LLMs for Zero-Shot Open-Domain QA (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods like GAR and EAR rely heavily on supervised training and struggle to maintain effectiveness across domains and datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a QE approach based on a three-step prompting strategy to enhance query expansion by broadening the scope of queries with additional relevant texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in out-domain zero-shot scenarios and outperformed existing methods in end-to-end evaluations. |
MedFact: A Large-scale Chinese Dataset for Evidence-based Medical Fact-checking of LLM Responses (2025.emnlp-main)
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Tong Chen, Zimu Wang, Yiyi Miao, Haoran Luo, Sun Yuanfei, Wei Wang, Zhengyong Jiang, Procheta Sen, Jionglong Su
| Challenge: | Existing medical fact-checking datasets focus on human-generated content, leaving the verification of content generated by large language models (LLMs) relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese medical fact-checking datasets to verify LLM-generated medical content by combining in-context learning and fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The first evidence-based Chinese medical fact-checking dataset of LLM-generated medical content consists of 1,321 questions and 7,409 claims . |
LOCR: Location-Guided Transformer for Optical Character Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Academic documents are packed with texts, equations, tables, and figures, posing challenges for accurate OCR results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates location guiding into the transformer architecture during autoregression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on an original large-scale dataset comprising 53M text-location pairs from 89K academic document pages. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation via Adaptive Prefix Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially in solving complex mathematical problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits teacher CoTs for distillation through adaptive prefix alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks by over 3%. |
RISK: A Framework for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Management (2026.acl-long)
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Renqi Chen, Zeyin Tao, Jianming Guo, Jingzhe Zhu, Yiheng Peng, Qingqing Sun, Tianyi Zhang, Shuai Chen
| Challenge: | RISK is a framework designed to automate multi-step web interactions in e-commerce risk management. |
| Approach: | a new framework is designed to build and deploy GUI agents for e-commerce risk management . RISK-R1 provides a scalable, domain-specific solution for automating complex web interactions . |
| Outcome: | RISK provides a scalable, domain-specific solution for automating complex web interactions in e-commerce risk management. |
Infinite Babble: Inflating 3D Vision-Language Model Inference Overhead via Adversarial Geometric Perturbation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | 3D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are critical cognitive backbone for spatial intelligence, but their reliance on autoregressive decoding introduces a fundamental vulnerability regarding inference efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that triggers computational and economic exhaustion in 3D-VLMs by injecting imperceptible noise that forces the model into a state of pathological verbosity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework amplifies output length and energy consumption by up to 6.45, demonstrating a potent capability to drain system resources. |
From Grounding to Manipulation: Case Studies of Foundation Model Integration in Embodied Robotic Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new study examines the operational characteristics of different integration strategies for robotics . end-to-end vision-language-action models implicitly unify perception and planning . |
| Approach: | They propose end-to-end vision-language-action models that implicitly unify perception and planning . they also propose modular pipelines using either vision-linguistic models or MLLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks implicitly unify perception and planning, and modular pipelines using either vision-language models or multimodal large language models. |
Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that share entity embeddings of knowledge graphs (KGs) would incur a severe privacy leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a new attack method that aims to recover the original embedding information based on the known entity embeddables of FedE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to infer whether a specific relation exists in a private client. |
Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) however, the reasoning chains of demonstrations are observed to be prone to errors, which can lead to incorrect reasoning during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative bootstrapping technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) by generating a series of reasoning steps to obtain the answer, and using the reasoning chains as exemplars to demonstrate the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of Large language models (LLMs) on three reasoning tasks on ten datasets. |
Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zichao Li, Shaojie He, Meng Liao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Yanxiong Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Document logical structuring is crucial for document intelligence due to the complexity of text segment dependencies in the document. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring that generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model and updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ChCatExt and HierDoc datasets show that Seg2Act performs better than previous methods in both supervised and transfer learning settings. |
Translation as Cross-Domain Knowledge: Attention Augmentation for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Segmenting and Labeling Tasks (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chinese has no word delimiter or inflection that can indicate segment boundaries or word semantics, increasing the difficulty of segmenting and labeling tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm based on attention augmentation to introduce crucial cross-domain knowledge via a translation system into Chinese model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly advances the state-of-the-art results of Chinese cross-domain segmenting and labeling tasks. |
