Papers by Chen Tang
VividMed: Vision Language Model with Versatile Visual Grounding for Medicine (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated promise in generating visually grounded responses, but their application in the medical domain is hindered by unique challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision language model with versatile visual grounding for medicine that generates semantic segmentation masks and instance-level bounding boxes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate semantic segmentation masks and instance-level bounding boxes, and accommodates various imaging modalities, including both 2D and 3D data. |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Dynamic Graph Knowledge Aggregation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph neural networks (GNNs) teach message passing on a graph from text, resulting in a semantic gap between graph knowledge and text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate external graph knowledge into chatbots by coagulating representations of both text and graph knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines on dialogue generation. |
Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for natural language generation are pre-trained on text-only corpora, resulting in visual commonsense. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that makes pre-trained language models learn to imagine for visually-augmented natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with Transformer-based architecture. |
Sequential LLM Framework for Fashion Recommendation (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Han Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Tianlang Chen, Jiapeng Liu, Indu Indu, Henry Zou, Peng Dai, Roberto Galan, Michael Porter, Dongmei Jia, Ning Zhang, Lian Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing fashion recommendation systems struggle with the unique challenges of the fashion domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential fashion recommendation framework that leverages a pre-trained large language model enhanced with recommendation-specific prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves fashion recommendation performance on Amazon fashion. |
A Deep Learning-Based System for PharmaCoNER (D19-57)
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Ying Xiong, Yedan Shen, Yuanhang Huang, Shuai Chen, Buzhou Tang, Xiaolong Wang, Qingcai Chen, Jun Yan, Yi Zhou
| Challenge: | Efficient access to mentions of clinical entities is very important for using clinical text. |
| Approach: | They developed a pipeline system based on deep learning methods for this shared task . it achieves a micro-average F1-score of 0.9105 on track 1 and a mini-average LSTM score of 0.8391 on track 2 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves a micro-average F1-score of 0.9105 on track 1 and a mini-average score of 0.8391 on track 2. |
LLM-Rec: Personalized Recommendation via Prompting Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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Hanjia Lyu, Song Jiang, Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Qifan Wang, Si Zhang, Ren Chen, Chris Leung, Jiajie Tang, Jiebo Luo
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable ability to harness commonsense knowledge and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which incorporates four distinct prompting strategies of text enrichment for improving personalized text-based recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves recommendation quality and even basic MLP models achieve comparable or even better results than complex content-based methods. |
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 . |
LLMs as Lab Engineers: A Benchmark for Analytical Method Lifecycle Management (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaoyi Chen, Mahsa Monshizadeh, Chaoqi Zhang, Jianjun Lang, Yang Wu, Genevieve Mortensen, Xiaozhong Liu, Haixu Tang
| Challenge: | General-purpose commercial models outperform domain-specialized ones, while RAG and reasoning significantly improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in analytical chemistry scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks focused on factual knowledge and provides practical guidance for analytical chemistry challenges. |
Emergent Relational Order in LLM Agent Societies: From Collective Affect to Authority Stratification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Fei Xiaotong’s Differential Order Pattern characterizes rural society as egocentric and relationally graded, with cooperation attenuating over social distance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework grounded in Affect Control Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Durkheimian collective affect. |
| Outcome: | Extensive simulations support interpreting Differential Order as a structure-sensitive emergent outcome of general social mechanisms. |
Learning Geometry-Aware Representations for New Intent Discovery (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for intent classification fail to distinguish new intents due to intertwined centers . a novel framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a new intent discovery framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarking datasets. |
ChatMap: Mining Human Thought Processes for Customer Service Chatbots via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinyi Jiang, Tianyi Hu, Yuheng Qin, Guoming Wang, Zhou Huan, Kehan Chen, Gang Huang, Rongxing Lu, Siliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing dialogue performance rely on summarizing behavior . e-commerce chatbots need to align their dialogue strategies with human behavior to achieve coherent, human-like conversations with customers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract core patterns from dialogue data and integrate them into models by mining service thought processes using a multi-agent aPproach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms manual methods and outperfies baselines on Taobao in China. |
OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Iat Long Iong, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Chen, Hanyu Lai, Shuntian Yao, Pengbo Shen, Hao Yu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | OpenWebAgent integrates large language models and large multimodal models to improve web automation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate large language models and large multimodal models into an open toolkit to optimize web automation. |
| Outcome: | The open toolkit integrates both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) it enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web. |
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods for knowledge base question answering are either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph retrieval framework that decouples the retrieval from the subsequent reasoning process and trains subgraphs for easier reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval and QA performance over existing methods. |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
MegaAgent: A Large-Scale Autonomous LLM-based Multi-Agent System Without Predefined SOPs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent systems lack agent coordination and rely on predefined procedures . existing systems lack adaptive task coordination when task is big and complex . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale autonomous LLM-based multi-agent system that generates agents based on task complexity and enables dynamic task decomposition, parallel execution, efficient communication and comprehensive system monitoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing systems in task completion efficiency and scalability. |
ORPP: Self-Optimizing Role-playing Prompts to Enhance Language Model Capabilities (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has explored model-driven strategies for prompt optimization, but these methods suffer from high computational overhead or require strong optimization capabilities from the model itself, which limits their broad applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes and generates role-playing prompts by limiting the prompt search space to role-player scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches and surpasses existing prompt optimization methods in terms of performance. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
OptiCo: Adaptive Distributed Training Optimization via Collaborative Agent Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing distributed training frameworks are plagued by over-reliance on prior profiling and poor generalization across models/hardware. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-driven multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models to enable automatic and explainable distributed training strategy configuration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms expert-designed training strategies within 20 iterations. |
DebateCoder: Towards Collective Intelligence of LLMs via Test Case Driven LLM Debate for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Xinyi Dai, Weiming Zhang, Xihuai Wang, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing debate-based approaches to code generation are limited due to several reasons: 1) Reliance on different instances of the same LLM for debate, 2) under-utilization of test cases, and 3) reliance on third-party moderators for result consolidation and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose to use test cases to analyze code and identify bugs while opposing models generate test cases for each other to challenge each other's code during the debate process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model collects intelligence of LLMs via test case-driven debate for code generation. |
Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on table-based reasoning distillation has focused on smaller models with limited performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based reasoning distillation approach to distill LLMs into smaller models . their results show that a 220 million parameter model fine-tuned using distilled data improves performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a scientific table-to-text generation dataset and surpasses specific LLMs. |
TS-Align: A Teacher-Student Collaborative Framework for Scalable Iterative Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mainstream approaches to aligning large language models heavily rely on human preference data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fine-tunes a policy model using pairwise feedback data automatically mined from its outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the base model with an average win rate of 69.7% across seven conversational or instruction-following datasets. |
A Multi-Task Approach for Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Representations (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirically, the model with the best performing syntactic and semantic representations gives rise to the most disentangled representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model that uses latent variables to learn a sentence that uses both latent and latent representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better disentanglement between semantic and syntactic representations by training with multiple losses, including losses that exploit aligned paraphrastic sentences and word-order information. |
Distilling the Essence: Efficient Reasoning Distillation via Sequence Truncation (2026.findings-acl)
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Wei-Rui Chen, Vignesh Kothapalli, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | a large reasoning model (LRM) training on large amounts of reasoning data is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify computation-quality tradeoffs as a function of sequence length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces training time, memory and FLOPs by 50% on long training sequences while retaining the full-sequence performance. |
