Papers by Cheng Chen
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yufei He, Ruoyu Li, Alex Chen, Yue Liu, Yulin Chen, Yuan Sui, Cheng Chen, Yi Zhu, Luca Luo, Frank Yang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
Multi-Frequency Contrastive Decoding: Alleviating Hallucinations for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies attribute object hallucinations to linguistic priors and data biases . MFCD method removes hallucinian distribution in the original output distribution . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that removes the hallucination distribution in the original output distribution . they propose MFCD to mitigate hallucinism in large visual-language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination distributions without training or external tools . the proposed method can be applied to various LVLMs without modifying model architecture or training . |
To Forget or Not? Towards Practical Knowledge Unlearning for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Bozhong Tian, Xiaozhuan Liang, Siyuan Cheng, Qingbin Liu, Mengru Wang, Dianbo Sui, Xi Chen, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing unlearning paradigms are mired in vague forgetting boundaries, erasing knowledge indiscriminately. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate if unlearning erases essential knowledge . they propose 'knowUnDo' which uses copyrighted content and privacy domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both precise knowledge unlearning and general knowledge retaining of LLMs. |
Say What You Mean! Large Language Models Speak Too Positively about Negative Commonsense Knowledge (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been studied for their ability to store and utilize positive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a constrained keywords-to-sentence generation task and a Boolean question answering task to probe large language models on negative commonsense knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks show that LLMs fail to generate valid sentences grounded in negative commonsense knowledge, yet they can correctly answer yes-or-no questions. |
Towards Explainable Computerized Adaptive Testing with Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on minimizing the number of questions required to assess ability, lacking clear and reliable explanations for the question selection process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to enhance computer adaptive testing (CAT) by providing human-like interpretability and explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent-based CAT performs comparably or superior to traditional CAT methods in accuracy and significantly improves student trust and satisfaction. |
Data Manipulation: Towards Effective Instance Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation via Learning to Augment and Reweight (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art neural dialogue models learn from human conversations . however, due to the open-ended nature of human conversations, the quality of training data varies . |
| Approach: | They propose a data manipulation framework to augment and highlight effective training samples . they also propose to increase its manipulation skills through gradient descent with validation samples a reshaping framework to proactively restructure the data distribution towards reliable samples is also proposed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of open-domain neural dialogue models with respect to evaluation metrics and human judgments. |
Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Redundancy Optimization for Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Tianle Chen, Pengyu Cheng, Qiyuan Zhu, Jiacheng Wang, Bei Liu, Hao Gu, Ruijie Shen, Xiaofeng Hou, Sirui Han, Jiacheng Liu
| Challenge: | Existing research to improve CoT efficiency falls into three categories, each with distinct limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that addresses both dimensions of CoT reasoning by applying a progressive precision reduction strategy coupled with an entropy-based confidence mechanism for adaptive termination. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework achieves 11.3 efficiency gain without compromising accuracy. |
SafeSwitch: Steering Unsafe LLM Behavior via Internal Activation Signals (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate to fully leverage their internal cognitive processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regulates unsafe outputs by utilizing the prober-based internal state monitor that actively detects harmful intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces harmful outputs by approximately 80% while maintaining strong utility. |
Steering Away from Refusal: A Black-box Jailbreak Method Based on First-Token Distribution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze black-box jailbreaks lack direct optimization signals to refine adversarial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a distribution-jailbreak attack method that selects effective jailbreak templates and iteratively optimizes adversarial suffixes by maximizing the KL divergence from the standard refusal distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate (ASR) on all tested open-source models and delivers over 94% ASR on GPT-4.1. |
RRHF-V: Ranking Responses to Mitigate Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models with Human Feedback (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate hallucinations generate erroneous or fabricated information. |
| Approach: | They propose a rank-response-based model that annotates pair-reponses and trains alignment algorithms to improve the correspondence between images and text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the DPO method and outperfies existing methods on two MLLMs of different sizes and four widely used benchmarks. |
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming to overcome this limitation by leveraging LLMs' superior ability in understanding both natural language and programming language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on time-sensitive question answering datasets by 14.5% over baselines. |
CollabKG: A Learnable Human-Machine-Cooperative Information Extraction Toolkit for (Event) Knowledge Graph Construction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing IE tools lack multi-task support and automatic updates for KG and EKG construction. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-machine-cooperative IE toolkit for KG and EKG construction that unifies different IE subtasks and integrates LLMs as the assistant machine. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool improves annotation quality, efficiency, and stability simultaneously. |
Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Wanlong Liu, Li Zhou, DingYi Zeng, Yichen Xiao, Shaohuan Cheng, Chen Zhang, Grandee Lee, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
| Challenge: | mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring correlations among multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-event argument argument extraction model which extracts arguments from all events simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on four public datasets while saving time. |
All Languages Matter: Understanding and Mitigating Language Bias in Multilingual RAG (2026.acl-long)
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Dan Wang, Guozhao Mo, Yafei Shi, Cheng Zhang, Bo Zheng, Boxi Cao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing mRAG systems suffer from a language bias during reranking, systematically favoring English and the query’s native language. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-agnostic utility-driven reranker alignment technique to mitigate language bias during re-ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates language bias and consistently improves mRAG performance across languages. |
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
Text Embedding as Treatment: A Meta Causal Approach for Robust Sentiment Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengxiang Cheng, Chuan Zhou, Xiang Li, Haoxuan Li, Wen-li Wang, Jinkun Chen, Mingming Gong, Kun Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment classification use binary treatment of words . Existing approaches limit generalizability to novel words and low-frequency words if there is a word in a sentence that is not treated . |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-causal approach that uses a single training task to identify causal words for arbitrary words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the spurious correlation between word treatment and sentiment classification by removing words with low treatment effects from a pre-trained language model. |