Beyond Length Scaling: Synergizing Breadth and Depth for Generative Reward Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Generative Reward Models have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought reasoning enhances reliability of evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconfigures raw rationales into structured Breadth-CoT and Depth-Co T through a modular synthesis pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses open-source RMs by an average of 8.2%. |
An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for empathetic response generation ignore the associated words between dialogue utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative associative memory model to capture associated words between dialogue utterances and situations, dialogue history, and a memory module for storing associated words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures key words between dialogue utterances and situations, dialogue history, and a memory module, thereby accurately and nuancedly comprehending the utterables. |
EchoMLLM: Incentivizing Echocardiographic Video Understanding with Keyframe Grounding and Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Heyu Huang, Wanran Sun, Chi Chen, Bo Chen, Zonghao Guo, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Kunlun He, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Echocardiography analysis requires a dual capability: rigorous quantitative keyframe localization and comprehensive qualitative synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework designed for real-world echocardiography video understanding. |
| Outcome: | a new framework is designed to support real-world echocardiography video understanding . it reduces temporal grounding errors by up to 76% and improves report generation quality by 65% . |
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Qiwei Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Huaxiu Yao, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Xujiang Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over multi-step decision-making process and dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 20%. |
Skip-Thinking: Chunk-wise Chain-of-Thought Distillation Enable Smaller Language Models to Reason Better and Faster (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods train small language models to learn long rationales in one iteration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a heuristic search to divide rationale into internal chunks . they propose CWT, which uses CWt to focus SLM on learning from only one chunk per iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can guide a large language model (LLM) in reasoning tasks. |
Structure-aware Fine-tuning for Code Pre-trained Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing CodePTMs are mainly structure-free and structurebased, but how to fine-tune them remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play fine-tuning method that incorporates structural knowledge into pre-trained code models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can benefit CodePTMs more with limited training data. |
GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shuhe Wang, Xiaofei Sun, Xiaoya Li, Rongbin Ouyang, Fei Wu, Tianwei Zhang, Jiwei Li, Guoyin Wang, Chen Guo
| Challenge: | Large-scale language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for in-context learning with limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel sequence labeling task that transforms a sequence labeled as a text-generation task into a self-verification task that LLMs can adapt to. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on NER than supervised models on a variety of tasks . the proposed model can be easily adapted by LLMs to generate a text sequence . |
MEFT: Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning through Sparse Adapter (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are limited on knowledge-intensive tasks due to the limited number of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that fine-tunes Large Language Models with larger adapters . they store and update the parameters of larger adapter adapters on the CPU . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to those obtained with larger memory capacities over the limited bandwidth of PCI Express (PCIe). |
The Accuracy Paradox in RLHF: When Better Reward Models Don’t Yield Better Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate feedback from humans into RLHF to improve language models by capturing human-like preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with moderately accurate reward models on relevance, factuality, and completeness tasks. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
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Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Kai Lv, Shuo Zhang, Tianle Gu, Shuhao Xing, Jiawei Hong, Keyu Chen, Xiaoran Liu, Yuqing Yang, Honglin Guo, Tengxiao Liu, Yu Sun, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of tasks . however, the resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models . they use 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and optimizers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. |
AdaTP: Attention-Debiased Token Pruning for Video Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual token compression methods rely on attention scores but have inherent biases . global and local attention biased scores cause excessive computational overhead . |
| Approach: | They propose a token pruning pipeline that targets global and local attention biases . the pipeline is designed to reduce computational overhead of Video Large Language Models based on visual tokens compiled from multiple video frames . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the computational overhead of Video Large Language Models while retaining the performance of vanilla models. |
Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) can only translate between a single language pair and cannot produce translation results for multiple language pairs at the same time. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to translate between 13 languages using a single encoder and a decoder . they propose two knowledge distillation methods to further enhance multilingual UNMT performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation performance for all languages using multilingual data. |
An Information Minimization Based Contrastive Learning Model for Unsupervised Sentence Embeddings Learning (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent contrastive learning methods keep positive pairs similar and push negative pairs apart, which leads to redundant information in sentence embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning approach which maximizes mutual information and minimizes the information entropy between positive and negative instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all previous competitors on supervised and unsupervised tasks. |