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. |
BlendFilter: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Query Generation Blending and Knowledge Filtering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haoyu Wang, Ruirui Li, Haoming Jiang, Jinjin Tian, Zhengyang Wang, Chen Luo, Xianfeng Tang, Monica Cheng, Tuo Zhao, Jing Gao
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models struggle with complex inputs and noisy knowledge retrieval hindering model effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a query generation method that integrates query generation blending with knowledge filtering to enhance retrieval-augmented LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks on open-domain question answering benchmarks. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
CIL: Contrastive Instance Learning Framework for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce noise from DS generated training data are not effective for distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-instance learning framework to reduce DS noise by dividing training instances into several bags and using them as new data units. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on NYT10, GDS and KBP with significant improvements over existing methods. |
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. |
Zero-Shot Information Extraction as a Unified Text-to-Triple Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of information extraction tasks require task-specific training. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-triple translation framework for information extraction tasks . they propose enabling task-agnostic translation by leveraging latent knowledge of a pre-trained language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing methods on open information extraction tasks. |
Bridging the Memorization-Utilization Gap: Near-Lossless Context Compression via Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in context compression have failed to effectively utilize compressed representations for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic training paradigm that uses outcome-based RL to enable implicit expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous models on NIAH, LongBench and multi-hop reasoning. |
VRoPE: Rotary Position Embedding for Video Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zikang Liu, Longteng Guo, Yepeng Tang, Tongtian Yue, Junxian Cai, Kai Ma, Qingbin Liu, Xi Chen, Jing Liu
| Challenge: | Existing versions of Large Language Models (LLMs) lack a positional encoding strategy for video. |
| Approach: | They propose a new positional encoding method tailored for Video-LLMs that mitigates positional biases and ensures a more uniform distribution of spatial focus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing versions of RoPE in video understanding and reasoning tasks. |
xDial-Eval: A Multilingual Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation Benchmark (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, human evaluation is the most reliable way to holistically judge the quality of the dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English dialogue evaluation metrics to generalize them to other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics outperform OpenAI’s ChatGPT in terms of average Pearson correlations over all datasets and languages. |
Meta-Reflection: A Feedback-Free Reflection Learning Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Yaoke Wang, Yun Zhu, XintongBao XintongBao, Wenqiao Zhang, Suyang Dai, Kehan Chen, Wenqiang Li, Gang Huang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve large language models' ability to understand and reason are limited by external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-free reflection mechanism that requires only a single inference pass without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on an industrial e-commerce benchmark and public datasets. |
QBridge: Bridging Natural Language and SQL via Gold Query Rewriting with Agentic Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) is an intuitive interface for querying structured data . but real user questions are noisy, ambiguous, and weakly grounded to database semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic feedback-driven NL2SQL framework that bridges natural language and SQL via Gold Query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong prompting and agentic baselines on spider, BIRD, and three robustness variants on NL2SQL. |
LayoutMask: Enhance Text-Layout Interaction in Multi-modal Pre-training for Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models on document images with transformer-based backbones have led to significant performance gains in this field. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal pre-training model that combines text, layout and image . they propose to use local 1D position instead of global 1D positions as layout input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of VrDU problems. |
Global Structure Knowledge-Guided Relation Extraction Method for Visually-Rich Document (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Relation Extraction framework that generates relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from scanned images and incorporates global structural knowledge into the representations of the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in fine-tuning setting and yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
GeoQA: A Geometric Question Answering Benchmark Towards Multimodal Numerical Reasoning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve geometric problems are dependent on handcraft rules and limited on small-scale datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a Geometric Question Answering dataset with 5,010 geometric problems with corresponding annotated programs to illustrate the solving process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is significantly lower than human performance on the proposed dataset than on a publicly available dataset. |
Demonstrating ViviDoc: Generating Interactive Documents through Human-Agent Collaboration (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based agents can automate content creation, but naively applying them yields uncontrollable and unverifiable outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-agent collaborative system that generates interactive educational documents from a single topic input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates documents comparable in quality to human-authored ones. |
Emphasising Structured Information: Integrating Abstract Meaning Representation into LLMs for Enhanced Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics struggle to evaluate adversarial negative examples . existing metrics struggle in handling adversarials, resulting in low correlations with human judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates AMR and domain-specific language models for automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework achieves strong correlations with human judgments across multiple datasets. |
LoRA-PAR: A Flexible Dual-System LoRA Partitioning Approach to Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale generative models like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-O1 benefit substantially from chain-of-thought reasoning, yet pushing their performance typically requires vast data, large model sizes, and full-parameter fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-system LoRA framework that partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands and adopts a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance knowledge and intuition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands, using fewer yet more focused parameters for each task. |
Towards Bridging the Reward-Generation Gap in Direct Alignment Algorithms (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, including instruction following, mathematical problem solving, and coding generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that truncates both preferred and dispreferred responses to match the shorter one’s length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves over standard implementations and achieves 11.8 points in AlpacaEval 2 and overall improvements across downstream tasks. |
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. |
MovieCORE: COgnitive REasoning in Movies (2025.emnlp-main)
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Gueter Josmy Faure, Min-Hung Chen, Jia-Fong Yeh, Ying Cheng, Hung-Ting Su, Yung-Hao Tang, Shang-Hong Lai, Winston H. Hsu
| Challenge: | MovieCORE is a video question answering dataset that focuses on surface-level comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a video question-answer dataset that uses large language models as thought agents to generate and refine high-quality question-anchor pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves model reasoning capabilities post-training by 25% . the proposed model is based on a large language model and is scalable to a wide range of tasks . |
Integrating Data Validation with Large Language Models for Regulation-Guided Tabular Anomaly Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tabular anomaly detection methods focus on detecting anomalies based on data distribution without considering regulatory compliance. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that leverages regulations to detect anomalies in tabular data . they also develop three new datasets to address this task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three new datasets. |
MAB-DQA: Addressing Query Aspect Importance in Document Question Answering with Multi-Armed Bandits (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document Question Answering (DQA) requires interpreting visual layouts, which has prompted recent studies to adopt multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that processes page images for answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-armed bandit-based DQA framework that explicitly models the varying importance of multiple implicit aspects in a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows an improvement of 5%-18% over the state-of-the-art method on four benchmarks. |
FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yilun Zhao, Yitao Long, Tintin Jiang, Chengye Wang, Weiyuan Chen, Hongjun Liu, Xiangru Tang, Yiming Zhang, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | FinDVer is a benchmark to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs . financial documents are typically long, intricate and dense, and they include both quantita and numerical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs . they assess 25 LLM systems under long-context and RAG settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can be used to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs in financial documents. |
EvoMD-LLM: Learning the Language of Species Evolution in Reactive Molecular Dynamics (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models operate on static molecular representations or rely on external tools for reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates species-level molecular dynamics as a symbolic temporal language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms neural networks and language-based baselines on multiple temporal prediction tasks and generates plausible interpretations of reaction dynamics. |
KCAT: A Knowledge-Constraint Typing Annotation Tool (P19-3)
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Sheng Lin, Luye Zheng, Bo Chen, Siliang Tang, Zhigang Chen, Guoping Hu, Yueting Zhuang, Fei Wu, Xiang Ren