Logit Space Constrained Fine-Tuning for Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based recommender systems rely on standard fine-tuning methodologies, often ignoring hallucination issues during the fine-uning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a logit space constraint-based fine-tuning framework to mitigate hallucination in LLM-based recommenders by incorporating Kullback–Leibler divergence into the training objective. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two recommendation models with distinct LLM backbones and four real-world datasets show that LCFT reduces hallucination and enhances recommendation performance. |
PricingLogic: Evaluating LLMs Reasoning on Complex Tourism Pricing Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunuo Liu, Dawei Zhu, Zena Al-Khalili, Dai Cheng, Yanjun Chen, Dietrich Klakow, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, such as code generation, mathematical problem-solving, and general-purpose human instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to process questions expressed in natural language to automate tourism-booking prices when multiple, overlapping farerules apply. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can automate tourism-booking prices when multiple, overlapping farerules apply. |
Open-Ended Visual Question Answering by Multi-Modal Domain Adaptation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual question answering (VQA) are not suitable for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised multi-modal domain adaptation method for visual question answering in images that exploits supervised domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark VQA 2.0 and VizWiz datasets. |
Decouple knowledge from paramters for plug-and-play language modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have made impressive results in a wide range of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training model with editable and scalable key-value memory and leverage knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples the knowledge storage from model parameters with an editable and scalable key-value memory and leverages knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
On the Universal Truthfulness Hyperplane Inside LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored hallucinations through the lens of internal representations, proposing mechanisms to decipher LLMs’ adherence to facts. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a universal truthfulness hyperplane that distinguishes the model’s factually correct and incorrect outputs on a diverse collection of over 40 datasets and examine its cross-task, cross-domain, and in-domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to distinguish factual outputs from incorrect outputs on a diverse collection of over 40 datasets. |
EAC-MoE: Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has demonstrated promising potential in scaling LLMs . however, it is hindered by two critical challenges: substantial GPU memory consumption and low activated parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose an Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) that aligns with the characteristics of MoE from the perspectives of quantization and pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces memory usage and improves inference speed with minimal performance degradation. |
CPT-Agent: A Cognitive Process Theory-driven Framework for Student Simulation in Writing Development (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs model overly capable learners who over-apply feedback, resulting in pedagogically implausible behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples cognitive ability from writing proficiency and models their interaction during writing and revision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces distinguishable proficiency levels and is consistent with instructional theories. |
To Diff or Not to Diff? Structure-Aware and Adaptive Output Formats for Efficient LLM-based Code Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code editing, yet the full-code generation paradigm suffers from severe efficiency bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a structure-aware diff format to train LLMs to choose the most token-efficient format between a given diff format and full code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach matches the most token-efficient format with full-code generation while reducing latency and cost by over 30% on long-code editing tasks. |
Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for analyzing social media data lack a systematic integration of medical knowledge, causing a critical treatment gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to integrate medical knowledge into social media data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to distinguish depression from transient mood changes. |
Velocitune: A Velocity-based Dynamic Domain Reweighting Method for Continual Pre-training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimise pretraining performance have not addressed the complexities of domain-adaptive continual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically assesses learning velocity and adjusts data proportions accordingly, favouring slower learning domains while de-emphasising faster learning ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains in math and code reasoning tasks and command-line generation benchmarks. |
EarlyBERT: Efficient BERT Training via Early-bird Lottery Tickets (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models require enormous computational resources and long training time. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to reduce inference time and train large NLP models by slimming the self-attention and fully-connected sub-layers inside a transformer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves comparable performance to standard BERT with 35 45% less training time. |
ChemVLR: Prioritizing Reasoning in Perception for Chemical Vision-Language Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Currently, vision-Language Models are optimized for direct visual question-answering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-language-based VLM that prioritizes reasoning within the perception process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and domain-specific open-source models in the chemical domain. |
Veri-R1: Toward Precise and Faithful Claim Verification via Online Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to online claim verification rely on prompt engineering or pre-designed reasoning workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose an online reinforcement learning framework that enables an LLM to interact with a search engine and receive reward signals that explicitly shape its planning, retrieval, and reasoning behaviors. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that Veri-R1 improves joint accuracy by 30% and doubles evidence score, often surpassing larger-scale model counterparts. |
PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Scheduling logistics associated with meetings can amount to hours each week . a lack of automation can cause a lot of errors and can be costly . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution that automates calendar conflict management . they propose 'pearl' that augments the language agent with an external preference memory . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution shows that existing agents perform poorly with high error rates. |
Towards Fast and Accurate Neural Chinese Word Segmentation with Multi-Criteria Learning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese word segmentation datasets have ambiguous annotation criteria resulting in multi-grained compounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain adaptive segmenter to exploit diverse annotation criteria of datasets . they use bidirectional encoder representations from transformers to introduce open-domain knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 10 Chinese word datasets with superior efficiency. |
Building Real-World Meeting Summarization Systems using Large Language Models: A Practical Perspective (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | a study examines how to build meeting summarization systems using large language models . closed-source models are generally better in terms of performance, but open-source ones are more advantageous for industrial use . |
| Approach: | They compare closed-source and open-source meeting summarization models for real-world use . they find that closed-sourced models are generally better in terms of performance . however, smaller open-sourced LLMs could still achieve comparable performance if they are open . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more efficient for industrial use than closed-source models due to privacy concerns and high cost. |