Rethinking Data Mixture for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey and New Perspectives (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data mixture improve the generalization capability of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained categorization of existing methods and propose three subtypes of offline and online methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods extend beyond offline and online classifications and highlight key challenges in the field of data mixture. |
QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Songxin Qu, Tai-Ping Sun, Yun-Jie Wang, Huan-Yu Liu, Cheng Xue, Xiao-Fan Xu, Han Fang, Yang Yang, Yu-Chun Wu, Guo-Ping Guo, Zhao-Yun Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models lack reliability in scientific domains that require strict adherence to physical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models and is competitive with proprietary models. |
MAAM: A Morphology-Aware Alignment Model for Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work shows that morphological variation is an intractable challenge for the unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a morphology-aware alignment model to alleviate the adverse effect of morphological variation by introducing grammatical information learned by the pre-trained denoising language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised systems and achieves competitive performance compared to supervised methods. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages. |
Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study validates the effectiveness of chat language models by fine-tuning instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale dataset of instructional conversations to fine-tune a conversational model on instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in key metrics including scale, average length, diversity, coherence, etc. |
Rich Semantic Knowledge Enhanced Large Language Models for Few-shot Chinese Spell Checking (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) is a widely used technology for speech to text and optical character recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese rich semantic information to introduce large language models as the foundation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on few-shot CSC task than existing methods. |
Field Embedding: A Unified Grain-Based Framework for Word Representation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on learning word embeddings while linguistic information is discarded after the learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework field embedding to jointly learn word and grain embedds by incorporating morphological, phonetic, and syntactical linguistic fields. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates morphological, phonetic, and syntactical linguistic fields to learn word embeddings and grain embedds. |
Answering Ambiguous Questions via Iterative Prompting (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that AmbigPrompt achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results while using less memory and having a lower inference latency than competing approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose an answering model with a prompting model to address imperfections in open-domain question answering . Empirical studies show AmbigPrompt achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two commonly-used open benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results while using less memory and having a lower inference latency. |
Self-Training for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation in Unbalanced Training Data Scenarios (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that use monolingual corpora for translation are not suitable for low-resource languages such as Estonian. |
| Approach: | They propose unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) that relies on monolingual corpora to train a robust UNMT system and improve its performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform conventional UNMT systems on several language pairs. |
Location-Aware Visual Question Generation with Lightweight Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Nicholas Suwono, Justin Chen, Tun Hung, Ting-Hao Huang, I-Bin Liao, Yung-Hui Li, Lun-Wei Ku, Shao-Hua Sun
| Challenge: | a novel task aims to generate engaging questions from location-aware information . a lightweight model can be used to generate such questions . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate engaging questions from location-aware data . they represent location-based information with surrounding images and a GPS coordinate . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines regarding human evaluation and evaluation metrics. |
Pass-Tuning: Towards Structure-Aware Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Code Representation Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Code pre-trained models have been proposed and widely applied in the domain of code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a plug-and-play graph neural network module as a tunable prefix to exploit structural information of source code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits structural information of source code and could replace full fine-tuning. |
Migician: Revealing the Magic of Free-Form Multi-Image Grounding in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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You Li, Heyu Huang, Chi Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Chao Huang, Zonghao Guo, Zhiyuan Liu, Jinan Xu, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs still struggle to achieve precise grounding in multi-image scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Thought framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension to address this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in multi-image grounding tasks by 24.94% and surpasses larger 70B models. |
Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System (P19-3)
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Guo Zhipeng, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Wenhao Li, Cheng Yang, Jiannan Liang, Huimin Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ruoyu Li
| Challenge: | Existing systems for automatic poetry generation are model-oriented, resulting in poor user participation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-machine collaborative Chinese classical poetry generation system called Jiuge . Jiuge allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. |
Beyond Query Bias: Candidate-Aware Iterative Refinement for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve target images suffer from inherent cognitive bias due to unknown candidate distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that reframes ZS-CIR as a self-correcting process . they propose to use retrieved results as feedback to perceive the candidate distribution . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on public benchmarks show that CoRR outperforms other SOTA methods. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