| Challenge: | Recent years Natural Language Processing community has seen a surge of interest in fine-grained entity typing (FET) given an entity mention (i.e. a sequence of token spans representing an entity), FET aims at uncovering its contextdependent type. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Knowledge Constraint Fine-grained Entity Typing Annotation Tool which further improves the entity typing process through entity linking together with some practical functions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool improves the entity typing process by linking the candidate types with some practical functions. |
BiKT: Enabling Bidirectional Knowledge Transfer Between Pretrained Models and Sequential Downstream Tasks (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks adapt from initial pretrained model to each downstream task directly, but ignore sequential nature of downstream tasks and feedback effect on pretrained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable bidirectional knowledge transfer between pretrained models and downstream tasks in rounds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on 9 GLUE datasets and 6 SuperGLUEs. |
MES-RAG: Bringing Multi-modal, Entity-Storage, and Secure Enhancements to RAG (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieve entity information are limited by document level retrieval and intermingled storage of information from different entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances entity-specific query handling . MES-RAG introduces proactive security measures that ensure system integrity . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that MES-RAG improves accuracy and recall . the framework can be integrated into existing RAG architectures . |
RLKGF: Reinforcement Learning from Knowledge Graph Feedback Without Human Annotations (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Lack of human preference labels remains a significant bottleneck when applying RLHF to a downstream domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages human priors encoded in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to derive RL rewards in the absence of manual annotations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three public and one private medical dialogue datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the competitive RLAIF in improving LLM diagnostic accuracy. |
OpenT2T: An Open-Source Toolkit for Table-to-Text Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Haowei Zhang, Shengyun Si, Yilun Zhao, Lujing Xie, Zhijian Xu, Lyuhao Chen, Linyong Nan, Pengcheng Wang, Xiangru Tang, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation are limited and benchmarked on a limited number of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source tools to reproduce existing large language models for performance comparison and expedite the development of new models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit compares existing large language models on 9 table-to-text generation datasets and maintains a leaderboard to provide insights for future work. |
T2DR: A Two-Tier Deficiency-Resistant Framework for Incomplete Multimodal Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing incomplete multimodal learning frameworks are inadequate for integrating multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for incomplete multimodal learning that is deficiency-resistant and provides two modules to address fine-grained deficiencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the SOTA models on two well-known multimodal benchmarks. |
Spatiotemporal Sycophancy: Negation-Based Gaslighting in Video Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Vid-LLMs lack robust mechanisms for maintaining grounded spatiotemporal beliefs under conversational feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a negation-based gaslighting evaluation framework and introduce a benchmark to investigate spatiotemporal sycophancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates state-of-the-art Vid-LLMs across video understanding tasks. |
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. |
Multi-Granularity Semantic Revision for Large Language Model Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaoyu Liu, Yun Zhang, Wei Li, Simiao Li, Xudong Huang, Hanting Chen, Yehui Tang, Jie Hu, Zhiwei Xiong, Yunhe Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models rely on student-generated outputs, which introduce generation errors and misguide the distillation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity semantic revision method for LLM distillation that corrects errors using teacher-generated tokens and re-generates the sequence to minimize errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces errors and misguides distillation on student models and improves consistency between teacher and student outputs. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
Reasoning Makes Good Annotators : An Automatic Task-specific Rules Distilling Framework for Low-resource Relation Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract knowledge from unlabeled data generate noise labels. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic task-specific rules distilling framework to generate a logic rule from unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework could power the labeling ability by discovering reliable model-labeled data. |
Response-G1: Explicit Scene Graph Modeling for Proactive Streaming Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Ke Ma, Jiaqi Tang, Bin Guo, Xueting Han, Ruonan Xu, Qingfeng He, Ziheng Wang, Xu Wang, Qifeng Chen, Zhiwen Yu, Yunhao Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for streaming video understanding are query-agnostic and implicitly model video evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes explicit, structured alignment between the accumulated video evidence and the query’s expected response conditions via scene graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves more interpretable and accurate response timing decisions on both proactive and reactive tasks. |
CLEAR: A Clinically Grounded Tabular Framework for Radiology Report Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuyang Jiang, Chacha Chen, Shengyuan Wang, Feng Li, Zecong Tang, Benjamin M. Mervak, Lydia Chelala, Christopher M Straus, Reve Chahine, Samuel G. Armato Iii, Chenhao Tan
| Challenge: | Existing metrics lack the granularity and interpretability to capture nuanced clinical differences between candidate and ground-truth radiology reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a tabular framework with E**xpert-curated labels and an attribute-level comparison for radiology report evaluation (**CLEAR) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract clinical attributes and provide automated metrics that are strongly aligned with clinical judgment. |
ZoomRAG: Hierarchical Random-walk Zooming across Multi-scale Information Graphs for Fast and Accurate RAG (2026.findings-acl)
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Xianming Hu, Jingyang Chen, Bin Tang, Yihe Liu, Yihong Huang, Hongbo Zhao, Nuoyi Chen, Jie Zhang, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful tool for NLP applications . but it is challenging to encode large knowledge bases as compact offline structures . |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical graph inference method that uses random walks to retrieve information from a corpus of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces offline indexing costs and accelerates retrieval. |
LongVideoAgent: Multi-Agent Reasoning with Long Videos (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a key emerging challenge is robust long video understanding, authors say . current methods compress content into lossy summaries or rely on limited toolsets . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework where a master LLM coordinates a grounding agent and a vision agent to extract targeted textual observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong non-agent baselines on episode-level datasets . the proposed model significantly outperformed existing models on other datasets. |
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. |
Backdooring Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models with Virtual Prompt Injection (2024.naacl-long)
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Jun Yan, Vikas Yadav, Shiyang Li, Lichang Chen, Zheng Tang, Hai Wang, Vijay Srinivasan, Xiang Ren, Hongxia Jin
| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can modulate responses based on human instructions, but they can be maliciously steered to impact society in subtle but persistent ways. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack setting that allows an attacker to inject a virtual prompt into an LLM to steer it without any explicit injection at its input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to poison the model's instruction tuning data and show that it is highly effective in steering the model. |
TRACE: Two-Phase RL for Causal Graph Exploration and Deeper Psychological Intervention in Dynamic Counseling Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models lack the ability to actively explore the underlying causes of psychological distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase reinforcement learning framework that implements a causal-graph-driven reward scheme across two phases: an exploration phase that rewards the causal graph reconstruction following a surface-to-deep path, and an intervention phase that supports targeted restructuring of irrational beliefs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that TRACE outperforms existing models, enabling causal-chain-aware psychological intervention beyond surface-level empathy. |
Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT. |
The Rise of Darkness: Safety-Utility Trade-Offs in Role-Playing Dialogue Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their utility in character simulations, but they pose a risk of generating unsafe content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which dynamically adjusts safety-utility preferences based on the degree of risk coupling and guides the model to generate responses biased toward utility or safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety metrics while maintaining utility. |
RAVEN++: Pinpointing Fine-Grained Violations in Advertisement Videos with Active Reinforcement Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Deyi Ji, Yuekui Yang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Haiyang Wu, Shaogang Tang, Xudong Chen, Shaoping Ma, Tianrun Chen, Lanyun Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have improved the detection of non-compliant content, but critical gaps persist in fine-grained understanding, explainability, and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines active reinforcement learning, fine-grained violation understanding and progressive multi-stage training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms general-purpose LLMs and specialized models in fine-grained violation understanding, explainability, and generalization. |
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 . |
Read As Human: Compressing Context via Parallelizable Close Reading and Skimming (2026.acl-long)
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Jiwei Tang, Shilei Liu, Zhicheng Zhang, Qingsong Lv, Runsong Zhao, Tingwei Lu, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Yujin Yuan, Hai-Tao Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing task-aware methods require loading the entire input sequence at once for compression, which suffer from computational inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adopts an adaptive hybrid reading strategy to reduce computational inefficiency and redundant information in long-context scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAM outperforms baselines on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks while delivering up to a 12x speedup on long inputs. |
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 . |
From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks (2025.naacl-long)