Code-Switching Can be Better Aligners: Advancing Cross-Lingual SLU through Representation-Level and Prediction-Level Alignment (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing code-switching-based cross-lingual spoken language understanding frameworks are limited to low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual spoken language understanding framework that leverages both code-switched and original sentences to achieve multi-level alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve multi-level alignment on two benchmarks across ten languages. |
BSFA: Leveraging the Subspace Dichotomy to Accelerate Neural Network Training (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies highlight a fundamental dichotomy in deep learning optimization: parameter updates along the top eigendirections of the loss Hessian (Dom-space) capture most of the update magnitude, while updates in the orthogonal component (Bulk-space), have smaller magnitudes but drive most learning progress. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that scales update components projected onto distinct subspaces and a block-wise strategy that applies this estimation on a per-parameter-block basis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates training by differentially scaling update components projected onto distinct subspaces, while enhancing stability by moderating updates in dominant subspace and boosting convergence speed by amplifying updates in bulk-space. |
SDiaReward: Modeling and Benchmarking Spoken Dialogue Rewards with Modality and Colloquialness (2026.acl-long)
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Jingyu Lu, Yuhan Wang, Fan Zhuo, Xize Cheng, Changhao Pan, Xueyi Pu, Yifu Chen, Chenyuhao Wen, Tianle Liang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | SDiaReward is an end-to-end spoken dialogue system that integrates paralinguistic nuances and spontaneous nature of human conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end multi-turn reward model trained on SDiaReward-Dataset . it is a collection of episode-level preference pairs targeting modality and colloquiality gaps . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose audio LLMs in episode-level evaluation. |
Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Computational Argumentation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Argumentation is an essential tool in various domains, including law, public policy, and artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on various computational argumentation tasks . they organize existing tasks into six main categories and standardize the format of 14 datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on argument mining and argument generation tasks. |
Cluster-Former: Clustering-based Sparse Transformer for Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for encoding long sequences in deep learning suffer from high latency and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a clustering-based sparse Transformer framework to perform attention across chunked sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several major QA benchmarks. |
Exploring Mode Connectivity for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found. |
| Approach: | They investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to find low-loss paths between two minima, and to understand how their mode connectivity affects their task knowledge. |
A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based EAE methods have input length constraints and the gap between the retriever and the inference model. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based retrieval mechanism that overcomes input length constraints . they use compressive memory to cache retrieved information and support continuous updates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms retrieval-based methods on three public datasets. |
ToolBeHonest: A Multi-level Hallucination Diagnostic Benchmark for Tool-Augmented Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuxiang Zhang, Jing Chen, Junjie Wang, Yaxin Liu, Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Xinyu Zhu, Zihao Lin, Hanwen Wan, Yujiu Yang, Tetsuya Sakai, Tian Feng, Hayato Yamana
| Challenge: | Currently, tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) only achieve total scores of 45.3 and 37.0, respectively, on a scale of 100. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level diagnostic process to assess the LLM's hallucinations through two perspectives: depth and breadth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed diagnostic process assesses the hallucinations of large language models through two perspectives: depth and breadth. |
CofiPara: A Coarse-to-fine Paradigm for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for multimodal sarcasm target identification focus on superficial indicators in an end-to-end manner, overlooking the nuanced understanding of multimodal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal sarcasm target identification framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm by augmenting sarcasm explainability with reasoning and pre-training knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits explainability in deciphering sarcasm as well. |
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. |
Bit-Flip Error Resilience in LLMs: A Comprehensive Analysis and Defense Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuhang Chen, Zhen Tan, Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Huaizhi Qu, Xinyu Zhao, Qi Lin, Yu Cheng, Andrew Kwong, Zhichao Cao, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Bit-flip errors (BFEs) are hardware faults where individual bits in memory or processing units are unintentionally flipped. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel defense strategy to mitigate bit-flip errors (BFEs) they propose bfe protection and a self-correction mechanism to minimize performance degradation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense strategy minimizes performance degradation while significantly improving robustness against BFEs. |
MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Li, Miaozeng Du, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Haiyun Jiang, Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks focus on coarse-grained knowledge, leaving the intricacies of fine-grounded knowledge unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and dataset specifically designed for FG multimodal entity knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark underscoring the complexity of FG knowledge editing in MLLMs. |
Distilling Knowledge Learned in BERT for Text Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models such as BERT have revolutionized the state of the art in many language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional masked language modeling approach to fine tune BERT on target generation tasks by imposing global sequence-level supervision on conventional Seq2Seq models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong Transformer baselines on multiple language generation tasks such as machine translation and text summarization. |
Controlling Risk of Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Counterfactual Prompting Framework (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) rarely address the issue of predictive uncertainty, i.e., how likely it is that a RAG model’s prediction is incorrect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that induces RAG models to alter latent factors and analyzes the effect on their answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies two critical factors affecting RAG models' confidence in their answers and analyzes the effect on their answers. |
Can Post-Training Quantization Benefit from an Additional QLoRA Integration? (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large language models require considerable computing resources, which can be costly and often unavailable. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate 4-bit Post-training Quantization with QLoRA to address these issues . they demonstrate that the integration outperforms standard quantization and fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed integration outperforms standard PTQ and 16-bit full-parameter fine-tuning on LLMs. |
The Microsoft Toolkit of Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding (2020.acl-demos)
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Xiaodong Liu, Yu Wang, Jianshu Ji, Hao Cheng, Xueyun Zhu, Emmanuel Awa, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Hoifung Poon, Guihong Cao, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | MT-DNN is an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it allows researchers and developers to train customized deep learning models . |