Attention-Based Capsule Networks with Dynamic Routing for Relation Extraction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural networks focus on instance representation, and subsampling fails to retain precise spatial relationships between higher-level parts. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach based on capsule networks with attention mechanisms to extract relational information from a capsule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the precision of the predicted relations with different benchmarks. |
Resonant Context Anchoring: Decoupling Attention Routing and Signal Gain at Inference Time (2026.findings-acl)
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Mingkuan Zhao, Yide Gao, Wentao Hu, Suquan Chen, Tianchen Huang, Zhenhua An, Zetao Chang, Xiayu Sun, Yuheng Min
| Challenge: | Existing mitigation strategies rely on suppressing specific neuron activations or employing computationally expensive contrastive decoding mechanisms, which often result in increased perplexity or significantly elevated inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight inference-time intervention method grounded in the perspective of residual stream signal dynamics to resolve the signal attenuation of external evidence during its propagation through deep networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves contextual faithfulness across multiple factual consistency and strong knowledge-conflict tasks while maintaining the model’s general language understanding capabilities. |
CAT-probing: A Metric-based Approach to Interpret How Pre-trained Models for Programming Language Attend Code Structure (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing code pre-trained models fail to consider inherent characteristics of codes . Existing methods to interpret code pretrained model fail to take into account inherent characteristics . |
| Approach: | They propose a probing method to quantitatively interpret how CodePTMs attend code structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method denoises input code sequences and measures commonality between token-level attention scores and pair-wise distances between corresponding AST nodes. |
QAVA: Query-Agnostic Visual Attack to Large Vision-Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, large vision-language models are limited in their ability to provide correct answers for multimodal tasks . however, they can still provide correct responses for multiple images associated with a single image . a query-agnostic visual attack (QAVA) provides robust adversarial examples that generate incorrect responses to unspecified and unknown questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-agnostic visual attack to create adversarial examples that generate incorrect answers to unspecified and unknown questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on images when the question is unknown compared to known target questions . |
Human-Agent Collaborative Paper-to-Page Crafting (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianli Ma, Siyu Wang, Chen Yilin, Yinhao Tang, Yixiang Yang, Chang Guo, Bingjie Gao, Zhening Xing, Yanan Sun, Zhipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to create project pages from academic papers have focused on static slides and posters, but the dynamic nature of webpages remains an unaddressed challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-agent system that deconstructs paper-to-page creation into a coarse-to fine pipeline from narrative planning to multimodal content generation and interactive rendering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality, visually appealing pages in under 15 minutes for less than $0.1 . |
FUSE: Measure-Theoretic Compact Fuzzy Set Representation for Taxonomy Expansion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work models taxonomy concepts as vectors or geometric objects, but fuzzy sets are efficient for concept modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a set representation learning task based on fuzzy set approximation . they demonstrate remarkable improvements in taxonomy expansion using FUSE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves taxonomy expansion performance by 23% over baselines. |
Accurate Text-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Representation Learning (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing representation learning methods for knowledge graph representation do not consider the ambiguity of relations and entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-enhanced knowledge graph representation learning method which exploits the entity descriptions and triple-specific relation mention to enhance representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing representation learning models on link prediction and triple classification tasks and significantly outperformed existing models. |
Sparse Growing Transformer: Training-Time Sparse Depth Allocation via Progressive Attention Looping (2026.findings-acl)
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Yao Chen, Yilong Chen, Yinqi Yang, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zefeng Zhang, Shuaiyi Nie, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to increasing effective depth of LLMs rely on parameter reuse, extending computation through recursive execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time sparse depth allocation framework that progressively increases depth for a small subset of parameters as training evolves. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing approaches to increasing the effective depth of language models while reducing training FLOPs overhead from approximately 16–20% to only 1–3% relative to a standard Transformer backbone. |
Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slips (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer, we analyze ancient Chinese scripts . a large proportion of the characters in ancient Chinese are rare or undeciphered . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for ancient Chinese scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer improves on the part-of-speech tagging task on the Chu bamboo slip script. |
ReTA: Recursively Thinking Ahead to Improve the Strategic Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing logical reasoning evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on single-turn and static environments, such as arithmetic problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Recursively Thinking-Ahead agent that analyzes the opponents’ future moves/actions and assigns reward signals for these situations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent is based on two scenarios: Online Racing and Offline Probing. |