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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Liang Xie, Wenxiao Wang, Chaochen Gu, Hao Tang, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) are a powerful visual-language reasoning tool. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM to determine interactions between visual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be used to determine interactions between visual representations. |
Reading Order Matters: Information Extraction from Visually-rich Documents by Token Path Prediction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to predict token sequences within visually-rich documents by a simple prediction head. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to predict token mentions as token sequences within documents. |
Debate-to-Detect: Reformulating Misinformation Detection as a Real-World Debate with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite advances in large language models, their application to misinformation detection remains hindered by issues of logical inconsistency and superficial verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework that reformulates misinformation detection as a structured adversarial debate based on fact-checking workflows . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables iterative refinement of evidence while improving decision transparency. |
CLOWER: A Pre-trained Language Model with Contrastive Learning over Word and Character Representations (2022.coling-1)
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Borun Chen, Hongyin Tang, Jiahao Bu, Kai Zhang, Jingang Wang, Qifan Wang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Wei Wu, Liqian Yu
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance gains across numerous downstream tasks in natural language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese pre-trained language model that implicitly encodes words into characters . they propose 'contrastive learning over word' and 'character' representations to improve learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode words into fine-grained representations without modification of production pipelines. |
Boost, Disentangle, and Customize: A Robust System2-to-System1 Pipeline for Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Kounianhua Du, Hanjing Wang, Jianxing Liu, Jizheng Chen, Xinyi Dai, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Jun Wang, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems 2 methods for code generation are difficult to implement due to the complex hidden reasoning process and heterogeneous data distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that Boosts reasoning exploration via multi-agent collaboration and Disentangles heterogeneous data into specialized experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on APPS and CodeContest benchmarks and achieves 73.8% accuracy on hard problems. |
Trajectory2Task: Training Robust Tool-Calling Agents with Synthesized Yet Verifiable Data for Complex User Intents (2026.acl-long)
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Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Yimeng Zhang, Pei Chen, Ziwei Dong, Jing Huang, Jiri Gesi, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Qun Liu, Yisi Sang, Hanqing Lu, Manling Li, Jin Lai, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows . but most studies on tool-callers focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-calling agent-based data pipeline that converts trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be used to study tool use under three scenarios. |
Many Heads Are Better Than One: Improved Scientific Idea Generation by A LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.acl-long)
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Haoyang Su, Renqi Chen, Shixiang Tang, Zhenfei Yin, Xinzhe Zheng, Jinzhe Li, Biqing Qi, Qi Wu, Hui Li, Wanli Ouyang, Philip Torr, Bowen Zhou, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent AI methods have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, but they fail to replicate the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual scientific system that mimics the collaborative nature of scientific research by organizing a team of agents to generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing new scientific ideas and offers valuable insights to guide future research. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Multilingual Translation from Denoising Pre-Training (2021.findings-acl)
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Yuqing Tang, Chau Tran, Xian Li, Peng-Jen Chen, Naman Goyal, Vishrav Chaudhary, Jiatao Gu, Angela Fan
| Challenge: | Recent work shows potential of training one model for multilingual machine translation . but little has been explored on the potential to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual translation in a single model. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual machine translation in a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over models trained from scratch and bilingually for translation into English. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
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. |
Improving Chinese Story Generation via Awareness of Syntactic Dependencies and Semantics (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Current neural models for Chinese story generation struggle to generate high-quality long text narratives due to ambiguity in syntactically parsing the Chinese language. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances the feature capturing mechanism by informing the generation model of dependencies between words and additionally augmenting the semantic representation learning through synonym denoising training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art Chinese generation models on all evaluation metrics, showing that it enhances dependency and semantic representation learning. |
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. |
SLIDE: A Framework Integrating Small and Large Language Models for Open-Domain Dialogues Evaluation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to evaluate open domain dialogues have a one-to-many problem . existing approaches lack commonsense reasoning biases and perform poorly in domain-specific scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages both a small, specialised model and LLMs for the evaluation of open-domain dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and evaluation tasks and exhibits better correlation with human judgements. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
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Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks. |
Controllable Paraphrase Generation with a Syntactic Exemplar (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on controllable text generation assumes that the generated attribute can take on a finite set of values known a priori. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where the syntax of a generated sentence is controlled rather by a sentential exemplar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves improvements over baselines and learns to capture desirable characteristics. |
SwarmAgentic: Towards Fully Automated Agentic System Generation via Swarm Intelligence (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing agentic system generation frameworks lack autonomy, autonomy, and functionality . current frameworks are too rigid, limiting adaptability and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fully automates agentic system generation, optimization, and collaboration . they construct agents from scratch and jointly refine functionality and coordination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ADAS on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks on the TravelPlanner benchmark. |
Mixture of Multimodal Adapters for Sentiment Analysis (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been used for text sentiment analysis but sentiment is hidden in other modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse emotions from different data to analyze sentiments . they use compression parameter for each expert to reduce training burden . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art with a tiny trainable parameter count compared to current methods . emotions hidden in body movements or vocal timbres eclipse traditional methods compared with text sentiment analysis . |
Language Constrained Multimodal Hyper Adapter For Many-to-Many Multimodal Summarization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that share parameters neglect the language-specific knowledge learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-constrained multimodal hyper adapter for multimodal summarization that integrates language-specific adapters into multilingual pre-trained backbones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate summaries based on multimodal documents such as text and visuals, allowing people to quickly locate key information from the vast multimedia con. |
M3D: MultiModal MultiDocument Fine-Grained Inconsistency Detection (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact-checking claim are limited by ambiguous information and lack sample-level predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that predicts the logical relationship of each aspect of a claim from a set of multimodal documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on two benchmarks while providing finer-grained predictions, explanations, and evidence. |
UnitY: Two-pass Direct Speech-to-speech Translation with Discrete Units (2023.acl-long)
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Hirofumi Inaguma, Sravya Popuri, Ilia Kulikov, Peng-Jen Chen, Changhan Wang, Yu-An Chung, Yun Tang, Ann Lee, Shinji Watanabe, Juan Pino
| Challenge: | Experimental evaluations show that UnitY outperforms a single-pass speech-to-unit translation model by 2.5-4.2 ASR-BLEU with 2.83x decoding speed-up. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-pass direct S2ST architecture which generates textual representations and predicts discrete acoustic units . they show that UnitY outperforms a single-pass speech-to-unit translation model by 2.5-4.2 ASR-BLEU with 2.83x decoding speed-up. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms a single-pass speech-to-unit translation model by 2.5-4.2 ASR-BLEU with 2.83x decoding speed-up on large datasets. |
How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the role of Large Language Models in combating misinformation, but there is still a lack of detailed analysis on the specific aspects and extent to which LLMs are influenced by misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' behavior and knowledge preference toward misinformation to identify their models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on 10,346,712 pieces of misinformation and examines knowledge conflicts and stylistic variations. |
EtriCA: Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation Augmented by Cross Attention (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for story generation still suffer from problems of relevance and coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel neural generation model which maps contextual and event features to event sequences with a cross-attention mechanism and exploits logical relatedness between events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on automatic and human evaluations and shows that it can leverage contextual and event features. |
Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation With Discrete Units (2022.acl-long)
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Ann Lee, Peng-Jen Chen, Changhan Wang, Jiatao Gu, Sravya Popuri, Xutai Ma, Adam Polyak, Yossi Adi, Qing He, Yun Tang, Juan Pino, Wei-Ning Hsu
| Challenge: | Existing direct speech-to-speech translation models rely on text generation as an intermediate step. |
| Approach: | They propose a direct speech-to-speech translation model that translates speech from one language to another without relying on intermediate text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces 6.7 BLEUs in the Fisher Spanish-English dataset when trained without any text transcripts and with text supervision. |