| Approach: | They present MT-DNN, an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it is designed to facilitate rapid customization for a broad spectrum of NLU tasks . MT supports multi-task knowledge distillation, which can substantially compress a deep neural model without significant performance drop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly compress a large model without significant performance drop. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
Developing a Production System for Purpose of Call Detection in Business Phone Conversations (2022.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | a commercial system detects Purpose of Call statements in call transcripts . the model is based on a set of rules and a neural model . |
| Approach: | They propose a system to detect Purpose of Call statements in English business call transcripts in real time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 88.6 F1 on average in various types of business calls and has low inference time. |
UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Chunyu Qiang, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin, Yuzhe Liang, Yuxin Guo, Teng Ma, Ziyu Zhang, Tianrui Wang, Cheng Gong, Yushen Chen, Ruibo Fu, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Generative audio modeling has been fragmented into specialized tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), text- to-music (TTM), and text-ta (TTA) specialized models require reference audio for timbre cloning and strict phoneme alignment, whereas TTA models generate unstructured textures from open-ended captions. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, sound effects . they propose 'token injection mechanism' that projects unstructured environmental sounds into structured temporal latent space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS and TTM while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. |
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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Yuanzhen Xie, Xinzhou Jin, Tao Xie, Matrixmxlin Matrixmxlin, Liang Chen, Chenyun Yu, Cheng Lei, Chengxiang Zhuo, Bo Hu, Zang Li
| Challenge: | In-context learning of large-language models has achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing . however, the single-step chain-of-thought prompting approach faces challenges such as attention diffusion and inadequate performance in complex tasks like text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow paradigm method to enhance the attention and problem-solving scope of large-language models through decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three datasets and improves the upper limit of LLM-based approaches. |
Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Search for Optimization Problem Solving (2026.acl-long)
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Linlin Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Chen Zhao, Feng Chen, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Language model hallucinations and limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors and feasibility failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that automates optimization problems from natural language descriptions with efficiency and reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy and reduces token usage. |
Learning to Match Representations is Better for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog System (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for task-oriented dialogue lack belief states as supervisory signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for knowledge retrieval driven by matching representations . they use a matching signal extractor to extract matching representation between contexts and entities . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three standard benchmarks show that the proposed method performs better than existing approaches. |
Novel Relation Detection: Discovering Unknown Relation Types via Multi-Strategy Self-Supervised Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation extraction can only recognize predefined relation types . new or out-of-scope relation types may continually emerge after the model is deployed . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel relation detection task that uses self-supervised learning to handle shallow semantic similarity problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets. |
A Computational Method for Measuring Open Codes in Qualitative Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
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John Chen, Alexandros Nikolaos Lotsos, Sihan Cheng, Lexie Zhao, Yanjia Zhang, Jessica Hullman, Bruce Sherin, Uri Wilensky, Michael Horn
| Challenge: | Qualitative analysis is widely adopted across many social science disciplines. |
| Approach: | They propose a theory-informed computational method for measuring inductive coding results from humans and GAI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures breadth, consensus, unique contribution, and systematic deviation without assuming ground truth. |
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 . |
Breaking the Noise Barrier: LLM-Guided Semantic Filtering and Enhancement for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities between two multimodal knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLMguided MMEA framework that prioritizes noise reduction before fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework prioritizes noise reduction before fusion and improves semantics on the noisy FB YG dataset. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
OLMoTrace: Tracing Language Model Outputs Back to Trillions of Training Tokens (2025.acl-demo)
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Jiacheng Liu, Taylor Blanton, Yanai Elazar, Sewon Min, Yen-Sung Chen, Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, Huy Tran, Byron Bischoff, Eric Marsh, Michael Schmitz, Cassidy Trier, Aaron Sarnat, Jenna James, Jon Borchardt, Bailey Kuehl, Evie Yu-Yen Cheng, Karen Farley, Taira Anderson, David Albright, Carissa Schoenick, Luca Soldaini, Dirk Groeneveld, Rock Yuren Pang, Pang Wei Koh, Noah A. Smith, Sophie Lebrecht, Yejin Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ali Farhadi, Jesse Dodge
| Challenge: | tracing language models' outputs back to training data is a problem because they are trained on text corpora with trillions of tokens . existing methods for tracers have not been scaled to work within this multi-trillion-token setting . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that traces language models' outputs verbatim back to training data . OLMOTRACE retrieves documents from the model's training data that contain exact matches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can find verbatim matches between LM output and training data . it can be used to explore fact checking, hallucination, and creativity of language models . |
Not All Modalities at Once: Dynamic Dropout and Bidirectional Fusion for Robust Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing MKGC methods train with all modalities available, implicitly assuming consistent complementarity . however, this often induces modality dependence and modality competition under heterogeneous noise, which can hinder robust multi-modal fusion and limit overall performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to infer missing links in multimodal knowledge graphs by leveraging structured triples together with auxiliary modalities such as text and images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art results. |
Learning to Bridge Metric Spaces: Few-shot Joint Learning of Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot learning methods learn a single task each time with a few examples . but, real-world applications often contain multiple closely related tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot joint learning scheme that captures intent and slot relationships from only a handful of examples and adapts the bridged metric space to specific few- shot domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two public datasets on intent and slot . the proposed model significantly outperformed baseline models in one and five shots settings. |
Optima: Optimizing Effectiveness and Efficiency for LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for a wide range of tasks, from * Equal Contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances communication efficiency and task effectiveness in LLM-based multi-agent systems through training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves communication efficiency and task effectiveness on multi-agent tasks with 2.8x performance gain with less than 10% tokens on tasks requiring heavy information exchange. |
Call Me When Necessary: LLMs can Efficiently and Faithfully Reason over Structured Environments (2024.findings-acl)