Hallucination Detection in Long-Form Text Generated by LLMs: A Benchmark and a Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Approach (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection are coarse-grained and lack long-range consistency checks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-form hallucination detection that incorporates diverse entity types and intricate factual dependencies spanning extended contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and robustly integrates fact-centric hyper-relational knowledge graphs. |
Weakly Supervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Relative Representations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Weakly supervised vision-and-language pre-training (WVLP) uses only local descriptions of images as cross-modal anchors to construct weakly-aligned image-text pairs for pre- training. |
| Approach: | They propose to take a small number of aligned image-text pairs as anchors and represent each unaligned image and text by its similarities to these anchors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the cost of pre-training while maintaining decent performance on downstream tasks. |
GATEAU: Selecting Influential Samples for Long Context Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Gang Chen, Yunshui Li, Kangyang Luo, Chuancheng Lv, Kaikai An, Fanchao Qi, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have attempted to scale up the available data volume by synthesizing long instruction-following samples, but a lack of a well-defined strategy for ensuring data quality may introduce low-quality samples and restrict the model’s performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to identify influential samples enriched with long-range dependency relations that can be used to align large language models to handle instructions with extremely long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies samples with long-range dependency relations and shows that the model trained on these samples exhibits better instruction-following and long-context understanding capabilities. |
Query-Aware Knowledge Retrieval via Hyperbolic Structuring (2026.acl-long)
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Chuang Zhou, Junnan Dong, Yilin Xiao, Shengyuan Chen, Su Dong, di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhaozhuo Xu, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus primarily on retrieving isolated factual knowledge entities while neglecting the critical reasoning relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-centric retrieval framework that explicitly integrates structured knowledge graphs to support complex reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that HyperRAG outperforms baselines. |
A Multi-answer Multi-task Framework for Real-world Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of machine reading comprehension (MRC) are based on cloze style questions or crowdworkers given a short passage from well-edited sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-answer multi-task framework that uses multiple reference answers for multiple questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases the ROUGE-L score on the DuReader dataset from 44.18, the previous state-of-the-art, to 51.09 . |
CritiQ: Mining Data Quality Criteria from Human Preferences (2025.acl-long)
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Honglin Guo, Kai Lv, Qipeng Guo, Tianyi Liang, Zhiheng Xi, Demin Song, Qiuyinzhe Zhang, Yu Sun, Kai Chen, Xipeng Qiu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train language models rely on manual design, perplexity, or careful prompt engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically mines criteria from human preferences for data quality with only 30 human-annotated pairs and performs efficient data selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on human-annotated test sets and shows high accuracy on code, math, and logic domains. |
CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Yang, Wei Du, Jie Wang, Wenze Zhou, Xiangfeng Meng, Zhengyang Wang, Suping Sun, Ziwei Du, Haodong Zou, Jie Chen, Yongbin Liu, Shicheng Tan, Jiahao Ying, Shu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and realism of large language models under complex and irregular table conditions. |
StateX: Enhancing RNN Recall via Post-training State Expansion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that RNNs with large recurrent states are expensive to train . however, the ability to recall contextual information from long contexts is underperforms them in certain aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that expands the states of pre-trained RNNs by scaling them up to 1.3B . they use a recurrent architecture that compresses contextual information into a fixedsize state . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on models with up to 1.3B parameters show that StateX expands state sizes without incurring high post-training costs or compromising other capabilities. |
Different Tunes Played with Equal Skill: Exploring a Unified Optimization Subspace for Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing delta tuning algorithms freeze most of the parameters and only optimize minimal adaptive parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose DETs into a unified optimization subspace and conduct optimization within the subspace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed DETs achieve comparable performance to the original DET and can be transferred to another DET with non-trivial performance. |
Alleviating Performance Degradation Caused by Out-of-Distribution Issues in Embedding-Based Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haotong Bao, Jianjin Zhang, Qi Chen, Weihao Han, Zhengxin Zeng, Ruiheng Chang, Mingzheng Li, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal query out-of-distribution issues degrading ANN performance . a distribution regularizer is introduced into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Approach: | They introduce a distribution regularizer into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently improves retrieval performance across multiple datasets. |
Equal Truth: Rumor Detection with Invariant Group Fairness (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection methods rarely consider fairness issues inherent in the model . this can lead to biased predictions across stakeholder groups, undermining their detection effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to address fairness issues inherent in rumor detection models . they perform unsupervised partitioning to dynamically identify potential unfair data patterns . then, they apply invariant learning to these partitions to extract fair and informative feature representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines regarding detection and fairness performance . it also shows robust performance on out-of-distribution samples . |