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. |
Specialization through Collaboration: Understanding Expert Interaction in Mixture-of-Expert Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models are popular for multitasking . however, whether each expert can specialize to a task remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dictionary learning approach to analyze expert collaboration mechanisms in MoE LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by 2.5% while enabling 50% expert reduction. |
Improving Distantly-supervised Entity Typing with Compact Latent Space Clustering (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have addressed this problem with partial-label loss, but they suffer from confirmation bias, which means the classifier fit a pseudo data distribution given by itself. |
| Approach: | They propose to regularize distantly supervised models with Compact Latent Space Clustering to bypass this problem and effectively utilize noisy data yet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on standard benchmarks on fine-grained entity typing (FET) by a significant margin. |
LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zhaoyan Guo, Chenxu Wang, Shengji Tang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Yang Chen, Biqing Qi, Peng Ye, Lei Bai, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the best suitable model from an ensemble. |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing . they find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented and performance-cost trade-off routing. |
URG: A Unified Ranking and Generation Method for Ensembling Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rank and generate large language models have limited performance due to time-intensive nature of ranking process and lack of error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly ranks the outputs of Large Language Models and generates fine-grained fusion results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on ranking and generation tasks. |
KCS: Diversify Multi-hop Question Generation with Knowledge Composition Sampling (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering focus on generating simple questions and neglecting the integration of essential knowledge, such as relevant sentences within documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to expand the diversity of generated multi-hop questions by sampling varied knowledge compositions within a given context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the overall accuracy of knowledge composition selection by 3.9% on hotpotQA and 2WikiMultihopQA datasets. |
Enhancing Biomedical Lay Summarisation with External Knowledge Graphs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lay summarisation are reliant on the source article, which is unlikely to include all the information necessary for a lay audience. |
| Approach: | They augment existing biomedical lay summarisation dataset with article-specific knowledge graphs that contain detailed information on relevant biomedically related concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve readability and explanation of technical concepts by integrating graph-based domain knowledge within lay summarisation models. |
Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge (2025.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Liangyou Li, Chuhan Wu, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Fuyuan Lyu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on majority voting or criteria expansion to capture detailed and detailed details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate answers. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves evaluation reliability and achieves an average gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. |
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. |
Hey, That’s My Data! Token-Only Dataset Inference in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing dataset inference methods require logit access, but many modern LLMs restrict such access. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-only dataset inference framework that allows models to overwrite prior knowledge when trained on new data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overwrites prior knowledge when trained on new data. |
VIRT: Improving Representation-based Text Matching via Virtual Interaction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that representation-based text matching methods suffer from performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual interaction mechanism that enables deep interaction between texts . they propose 'inteRacTion mechanism' that can be integrated into existing methods as plugins . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on six text matching benchmarks. |
SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)
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Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%. |
Fine-grained Category Discovery under Coarse-grained supervision with Hierarchical Weighted Self-contrastive Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for novel category discovery focus on the scenario where known and novel categories are of the same granularity. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel scenario for fine-grained category discovery under coarse-grain supervision that allows for adapting models to categories of different granularity from known ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can adapt models to categories of different granularity from known ones and reduce labeling cost. |
Adaptive Zooming via Relevance-Informed Positional Resource Allocation for Training-free LLM Context Extension (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbo Zhao, Huibin Wang, Bin Tang, Xianming Hu, Yihong Huang, Yijun Shen, Nuoyi Chen, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods for extrapolating beyond training context lengths are semantics-agnostic . Existing methods that focus on relative token distances can indiscriminately blur semantically relevant and irrelevant tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive positional zooming method that uses semantic relevance to extrapolate beyond training context lengths. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RiPRA outperforms existing training-free extrapolation methods . relevant tokens get higher positional resolution, while irrelevant tokens are compressed . |
RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations (2023.acl-long)
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Yilun Zhao, Chen Zhao, Linyong Nan, Zhenting Qi, Wenlin Zhang, Xiangru Tang, Boyu Mi, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing Table QA models are vulnerable to task-specific perturbations, such as replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on existing Table QA models against human-annotated adversarial perturbations. |
Cognitive Graph for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension at Scale (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for multi-hop reading comprehension question answering is needed to cross the chasm of reading comprehension between machine and human. |
| Approach: | They propose a CogQA framework for multi-hop reading comprehension question answering in web-scale documents that builds a cognitive graph in an iterative process by coordinating an implicit extraction module and an explicit reasoning module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best competitor in the hotpotQA dataset in F1 . it provides explainable reasoning paths and accurate answers, while giving accurate answers . |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yinghao Tang, Xueding Liu, Boyuan Zhang, Tingfeng Lan, Yupeng Xie, Jiale Lao, Yiyao Wang, Haoxuan Li, Tingting Gao, Bo Pan, Luoxuan Weng, Xiuqi Huang, Minfeng Zhu, Yingchaojie Feng, Yuyu Luo, Wei Chen
| Challenge: | Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate reliability of text-to-infographic generation using IGenBench . they employ multimodal large language models to verify each question . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. |
FinRipple: Aligning Large Language Models with Financial Market for Event Ripple Effect Awareness (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Financial markets exhibit complex dynamics where localized events trigger ripple effects across entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that empowers large language models to analyze ripple effects . they use financial theory-guided large-scale reinforcement learning to align LLMs with the market . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows LLMs to analyze ripple effects through financial theory-guided large-scale reinforcement learning. |
MAUD: An Expert-Annotated Legal NLP Dataset for Merger Agreement Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Steven Wang, Antoine Scardigli, Leonard Tang, Wei Chen, Dmitry Levkin, Anya Chen, Spencer Ball, Thomas Woodside, Oliver Zhang, Dan Hendrycks
| Challenge: | Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD) is an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study. |
| Approach: | They propose a Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 annotations. |
| Outcome: | The Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD) is an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study. |
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuanfu Wang, Pengyu Wang, Chenyang Xi, Bo Tang, Junyi Zhu, Wenqiang Wei, Chen Chen, Chao Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Yijun Niu, Keming Mao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang
| Challenge: | Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%. |
EARA: Improving Biomedical Semantic Textual Similarity with Entity-Aligned Attention and Retrieval Augmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure semantic similarity between biomedical texts are inefficient due to too many biomedically-related entities. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-aligned, attention-based and retrieval-augmented PLM that aligns the same type of fine-grained entity information in each sentence pair with an entity alignment matrix with an auxiliary loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art on both in-domain and out-of domain datasets. |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks. |
Why LLM Safety Guardrails Collapse After Fine-tuning: A Similarity Analysis Between Alignment and Fine-tuning Datasets (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing mitigation strategies focus on reactively addressing jailbreak incidents after safety guardrails have been compromised. |
| Approach: | They investigate the degradation of safety guardrails through the lens of representation similarity between upstream alignment datasets and downstream fine-tuning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces harmfulness score by 10.33% when compared to baseline models. |
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%. |
LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization (2025.acl-long)
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Zhaoling Chen, Robert Tang, Gangda Deng, Fang Wu, Jialong Wu, Zhiwei Jiang, Viktor Prasanna, Arman Cohan, Xingyao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches struggle to efficiently navigate complex codebases when identifying relevant code snippets. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-guided agent framework that addresses code localization through a distributed graph-based agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy on real-world benchmarks and can be used to locate code snippets at a cost of 86%. |
Conan-Embedding-v2: Training an LLM from Scratch for Text Embeddings (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies use LoRA to fine-tune existing LLMs, but this is limited by the data and training gap between them and embedding models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new 1.4B-parameter LLM trained from scratch and fine-tuned as a text embedder that integrates embeddings across different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and Chinese MTEB (May 19, 2025). |