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Sitao Cheng, Ziyuan Zhuang, Yong Xu, Fangkai Yang, Chaoyun Zhang, Xiaoting Qin, Xiang Huang, Ling Chen, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in reasoning over structured environments, e.g., knowledge graphs and tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows LLMs to efficiently and faithfully reason over structured environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art fine-tuned methods on three KGQA and two TableQA datasets and surpasse CWQ and WTQ methods. |
OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding (2026.acl-long)
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Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | coding scaffolds that follow heterogeneous instructions remain under-examined in software engineering . coding models are capable software agents, but their ability to follow constraints remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They introduce OctoBench, which benchmarks scaffold-aware instruction following in agentic coding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to accelerate the development of more scaffold-aware agents. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
Learning from Sibling Mentions with Scalable Graph Inference in Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to handle hard mentions due to insufficient contexts, limiting their overall typing performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit sibling mentions to enhance the mention representations by adding unseen test mentions as new nodes for inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms ten strong baseline models and outperformed strong baselines. |
Beyond Sequences: Two-dimensional Representation and Dependency Encoding for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing code generation approaches represent code as a linear sequence of tokens, but positional encodings compromise generalization . explicit positional encoders sacrifice permutation invariance, imposes a strict order on the input sequence . |
| Approach: | They propose to represent code snippets as two-dimensional entities with explicit encodings . they propose to use dictionary learning to perform semantic matching between code lines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures the hierarchical and spatial structure of code, especially the dependencies between code lines. |
Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoyun Du, Chen Qian, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Rennai Qiu, Yufan Dang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted various domains, especially through organized LLM-driven autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various task-oriented solutions and interact with their insights in a self-independence while cross-team collaboration environment for superior solutions generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework can generate better software quality compared to state-of-the-art frameworks. |
SEMA-RAG: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Standard RAG frameworks treat retrieval as a static, single-round auxiliary step . compressed workflow makes it difficult to form reliable evidence chains . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples tasks and allows for dynamic multi-round exploration . they propose retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to mitigate hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the strongest baseline by *+6.46* accuracy points on average across five benchmarks and five LLM backbones. |
Contextual Fine-to-Coarse Distillation for Coarse-grained Response Selection in Open-Domain Conversations (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Bolun Yao, Zhongyu Wei, Zhihao Fan, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over baseline methods on two datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus compared with baseline methods. |
Mitigating Boundary Ambiguity and Inherent Bias for Text Classification in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new text classification framework for large language models addresses the problem of boundary ambiguity and inherent biases in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage classification framework for large language models to mitigate bottlenecks . their approach uses pairwise comparisons to efficiently narrow down options . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of options and improves on four datasets. |
Evaluating Memory Capability in Continuous Lifelog Scenario (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianjie Zheng, Zhichen Liu, Zhanyu Shen, Jingxiang Qu, Guanhua Chen, Yile Wang, Yang Xu, Yang Liu, Sijie Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on online one-on-one chatting or human-AI interactions, neglecting real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to curate a lifelog benchmark that combines two subsets of audio data to address temporal leakage in offline settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks on live chats and AI interactions. |
Unsupervised Concept Representation Learning for Length-Varying Text Similarity (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing document similarity approaches suffer from the information gap caused by context and vocabulary mismatches when comparing varying-length texts. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised concept representation learning approach to address this issue . they propose a concept-based document matching method to leverage recognition of local phrase features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better F1 score than baseline models on real-world data sets. |
Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for controllable text generation are guided by coarse-grained feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or progressions within sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning algorithm which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for controllable text generation and employs a "first-quantize-then-noise" paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve superior performance on single-attribute and multi-attract control tasks. |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
Beyond Natural Language: LLMs Leveraging Alternative Formats for Enhanced Reasoning and Communication (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Weize Chen, Chenfei Yuan, Jiarui Yuan, Yusheng Su, Chen Qian, Cheng Yang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, but its utility in LLMs has not been thoroughly examined. |
| Approach: | They propose to allow LLMs to choose the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating, and to automate the selection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed format improves reasoning efficiency and reduces token usage while maintaining communicative effectiveness. |
Evaluating Implicit Bias in Large Language Models by Attacking From a Psychometric Perspective (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can elicit implicit biases that hurt certain demographics without explicit harmful words. |
| Approach: | They propose three attack approaches to elicit agreements to biased viewpoints from LLMs from a psychometric perspective and built two benchmarks to compare them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods elicit agreements to biased viewpoints more effectively than baselines. |
LiveFact: A Dynamic, Time-Aware Benchmark for LLM-Driven Fake News Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current evaluation frameworks are static and vulnerable to benchmark data contamination . current models are ineffective at assessing reasoning under temporal uncertainty . |
| Approach: | They propose a live-based benchmark that simulates the real-world "fog of war" they propose evaluating models on their ability to reason with evolving, incomplete information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms proprietary state-of-the-art models in classification and evidence mode . it also provides a component to monitor BDC explicitly . |
System Prompt Hijacking via Permutation Triggers in LLM Supply Chains (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming the landscape of artificial intelligence due to the substantial resources required for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-deployment attack that bypasses system prompts to compromise models . they introduce Precise Activation Guarding and Unit Deviation Sampling to protect against attack . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses system prompts, enabling unrestricted model outputs and safety violations. |
Enhancing Code-Switching for Cross-lingual SLU: A Unified View of Semantic and Grammatical Coherence (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on annotated training data, limiting their scalability to low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method termed SoGo for zero-shot cross-lingual SLU that uses keywords as substitution options to extract keywords and a token-level alignment strategy to ensure grammatical coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot cross-lingual SLU across nine languages on MultiATIS++. |