Decoding at the Speed of Thought: Harnessing Parallel Decoding of Lexical Units for LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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Chenxi Sun, Hongzhi Zhang, Zijia Lin, Jingyuan Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Bin Chen, Chengru Song, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in natural language understanding and generation, but their generation speed is limited by the inherently sequential nature of their decoding process. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that accelerates decoding process without sacrificing quality . they propose lexical unit decoding, which can be integrated with other methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces decoding time while maintaining quality while maintaining output quality. |
The Paradox of Outcome Optimization: A Causal Information-Theoretic Bound on Reasoning Shortcuts in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) exhibit a critical failure mode: they exhibit brittle reasoning capabilities on out-of-distribution tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework bridging Structural Causal Models and the Information Bottleneck principle to explain this paradox. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the framework between SCM and IB principles to explain the problem. |
Understanding Differential Search Index for Text Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Differentiable Search Index (DSI) is a new information retrieval framework . however, due to the black-box nature of the end-to-end neural architecture, it remains unclear to what extent it possesses basic indexing and retrieval abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task distillation approach to enhance the retrieval quality without altering the structure of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on various datasets. |
Improving Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks require unstated knowledge to perform well. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract a new kind of structured knowledge from scripts and use it to improve machine reading comprehension (MRC) They propose a teacher-student paradigm to facilitate the transfer of knowledge in weakly-labeled MRC data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms methods that use weakly-labeled data and improves a state-of-the-art baseline by 4.3% in accuracy on a Chinese multiple-choice MRC dataset C3. |
Few-Shot Representation Learning for Out-Of-Vocabulary Words (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning word embedding assume there are enough occurrences for each word in the corpus to accurately estimate the representation of words. |
| Approach: | They propose to fit a representation function to predict an oracle embedding vector based on limited contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in constructing an accurate embedding for OOV words and improves downstream tasks when the embeddable is utilized. |
Dipping PLMs Sauce: Bridging Structure and Text for Effective Knowledge Graph Completion via Conditional Soft Prompting (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) often requires both KG structural and textual information to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a system which tunes the parameters of Conditional Soft Prompts generated by entities and relations representations to maintain a balance between textual and structural knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed components outperform baseline models on three static and temporal benchmarks. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |
Automatic Term Name Generation for Gene Ontology: Task and Dataset (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Yanjian Zhang, Qin Chen, Yiteng Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Yixu Gao, Jiajie Peng, Zengfeng Huang, Weijian Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Gene Ontology (GO) terms are used to describe gene function in biology and bio-medicine. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate term names for GO and build a large-scale benchmark dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by incorporating the relations between genes, words and terms for term name generation. |
RevPRAG: Revealing Poisoning Attacks in Retrieval-Augmented Generation through LLM Activation Analysis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enriches the input to LLMs by retrieving information from the relevant knowledge database. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a knowledge database to enrich the input of LLMs by retrieving information from the relevant knowledge database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve 98% true positive rate while maintaining a false positive rate close to 1%. |
Knowledge Association with Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graphs (KGs) depend on high embedding dimensions and hierarchical structures to achieve expressiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperbolic relational graph neural network for KG embedding and capture knowledge associations with a high-dimensional transformation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on entity alignment and type inference show the proposed method is effective and efficient. |
Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embedding Agreement for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised bilingual word embedding (UBWE) has helped unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) achieve remarkable results in several language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods that train UNMT with UBWE agreement . they propose to use UBwe to initialize word embedding in UNMT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform conventional methods on several language pairs. |
When Gradient Descent Meets Derivative-Free Optimization: A Match Made in Black-Box Scenario (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are expensive and may not be open-sourced due to commercial considerations and potential risks of misuse. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce gradient descent into black-box tuning scenario . they propose a method which integrates gradient descent and derivative-free optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance gains over previous state-of-the-art methods. |
BaseCal: Unsupervised Confidence Calibration via Base Model Signals (2026.acl-long)