LPO: Towards Accurate GUI Agent Interaction via Location Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Tang, Yu Xia, Yi-Feng Wu, Yuwei Hu, Chen Yuhui, Qing-Guo Chen, Xiaogang Xu, Xiangyu Wu, Hao LU, Yanqing Ma, Shiyin Lu, Qifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing strategies for spatial localization are limited due to their limited capacity to perceive positional data. |
| Approach: | They propose a location-based approach that leverages locational data to optimize interaction preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves SOTA results across offline benchmarks and real-world evaluations. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulator (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in static medical question answering benchmarks, rivaling even human experts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework emulating dynamic medical interactions between Doctor as player and NPCs including Patient and Examiner to assess the performance of LLM-driven Doctor agents in simulated clinical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework emulates dynamic medical interactions between Doctor as player and NPCs including Patient and Examiner. |
From Long to Lean: Performance-aware and Adaptive Chain-of-Thought Compression via Multi-round Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning introduces significant inference latency due to its verbosity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages token elasticity phenomenon to progressively compress CoTs via multiround refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average accuracy improvement of 5.6% over state-of-the-art baselines while reducing CoT length by an average of 47 tokens and significantly lowering latency. |
Towards Efficient CoT Distillation: Self-Guided Rationale Selector for Better Performance with Fewer Rationales (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on rationale quality underestimates the importance of CoT distillation, focusing primarily on data quantity, which may result in transferring noisy or incorrect information to the student model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can discern and select high quality rationales for distillation and a Rationale Difficulty metric to measure the ability of the student model to generate the correct answer under a given rationale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 4.6% accuracy improvement over baseline data on seven datasets over three tasks, controlling accuracy, diversity, and difficulty. |
TwistList: Resources and Baselines for Tongue Twister Generation (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Previous work in phonetically-grounded language generation has focused on domains such as lyrics and poetry. |
| Approach: | They propose to use TwistList to generate phonetically constrained tongue twisters, a large annotated dataset consisting of 2.1K+ human-authored examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better than pre-trained models with limited training and data and no explicit phonetic knowledge. |
MoPE: Mixture of Prefix Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot dialogue state tracking models suffer from domain transferring and partial prediction problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to establish connections between similar slots in different domains to improve model transfer performance in unseen domains. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model achieves the goal accuracy of 57.13% on MultiWOZ2.1 and 55.4. |
CoMeT: Collaborative Memory Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yujin Yuan, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity is a major barrier to long-context processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
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. |
ViLBench: A Suite for Vision-Language Process Reward Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite its advantages, evaluation on PRMs remains less explored, especially in the multimodal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark vision large language models as output reward models and process reward models as process-supervised reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms both ORM and PRM on vision-language benchmarks and achieves an average improvement of 3.3% over standard CoT and up to 2.5% over its untrained counterpart on ViLBench. |
Multilingual Language Model Pretraining using Machine-translated Data (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiayi Wang, Yao Lu, Maurice Weber, Max Ryabinin, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Yihong Chen, Raphael Tang, Pontus Stenetorp
| Challenge: | Existing methods for collecting and filtering multilingual web data lead to most languages lagging behind English performance due to the Internet's English-centric nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to translate a high-quality English web corpus into nine languages and pretrain a 1.3B-parameter model on it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or outperforms multilingual LLMs of similar size across Non-English understanding and reasoning tasks despite being trained on an order of magnitude less data. |
MetaSumPerceiver: Multimodal Multi-Document Evidence Summarization for Fact-Checking (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Fact-checking claims on social media platforms poses a significant challenge due to the large volume of new claims constantly being posted without sufficient methods for verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates claim-specific summaries from multimodal multi-document datasets using a perceiver-based model that is able to handle inputs from multiple modalities of arbitrary lengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the SOTA approach by 4.6% in the claim verification task on the MOCHEG dataset and shows strong performance on the new multi-document claims dataset. |
Variational Sequential Labelers for Semi-Supervised Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a family of multitask variational methods for semi-supervised sequence labeling is currently unclear how to use them in the context of sequence labelling. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of multitask variational methods for semi-supervised sequence labeling using latent variables and a discriminative labeler. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform standard sequential baselines on 8 sequence labeling datasets and improve further with unlabeled data. |
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. |
SEER: Facilitating Structured Reasoning and Explanation via Reinforcement Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on single-step reasoning, ignoring logical dependencies between steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that maximizes a structure-based return to facilitate structured reasoning and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on EntailmentBank and STREET benchmarks. |
Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Zheng Chu, Huiming Fan, Jingchang Chen, Qianyu Wang, Mingda Yang, Jiafeng Liang, Zhongjie Wang, Hao Li, Guo Tang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses self-critique feedback to guide iterative reasoning by enabling iteration and self-evaluation of its intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA by 8.6% on three multi-hop reasoning datasets. |
SOP-Maze: Evaluating Large Language Models on Complicated Business Standard Operating Procedures (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as domain-specific agents, but evaluation of their capabilities in such contexts has not been fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow instructions and make decisions in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world business data and adapted into 23 complex SOP scenarios. |
TurboRAG: Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Precomputed KV Caches for Chunked Text (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current RAG systems concatenate and process numerous retrieved document chunks for prefill . this leads to significant latency in time-to-first-token (TTFT) Experimental results demonstrate that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by up to 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG system. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid offline-online paradigm that precomputes chunk-level key-value caches and stitches them together at inference time using independent–attention and reorderedRoPE techniques. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG systems . long concatenated contexts consume disproportionate GPU memory, limiting throughput . |
Improving Retrospective Language Agents via Joint Policy Gradient Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have sparked interest in creating autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly optimizes both task-planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves task planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
CloneMem: Benchmarking Long-Term Memory for AI Clones (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory benchmarks rely on user–agent conversational histories, which are temporally fragmented and insufficient for capturing continuous life trajectories. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating long-term memory in AI Clone scenarios grounded in non-conversational digital traces, including diaries, social media posts, and emails, spanning one to three years. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that existing memory benchmarks struggle in this setting, highlighting open challenges for life-grounded personalized AI. |
Text2Mem: A Unified Memory Operation Language for Memory Operating System (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory frameworks lack a formal, executable specification for memory control. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified memory operation language that standardizes translation of natural-language instructions into reliable execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language standardizes translation of natural-language instructions into reliable execution. |
Improving Biomedical Abstractive Summarisation with Knowledge Aggregation from Citation Papers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models struggle to generate technical summaries that are on par with those produced by biomedical experts due to the lack of domain-specific background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a attention-based citation aggregation model that integrates domain-specific knowledge from citation papers and a large-scale biomedical summarisation dataset to build on. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and achieves substantial improvements in biomedical abstractive summarisation. |
NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to story generation are based on end-to-end neural generation models, such as BART, to generate event sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel event planning framework which generates an event sequence by performing inference on an automatically constructed event graph and enhances generalisation ability through a neural event advisor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) event planning approaches on multiple criteria and compares with existing models on the downstream task of story generation. |
Analytical Reasoning of Text (2022.findings-naacl)
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Wanjun Zhong, Siyuan Wang, Duyu Tang, Zenan Xu, Daya Guo, Yining Chen, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models with implicit reasoning ability struggle to solve analytical reasoning of text. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to analyze text and use it to perform reasoning over it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms pre-trained models on an analysis of the Law School Admission Test dataset. |
DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens (2025.findings-acl)
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Shaoshen Chen, Yangning Li, Zishan Xu, Yongqin Zeng, Shunlong Wu, Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan, Xin Su, Jiwei Tang, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing semantic vector-based compression methods do not account for the intrinsic information density variations between context chunks, instead allocating soft tokens uniformly across context chunk. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the LLM's intrinsic understanding of contextual relevance to guide compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on long context tasks. |
LCQMC:A Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering system lack large-scale question matching corpora . lack of large-sized question matching results in problem solving . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese question matching corpus which is released to the public . they use a search engine to collect large-sized question pairs related to high-frequency words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is more general than paraphrase corpus as it focuses on intent matching rather than paraphrasing. |
SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tokenizers fail to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a tokenizer that integrates spiking neurons to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer leverages historical tokenization results, but does not selectively leverage history based on contextual relevance. |
Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bohao Yang, Dong Liu, Chenghao Xiao, Kun Zhao, Chen Tang, Chao Li, Lin Yuan, Yang Guang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
Exploiting Prompt-induced Confidence for Black-Box Attacks on LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks even in strict black-box settings with only hard-label feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box framework that leverages prompt-induced confidence as an auxiliary signal to guide attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the attack success rate and query efficiency while maintaining semantic fidelity. |
Breaking the Hourglass Phenomenon of Residual Quantization: Enhancing the Upper Bound of Generative Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Zhirui Kuai, Zuxu Chen, Huimu Wang, Mingming Li, Dadong Miao, Wang Binbin, Xusong Chen, Li Kuang, Yuxing Han, Jiaxing Wang, Guoyu Tang, Lin Liu, Songlin Wang, Jingwei Zhuo
| Challenge: | Generative retrieval (GR) is a transformative paradigm in search and recommender systems . however, data sparsity and long-tailed distribution hinder the full utilization of GR . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce the "Hourglass" phenomenon in RQ-SID where codebook tokens become overly concentrated. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve retrieval efficiency and generalization capabilities. |
Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that only provide information about user preferences can be inaccurate in e-commerce recommender systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which integrates the recommender system and dialog generation system by introducing information about users’ preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve better performance in both dialog generation and recommendation compared with baselines. |
TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Junyi Li, Zhipeng Chen, Yiwen Hu, Zhuohao Yu, Wenxun Dai, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jian-yun Nie, Ji-rong Wen
| Challenge: | TextBox 2.0 focuses on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generate text. |
| Approach: | They propose a library that integrates pre-trained language models into 13 common text generation tasks and 83 datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding datasets and incorporates 45 PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLM. |
NewsBench: A Systematic Evaluation Framework for Assessing Editorial Capabilities of Large Language Models in Chinese Journalism (2024.acl-long)
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Miao Li, Ming-Bin Chen, Bo Tang, ShengbinHou ShengbinHou, Pengyu Wang, Haiying Deng, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Keming Mao, Cheng Peng, Yi Luo
| Challenge: | a novel evaluation framework assesses the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for editorial capabilities in Chinese journalism. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark dataset to assess the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for editorial capabilities in Chinese journalism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is based on a dataset of 1,267 test samples in 24 news domains. |
Med-PRM: Medical Reasoning Models with Stepwise, Guideline-verified Process Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jaehoon Yun, Jiwoong Sohn, Jungwoo Park, Hyunjae Kim, Xiangru Tang, Daniel Shao, Yong Hoe Koo, Ko Minhyeok, Qingyu Chen, Mark Gerstein, Michael Moor, Jaewoo Kang
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown promise in clinical decision making, but current approaches struggle to localize and correct reasoning errors at specific steps of the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a process reward modeling framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to verify each reasoning step against established medical knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on five medical QA benchmarks and two open-ended diagnostic tasks by 13.50% on MedQA. |
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. |
A Scalable Multi-LLM Collaboration System with Retrieval-based Selection and Exploration-Exploitation-Driven Enhancement (2026.acl-long)
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Shengji Tang, Jianjian Cao, Weihao Lin, Jiale Hong, Bo Zhang, Shuyue Hu, Lei Bai, Tao Chen, Wanli Ouyang, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Existing multi-LLM collaboration systems often encounter scalability challenges when integrating new LLMs and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Scalable Multi-LLM Collaboration System to coordinate multiple open-source LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms prevailing closed-source LLMs on eight mainstream benchmarks on multiple tasks. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
Towards Faithful Multi-step Reasoning through Fine-Grained Causal-aware Attribution Reasoning Distillation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have witnessed large language models (LLMs) achieving significant milestones across various domains of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They introduce fine-grained attribution reasoning distillation (FARD) which incorporates grounded citations to consolidate the relationships between reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms CoT distillation methods on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks. |
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. |
Synthesizing Post-Training Data for LLMs through Multi-Agent Simulation (2025.acl-long)
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Shuo Tang, Xianghe Pang, Zexi Liu, Bohan Tang, Rui Ye, Tian Jin, Xiaowen Dong, Yanfeng Wang, Siheng Chen
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively generates both general and domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent simulator that automatically generates diverse text-based scenarios, capturing a wide range of real-world human needs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms Meta’s Llama-3-8B-Instruct model on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks with just 20K instruction-response pairs. |
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 . |
XtremeCLIP: Extremely Parameter-efficient Tuning for Low-resource Vision Language Understanding (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine-tune visual-language understanding (VLU) require tasks-specific designs and sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet efficient paradigm for low-resource Visual Language Understanding (VLU) they reformulate a series of VLU tasks as an open-book affinity-matching problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in low-resource settings. |
Unleashing the Native Recommendation Potential: LLM-Based Generative Recommendation via Structured Term Identifiers (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhiyang Zhang, Junda She, Kuo Cai, Bo Chen, Shiyao Wang, Xinchen Luo, Qiang Luo, Ruiming Tang, Han Li, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods for constructing item identifiers face bottlenecks due to their large output space and expensive vocabulary expansion and alignment training. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to develop general-purpose, semantically-aware recommender systems that can be generalized and reusable. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on real-world datasets show that GRAM outperforms baselines and significantly outperformed baselines. |
Explain-then-translate: an analysis on improving program translation with self-generated explanations (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using self-generated natural language explanations improves zero-shot performance by 12% on average. |
| Approach: | They propose to use self-generated natural language explanations as an intermediate step for code-to-code translation with language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot performance by 12% on average . the proposed approach is not evaluated on a broader set of languages including low-resource languages. |
Simple and Effective Unsupervised Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Changhan Wang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Peng-Jen Chen, Ilia Kulikov, Yun Tang, Wei-Ning Hsu, Michael Auli, Juan Pino
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train speech models without labeled data are limited for most languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline approach to build speech translation systems without labeled data by leveraging recent advances in unsupervised speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in unsupervised speech recognition by 3.2 BLEU on the Libri-Trans benchmark and the best supervised end-to-end models from only two years ago by an average of 5.0 BLUE over five X-En directions. |
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)
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Ziwei Wang, Junjie Zheng, Leyang Yang, Sheng Zhou, Xiaoxuan Tang, Fang Zhouhua, Zhiwei Liu, Dajun Chen, Yong Li, Jiajun Bu
| Challenge: | Advanced GUI agents suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight GUI agent with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability . LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. |
GuessArena: Guess Who I Am? A Self-Adaptive Framework for Evaluating LLMs in Domain-Specific Knowledge and Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models rely on static benchmarks and standardized evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive evaluation framework that integrates dynamic domain knowledge modeling with progressive reasoning assessment to improve evaluation fidelity. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the framework distinguishes LLMs in terms of domain knowledge coverage and reasoning chain completeness. |
Trigger Word Detection and Thematic Role Identification via BERT and Multitask Learning (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | Using natural language processing to discover and mine drug-related knowledge from text has been a hot topic in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained biomedical language representation model to extract mutation-disease knowledge from PubMed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches achieve 0.60 (ranks 1) and 0.25 (rank 2) on task 1 and task 2 respectively in terms of F1 metric. |