Multi-Stage LLM Fine-Tuning with a Continual Learning Setting (2025.findings-naacl)
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Changhao Guan, Chao Huang, Hongliang Li, You Li, Ning Cheng, Zihe Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jian Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in knowledge-intensive applications, but they may face a multi-stage continuous learning scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage continuous learning paradigm that includes a preference-based learning bias to identify potential knowledge conflicts and a self-distillation-based data augmentation strategy to expand and enrich the training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm achieves a significant improvement in accuracy after 7 stages of fine-tuning compared to previous methods while preserving general knowledge. |
Query-OPT: Optimizing Inference of Large Language Models via Multi-Query Instructions in Meeting Summarization (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs require a new call to the inference endpoint/API for each new query . repeated calls to the endpoints/AP Is expensive and impractical for many real-world use cases. |
| Approach: | They compare the performance of various LLMs for query-based meeting summarization . they find that combining queries for the same context in a single prompt can be used to minimize repeated calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the number of calls to the inference endpoints/APIs in meeting summarization tasks. |
CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent System (2025.acl-long)
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Li Hu, Guoqiang Chen, Xiuwei Shang, Shaoyin Cheng, Benlong Wu, LiGangyang LiGangyang, Xu Zhu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
| Challenge: | CompileAgent is the first LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves compilation success rate, ranging from 10% to 71%. |
AED-RAG: Continuous Multi-Granular Context Fusion for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Adaptive Ensemble Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment strategies that rely on discrete reranking struggle to address this granularity mismatch or effectively balance external evidence with internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergizes discrete retrieval with continuous reranking to discern the information density differences between unstructured narrative passages and structured knowledge triplets. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four open-domain QA benchmarks show that AED-RAG significantly outperforms competitive baselines. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
TestAgent: An Adaptive and Intelligent Expert for Human Assessment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adaptive testing methods face several challenges due to mechanized nature of most algorithms and noisy response data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to enhance adaptive testing through interactive engagement to capture test-takers’ responses and anomalies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves more accurate results with 20% fewer questions than state-of-the-art baselines and testers preferred it in speed, smoothness, and other dimensions. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
XY-Tokenizer: Mitigating the Semantic-Acoustic Conflict in Low-Bitrate Speech Codecs (2026.acl-long)
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Yitian Gong, Luozhijie Jin, Kuangwei Chen, Dong Zhang, Ruifan Deng, Xiaogui Yang, Xin Zhang, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance these objectives at low bitrates . XY-Tokenizer achieves stronger semantic alignment than representative semantic-distillation codec . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-bitrate speech codec that aligns discrete speech representations with text while preserving fine-grained acoustic details for reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing low-bitrate speech codecs in speech understanding and generation tasks. |
Tree-Structured Topic Modeling with Nonparametric Neural Variational Inference (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for topic modeling learn topics with a flat structure . however, such methods have data scalability issues . |
| Approach: | They propose to use nonparametric neural variational inference to extract a tree-structured topic model with reasonable structure, low redundancy, and adaptable widths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts a tree-structured topic hierarchy with reasonable structure, low redundancy, and adaptable widths. |
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities require large-scale data or significant training efforts. |
| Approach: | They introduce an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models trained on long-CoT distilled data with 3.1k initialization samples and achieves an accuracy improvement of 51.0% to 81.6%. |
MLDebugging: Towards Benchmarking Code Debugging Across Multi-Library Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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JinYang Huang, Xiachong Feng, Qiguang Chen, Hanjie Zhao, Zihui Cheng, Jiesong Bai, Jingxuan Zhou, Min Li, Libo Qin
| Challenge: | MLDebugging is a benchmark designed to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a benchmark to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code using 126 Python libraries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 126 Python libraries and a wide range of multi-library code issues. |
TamEdit: Trajectory-Aware Meta-Learning for Specificity-Preserving Continual Knowledge Editing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual knowledge editing focus on single edits or preventing knowledge forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning method that preserves specificity for continual knowledge editing by capturing relationships between different single edits within the trajectory. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TamEdit outperforms baselines in continual editing while preserving general capabilities. |
A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent few-shot learning models such as GPT3 are expensive and slow to deploy for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based low-resource learning method for VL tasks with a few examples . they pre-train a sequence-to-sequence transformer model with prefix and masked language modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Frozen on vision-language tasks with prompt-based learning by 18.2% point. |
SMART: Self-Aware Agent for Tool Overuse Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)
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Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Avirup Sil, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) lack self-awareness to balance reasoning and tool use, increasing computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enhances an agent’s self-awareness to optimize task handling and reduce tool overuse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces tool use by 24% while improving performance by over 37%. |
On Diversified Preferences of Large Language Model Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be fine tuned with human feedback, but human preferences can be diversified due to annotators’ different tastes, which hinders the effectiveness of LLM alignment methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration error metric to evaluate large language models (LLMs) and a multi-objective reward learning method to enhance the calibration performance of RMs on shared preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adopted as a key calibration error and MORE can achieve superior alignment performance. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
EasyEA: Large Language Model is All You Need in Entity Alignment Between Knowledge Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs) that represent the same real-world object. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end EA framework based on large language models that requires no training to implement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces the reliance on seed entity pairs while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on diverse datasets. |
Can We Edit Multimodal Large Language Models? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to edit multimodal models have been used to incrementally infuse a language model with a new set of facts. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark for editing multimodal Large Language Models and establish metrics for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that editing multimodal models is not as difficult as editing single-modal models. |