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Hexiang Tan, Wanli Yang, Junwei Zhang, Xin Chen, Rui Tang, Du Su, Jingang Wang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Fei Sun, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Post-trained LLMs typically compromise reliability with severe overconfidence, resulting in inaccurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that feeds PoLLMs into the base LLM to get confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution reduces expected calibration error (ECE) by 42.90% compared to the best unsupervised baselines. |
Divide-Then-Align: Honest Alignment based on the Knowledge Boundary of RAG (2025.acl-long)
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Xin Sun, Jianan Xie, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Yuehe Chen, Bowen Song, Zilei Wang, Weiqiang Wang, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have significantly advanced natural language processing tasks by integrating external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that conditions large language models to generate answers even in the absence of reliable knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach balances accuracy with appropriate abstention, enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of retrieval-augmented systems. |
More Than Sum of Its Parts: Deciphering Intent Shifts in Multimodal Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems struggle with multimodal content where the emergent meaning transcends the aggregation of individual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to characterize semantic intent shifts where modalities interact to construct implicit hate from benign cues or neutralize toxicity through semantic inversion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on H-VLI and on established benchmarks. |
Ranking-Based Autoencoder for Extreme Multi-label Classification (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve label dependency and noisy labeling problems are limited . experimental results show the proposed method is competitive to state-of-the-art methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a deep learning XML method with word-vector-based self-attention followed by ranking-based AutoEncoder architecture to solve these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is competitive to state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
Mitigating Linguistic Artifacts in Emotion Recognition for Conversations from TV Scripts to Daily Conversations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) focus on training and testing models on the same datasets and there is no prior work on adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contrastive learning to prioritize emotional features over a linguistic style and refining emotion predictions with pseudo-emotion intensity score to improve model's robustness and accuracy in diverse conversational contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques reduce reliance on linguistic artifacts found in TV transcripts and improve model’s robustness and accuracy in diverse conversational contexts. |
Fine-Grained and Multi-Dimensional Metrics for Document-Level Machine Translation (2025.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in machine translation, but most studies focus on sentence-level translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs as a judge paradigm to evaluate document-level translations by directly prompting them to translate entire documents in a single pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality even without document-level fine-tuning compared to translating sentences separately . |
Sparse Latents Steer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Xuanang Chen, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | In this study, we uncover interpretable latents that govern RAG behavior in large language models . Sparse Autoencoders are used to control large language model (LLM) behavior . |
| Approach: | They leverage Sparse Autoencoders within the LLaMA Scope to uncover latents that govern RAG behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to control large language models without architectural modifications. |
ERNIE-Layout: Layout Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Qiming Peng, Yinxu Pan, Wenjin Wang, Bin Luo, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhengjie Huang, Yuhui Cao, Weichong Yin, Yongfeng Chen, Yin Zhang, Shikun Feng, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visually rich document understanding lack layout-centered knowledge . experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout improves layout awareness . |
| Approach: | They propose a document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on key downstream tasks. |
Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Chenyan WU, Hengyu Sun, Haiwen Hong, Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Shumin Deng, Zhixuan Chu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs) are often studied in isolation, obscuring connections and making comparison difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference and utility, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves preference while preserving utility. |
Latent-Condensed Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Latent-Condensed Attention mechanism that performs structured context condensation directly within MLA's latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces KV cache size and attention cost without adding parameters. |
Generative Personality Simulation via Theory-Informed Structured Interview (2026.eacl-long)
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Pengda Wang, Huiqi Zou, Han Jiang, Hanjie Chen, Tianjun Sun, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ziang Xiao, Frederick L. Oswald
| Challenge: | Personality structured interviews are often lacking in advancing social science research. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate psychological insights into LLM simulations . they use a measure theory grounded evaluation procedure to evaluate reliability and validity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves human-like heterogeneity in LLM-simulated personality data and predicts personality-related behavioral outcomes. |
Dual-Space Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) have strong generalization abilities due to their huge model capacities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-space knowledge distillation framework that unifies the output spaces of the two models for KD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing white-box KD frameworks on task-agnostic instruction-following benchmarks and can automatically align representations of two models with different vocabularies. |
Error Detection for Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers are often over-confident, thus casting doubt on their trustworthiness when deployed for real use. |