Learning Dynamic Context Augmentation for Global Entity Linking (D19-1)
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Xiyuan Yang, Xiaotao Gu, Sheng Lin, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang, Fei Wu, Zhigang Chen, Guoping Hu, Xiang Ren
| Challenge: | Existing collective entity linking methods are expensive and often lack local context information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic context-augmented inference model that can be used to make collective inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can cope with different local EL models with different learning settings, base models, decision orders and attention mechanisms. |
Content Fuzzing for Escaping Information Cocoons on Digital Social Media (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Information cocoons restrict users’ exposure to posts with diverse viewpoints . social media platforms restrict the range of viewpoints that users encounter . |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-guided fuzzing framework that rewrites posts while preserving their human-interpreted intent and induces different machine-inferred stance labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework rewrites posts while preserving human-interpreted intent and induces different machine-inferred stance labels while maintaining semantic integrity with respect to the original content. |
MMSciBench: Benchmarking Language Models on Chinese Multimodal Scientific Problems (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing scientific benchmarks lack human-annotated difficulty levels and structured taxonomies of scientific concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating mathematical and physical reasoning through text-only and text-image formats with human-annotated difficulty levels and detailed explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 63.77% accuracy and struggles with visual reasoning tasks. |
QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Linyong Nan, Boyu Mi, Yixin Liu, Weijin Zou, Simeng Han, Ruizhe Chen, Xiangru Tang, Yumo Xu, Dragomir Radev, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Existing text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-focused task where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored table summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing baselines on table-to-text generation and large language models by concatenating generated facts to the model input. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Han, Yaochen Xie, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sreyashi Nag, William Headden, Yang Li, Chen Luo, Shuiwang Ji, Qi He, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, however, they still face challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct explicit graphs from context and leverage them to enhance LLM reasoning performance on reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves both logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks. |
Social-aware Sparse Attention Network for Session-based Social Recommendation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting the next item for an anonymous session do not capture user preferences and noisy irrelevant interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use social networks and historical sessions to provide personalized recommendations for the current session. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two benchmark datasets. |
Modeling Uncertainty in Composed Image Retrieval via Probabilistic Embeddings (2025.acl-long)
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Haomiao Tang, Jinpeng Wang, Yuang Peng, GuangHao Meng, Ruisheng Luo, Bin Chen, Long Chen, Yaowei Wang, Shu-Tao Xia
| Challenge: | Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) combines text and reference images to search for images . metric learning methods that focus on point embeddings fail to capture uncertainty in input data . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures uncertainty in images and queries by Gaussian distributions in latent space rather than fixed points. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework quantifies quality and semantic uncertainties . it can handle polysemy and ambiguity in search intentions, authors say . |
Neural-DINF: A Neural Network based Framework for Measuring Document Influence (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure scholarly impact of documents without citations only consider word frequency change. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network framework that measures document influence without citations by using word frequency changes and word semantic shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on document influence evaluation without citations. |
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. |
Answering Complex Geographic Questions by Adaptive Reasoning with Visual Context and External Commonsense Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image is proposed . the task requires identifying the objects in the image and understanding the background context . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image . they analyze the image and describe its fine-grained content by text and keywords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to answer geographic reasoning questions based on an image . it can be applied to a large-scale dataset with 41,329 samples . |
Inside Out: Evolving User-Centric Core Memory Trees for Long-Term Personalized Dialogue Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue systems struggle to reconcile unbounded interactions with finite context constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes a globally maintained PersonaTree as the carrier of long-term user profiling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing systems in suppressing contextual noise and persona inconsistency. |
DeepStruct: Pretraining of Language Models for Structure Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models perform structural understanding tasks that focus on understanding one aspect of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models by pretraining them to generate structures from the text on task-agnostic corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on 21 of 28 datasets. |
RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter (2024.findings-acl)
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Meng Cao, Haoran Tang, Jinfa Huang, Peng Jin, Can Zhang, Ruyang Liu, Long Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Li Yuan, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align relevant video content with natural language queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct efficient text-video Retrieval with a salient-and-correlated AdaPter . they propose a low-rank modulation module to refine per-image features from frozen CLIP backbone . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four TVR datasets show that the proposed method performs better than other methods. |
The BQ Corpus: A Large-scale Domain-specific Chinese Corpus For Sentence Semantic Equivalence Identification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Bank Question corpus is a corpus for sentence semantic equivalence identification (SSEI) because of rich expressions in natural languages, SSEI is really a challenging task. |
| Approach: | They propose to cluster 120,000 question pairs from 1-year online bank custom service logs into stacks by the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) based Affinity Propagation algorithm to achieve questions with the same intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves questions with the same intent by clustering deduplicated questions into stacks by the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) based Affinity Propagation (AP) algorithm. |
ORAL: Prompting Your Large-Scale LoRAs via Conditional Recurrent Diffusion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) are limited in scalability and controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional recurrent diffusion framework that generates LoRA parameters directly . they integrate model architecture and textual task specifications to generate task-specific parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework scales to billions-of-parameter LLMs and maintains controllability. |
TextBox: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Framework for Text Generation (2021.acl-demo)
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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Gaole He, Jinhao Jiang, Xiaoxuan Hu, Puzhao Xie, Zhipeng Chen, Zhuohao Yu, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | TextBox is an open-source text generation framework that is modularized and extensible. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible text generation framework that implements 21 text generation models on 9 benchmark datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework implements 21 models on 9 benchmark datasets and is available under the Apache License 2.0 license. |
VarBench: Robust Language Model Benchmarking Through Dynamic Variable Perturbation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent benchmarks release only training and validation sets, keeping the test set labels closed-source. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract variables from each test case and define a value range for each variable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of the evaluations on four datasets covering mathematical generation and multiple-choice tasks. |
Context-Driven Index Trimming: A Data Quality Perspective to Enhancing Precision of RALMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research often overlooks the data quality issues within retrieval results, often caused by inaccurate existing vector-distance-based retrieval methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Context-Driven Index Trimming framework to capture and regulate consistency between retrieved contexts and modify indexes in the database. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework can improve answer quality by 3.75% on open-domain question-answering tasks. |
ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Zheng Gong, Lixin Yang, Zhuohao Yu, Zhipeng Chen, Jingyuan Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent years have featured a trend towards Transformer based pretrained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use four evaluation dimensions to evaluate ten widely-used PLMs . they find that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests . |
| Outcome: | The results show that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests and have excellent transferability between tasks. |
An Effective Post-training Embedding Binarization Approach for Fast Online Top-K Passage Matching (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that learn semantic representations of passages are prone to performance degradation . embedding binarization is a promising branch of model compression . |
| Approach: | They propose an embedding binarization approach that can be used to optimize for online inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform query-passage matching acceleration. |
CYCLE-INSTRUCT: Fully Seed-Free Instruction Tuning via Dual Self-Training and Cycle Consistency (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhanming Shen, Hao Chen, Yulei Tang, Shaolin Zhu, Wentao Ye, Xiaomeng Hu, Haobo Wang, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning rely on expensive human-annotated seed data or powerful external teacher models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves fully seed-free instruction tuning by employing a dual self-training loop where two models are bootstrapped solely from raw, unlabeled text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms seed-driven back-translation baselines and achieves comparable performance to strongly supervised methods. |