Divergent Thinking: Escape the Homogeneity Trap in Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Generative commonsense reasoning requires models to synthesize coherent narratives that satisfy lexical constraints and commonsensical logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for deep semantic diversity rather than surface-level lexical variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves over 10% improvement in overall accuracy on NoRa and SPICE score on CommonGen-Lite. |
Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yunzhi Yao, Peng Wang, Bozhong Tian, Siyuan Cheng, Zhoubo Li, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in model editing for LLMs have created challenges and opportunities for the community. |
| Approach: | They propose to alter the behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alters behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
Dialogue Summarization with Static-Dynamic Structure Fusion Graph (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue summarization is a challenging task since it has dynamic interaction nature and inconsistent information flow among various speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a Static-Dynamic graph-based Dialogue Summarization model which fuses prior knowledge from human expertise and adaptively learns the graph structure in an end-to-end learning fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can help people capture the highlights of a semi-structured and multi-participant dialogue without reviewing the complex dialogue context. |
Towards Unified Spoken Language Understanding Decoding via Label-aware Compact Linguistics Representations (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for intent detection and slot filling decoders could result in misaligned predictions for both tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages label embeddings to jointly guide the decoding process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two single- and multi-intent SLU benchmarks and can be incorporated into existing models. |
Adaptive Parameterization for Neural Dialogue Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of open-domain dialogue generate responses based on sequence-to-sequence paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Neural Dialogue generation model which manages various conversations with conversation-specific parameterization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on a large-scale conversational dataset. |
VideoQA-TA: Temporal-Aware Multi-Modal Video Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video question answering align visual or textual features directly with large language models, limiting the deep semantic association between modalities and hindering a comprehensive understanding of interactions within spatial and temporal contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-aware framework for multi-modal video question answering that aligns videos and questions at fine-grained levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reasoning ability and accuracy of videoQA by aligning videos and questions at fine-grained levels. |
T2A-Feedback: Improving Basic Capabilities of Text-to-Audio Generation via Fine-grained AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Zehan Wang, Ke Lei, Chen Zhu, Jiawei Huang, Sashuai Zhou, Luping Liu, Xize Cheng, Shengpeng Ji, Zhenhui Ye, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Text-to-audio (T2A) models still struggle to satisfy human preferences for prompt-following and acoustic quality when generating complex multi-event audio. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback learning to enhance basic capabilities of text-to-audio models . they use a large audio preference dataset to evaluate the model's capabilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in simple and complex scenarios with AI feedback learning. |
Joint Learning for Emotion Classification and Emotion Cause Detection (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a unified framework, we propose a joint approach for emotion classification and emotion cause detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network-based joint approach for emotion classification and emotion cause detection which captures mutual benefits across the two sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can capture mutual benefits across two sub-tasks on Chinese microblogs. |
SpeechIQ: Speech-Agentic Intelligence Quotient Across Cognitive Levels in Voice Understanding by Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Yahan Yu, Jinchuan Tian, Sheng Li, Ke Hu, Zhehuai Chen, Shinji Watanabe, Fei Cheng, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | SIQ quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Approach: | They propose a human cognition-inspired evaluation pipeline for voice understanding large language models (LLM_Voice) that quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models, identifies annotation errors in existing benchmarks, and detects hallucinations in LLM_Voice. |
PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogue models in providing emotional support due to the lack of human resources for mental health support. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dynamically inferring and modeling seekers’ persona from the conversation history and a model that leverages persona information to provide personalized emotional support. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the studied benchmark. |
What are the Generator Preferences for End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog System? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the accuracy of entity retrieval are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that improves the performance of task-oriented dialogue systems by obtaining fine-grained matching information between contexts and entities and extracting the entity attribute shift matrix as preference signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and improves the quality of the dialogue. |
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuang Cheng, Yihan Bian, Dawei Liu, Yuhua Jiang, Yihao Liu, Linfeng Zhang, Qian Yao, Zhongbo Tian, Wenhai Wang, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models are a dominant paradigm in the field of parallelism and non-causal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a blockwise discrete diffusion model that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves theoretical speedups over 5 and wall-clock speedup of 2.3 on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes. |
DACIP-RC: Domain Adaptive Continual Instruction Pre-Training via Reading Comprehension on Business Conversations (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used in real-world industrial scenarios for various natural language processing tasks, but their high inference cost makes their deployment impractical, necessitating the use of smaller models. |
| Approach: | They propose a continual pre-training technique that generates diverse task instructions and responses via reading comprehension on conversation transcripts, enabling better instruction generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves small LLMs’ domain adaptability for business conversational tasks, compared with traditional methods that rely on next-token prediction. |
From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Liangjie Huang, Alimohammad Beigi, Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Yuxuan Jiang, Canyu Chen, Tianhao Wu, Kai Shu, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) inspire the "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm . traditional methods of assessment and evaluation fail in dynamic and open-ended scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm where LLMs are leveraged to perform scoring, ranking, or selection for machine learning evaluation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based judgment and evaluation paradigms are based on large language models and are compared to the current model-driven evaluation paradigm. |
OmniFlatten: An End-to-end GPT Model for Seamless Voice Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Qinglin Zhang, Luyao Cheng, Chong Deng, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Siqi Zheng, Jiaqing Liu, Hai Yu, Chao-Hong Tan, Zhihao Du, ShiLiang Zhang
| Challenge: | Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems allow simultaneous bidirectional communication . low latency and natural interactions in full-duplice systems remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage post-training scheme that adapts a text large language model into a speech-text dialogue LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model human conversation behaviors with low latency and natural interactions with low delay. |
Natural-Language Policies to Executable Decisions: An Interpretable Large Language Model Framework (2026.acl-industry)