| Approach: | They propose a parser-independent error detection model for text-to-SQL semantic parsing . they use a language model of code as its bedrock and graph neural networks to learn structural features of queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms parser-dependent uncertainty metrics on three strong parsers . it could improve the performance and usability of text-to-SQL semantic parsing, it is shown . |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision. |
Modeling Semantic Compositionality with Sememe Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic compositionality (SC) is defined as the phenomenon that the meaning of a complex linguistic unit can be composed of the meanings of its constituents. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate sememes into SC models and employ them in learning multiword expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve significant performance boost compared to baseline methods without sememe knowledge. |
Exploring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning for Generative Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have incredible instruction-following capabilities while maintaining strong task completion ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to encourage LLMs to Forget Spurious correlations and Learn from In-context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate shortcut learning by forging spurious correlations and learning from in-context information. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion via Ensemble Knowledge Transfer (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited by insufficiency of alignment information and inconsistency of described facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for embedding learning and ensemble knowledge transfer across KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves state-of-the-art methods on language-specific KGs. |
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)
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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark. |
Fine-Tuning Deteriorates General Textual Out-of-Distribution Detection by Distorting Task-Agnostic Features (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting out-of-distribution inputs are underexplored . detecting semantic and non-semantic shifts is difficult for pre-tuned pre-trainers . |
| Approach: | They propose a general OOD score that integrates confidence scores from task-agnostic and task-specific representations to improve detecting semantic and non-semantic shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two cross-task benchmarks with semantic and non-semantic shifts. |
FinHEAR: Human Expertise and Adaptive Risk-Aware Temporal Reasoning for Financial Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models often overlook key behavioral patterns underlying human financial behavior. |
| Approach: | FinHEAR is a multi-agent framework for human expertise and Adaptive Risk-aware reasoning. |
| Outcome: | FinHEAR outperforms baseline models in trend forecasting and decision-making. |
Can LLMs Clarify? Investigation and Enhancement of Large Language Models on Argument Claim Optimization (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in text rewriting tasks such as style transfer and query rewrite, their application to claim optimization remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a sliding window mechanism to evaluate the performance of large language models in claim clarification tasks under different settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of three LLMs on the claim clarification task under zero-shot, few-shot and supervised fine-tuning settings. |
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages. |
CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emits predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing methods on six classification tasks yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions. |
MIRTH: Mutual-Information Reasoning with Temporal Hubs for Vision-Language-Action Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that VLA models suffer from temporal myopia that discards historical dynamics and reasoning gaps between high-level instructions and low-level motor commands. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to address temporal myopia and autoregressive scalar decoding in VLAs . they propose two memory hubs that compress long-term scene evolution and short-term motion trends . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibiting emergent error recovery capabilities. |
Combating Security and Privacy Issues in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial aims to provide a summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . a number of studies have focused on security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Approach: | This tutorial seeks to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . authors will discuss security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . it will also outline emerging challenges in security, privacy and reliability of LLMs . |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. |
JumpCoder: Go Beyond Autoregressive Coder via Online Modification (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing code large language models lack reversibility and autoregressive sequential generation is incapable of correcting previous missing statements as humans do. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework that enables human-like online modification and non-sequential generation to augment code large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables human-like modification and non-sequential generation to augment code large language models. |
Ensuring Safe and High-Quality Outputs: A Guideline Library Approach for Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Yi Luo, Zhenghao Lin, YuHao Zhang, Jiashuo Sun, Chen Lin, Chengjin Xu, Xiangdong Su, Yelong Shen, Jian Guo, Yeyun Gong
| Challenge: | Guide-Align is a guideline-oriented approach to augment the safety and quality of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a guideline-oriented method to augment the safety and quality of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three benchmarks and shows significant improvements in security and quality. |
Look Again, Think Slowly: Enhancing Visual Reflection in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-only "slow thinking" reasoning have prompted efforts to transfer this capability to vision-language models (VLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a VRM Reflection-V which enhances visual reflection based on reasoning data for cold-start and reward design for reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves visual reflection for cold-start and reward design for reinforcement learning (RL) it maintains a stronger and more consistent reliance on visual information during visual reasoning, indicating effective enhancement in visual reflection capabilities. |