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Ziqiang Zhang, Jing Ma, Zilong Wang, Jiayuan Chen, Yi Qiao, Yu He, Wei Zhang, Dai Cheng, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | a production-grade pricing system for tourism is challenging due to unstructured nature of travel orders and ever-evolving pricing policies. |
| Approach: | They propose a production-grade pricing system with a strict decision boundary . they propose to combine structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection with interpretable condition trees . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system processed 3,960 orders in six months and reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3 . the system reduced the per-order handling time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes. |
Learning Intrinsic Dimension via Information Bottleneck for Explainable Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Gradient-based explanation methods are increasingly used to interpret neural models in natural language processing (NLP) however, in the context of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis, only specific dimensions are pertinent. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gradient-based explanation framework that leverages an information bottleneck to refine word embeddings into a concise intrinsic dimension, maintaining essential features and omitting unrelated information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves both the models’ performance and explanations’ clarity by identifying sentiment-aware features. |
Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight (2026.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Bingxuan Li, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Bingxiang He, Qinyu Luo, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Generative world models could be used to enhance agents' cognition . agents are expected to operate in settings where tasks unfold over long horizons and involve intricate chains of interdependent decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models as external simulators to enhance cognition . they find that agents rarely invoke simulation and misuse predicted rollouts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could be used to predict future states rather than short-horizon reasoning . the model could also be used for real-world planning and robotics . |
DiffusionDialog: A Diffusion Model for Diverse Dialog Generation with Latent Space (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have tried to introduce discrete or Gaussian-based latent variables to address the one-to-many problem, but the diversity is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion model to enhance the diversity of dialogue generation by using continuous latent variables instead of discrete ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model greatly enhances diversity of dialog response while keeping the coherence. |
Pruning as a Domain-specific LLM Extractor (2024.findings-naacl)
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Nan Zhang, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Runxue Bao, Rui Zhang, Prasenjit Mitra, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a wide array of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning large language models using general or task-specific weights to extract a compressed, task-agnostic LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts a compressed, domain-specific, and task- agnostic LLM by identifying LLM weights that are pivotal for general capabilities, like linguistic capability and multi-task solving, and domain- specific knowledge. |
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Sophia Pan, Ming Cheng, Shubham Mohole, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi, Michael Macy
| Challenge: | Rhetorical strategies are important to persuasive communication, but their analysis relies on human annotation, which is costly, inconsistent and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate and label debate data . they fine-tune transformer-based classifiers on this dataset and validate it against human data a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high performance and strong generalization across topical domains. |
Spectral Characterization and Mitigation of Sequential Knowledge Editing Collapse (2026.acl-long)
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Chi Zhang, Mengqi Zhang, Xiaotian Ye, Runxi Cheng, Zisheng Zhou, Ying Zhou, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reducing the effects of knowledge editing are insufficiently understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that preserves the dominant subspace of the original weights and analyzes parameter updates in the spectral basis of the weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves editing efficacy while preserving general abilities under long-horizon sequential editing, including extreme settings with up to 20,000 edits. |
Can Graph Descriptive Order Affect Solving Graph Problems with LLMs? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning and logical deduction. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis of how the order of graph descriptions impacts LLM performance. |
| Outcome: | The results show that graph descriptions significantly improve LLMs’ comprehension of graph structures, and the robustness of LLM models to graph description order varies across different tasks. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
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Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
VaseVQA: Multimodal Agent and Benchmark for Ancient Greek Pottery (2026.findings-eacl)
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Jinchao Ge, Tengfei Cheng, Biao Wu, Zeyu Zhang, Shiya Huang, Judith Bishop, Gillian Shepherd, Meng Fang, Ling Chen, Yang Zhao
| Challenge: | MLLMs that use domain-specific data are limited in understanding cultural heritage artifacts such as ancient Greek pottery . supervised fine-tuning improves adaptation to domain knowledge, but it struggles with deeper reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual question-answer tool that augments SFT with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on reasoning-intensive questions on ancient Greek pottery. |
AgentOCR: Reimagining Agent History via Optical Self-Compression (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems trained with reinforcement learning over multi-turn interaction, but practical deployment is bottlenecked by rapidly growing textual histories that inflate token and memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that represents the accumulated observation-action history as a compact rendered image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves over 95% of text-based agent performance while significantly reducing token consumption (>50%), yielding consistent token and memory efficiency. |
CapArena: Benchmarking and Analyzing Detailed Image Captioning in the LLM Era (2025.findings-acl)
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Kanzhi Cheng, Wenpo Song, Jiaxin Fan, Zheng Ma, Qiushi Sun, Fangzhi Xu, Chenyang Yan, Nuo Chen, Jianbing Zhang, Jiajun Chen
| Challenge: | Image captioning has been a challenge for vision-language researchers for decades . current VLMs focus on tasks like visual question answering (YA) but image captioning is not as advanced as expected. |
| Approach: | They evaluate VLMs' performance on image captioning using human annotations . they find that some metrics show high caption-level agreement with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models on image captioning . it achieves 93.4% correlation with human rankings at $4 per test . |
An Empirical Investigation of Implicit and Explicit Knowledge-Enhanced Methods for Ad Hoc Dataset Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ad hoc dataset retrieval are lexical and cannot capture semantic similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose to implement and evaluate a set of implicit and explicit knowledge-enhancement retrieval methods on two test collections to find semantic matches for ad hoc dataset retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are compared with existing methods on two test collections and reveal the unique features of the task and suggest an interpolation of different kinds of methods as the current best practice. |
LEDGER: Scaling Agentic Document Editing with Dependency-aware Graph Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Document editing requires full-context awareness of dependencies, but processing entire documents for each edit incurs prohibitive token costs and latency. |
| Approach: | a framework that constructs lightweight dependency graphs captures semantic relationships and structural hierarchies across document elements is proposed for agentic document editing . a scaLing agentic agentic framework is based on a dependency graph framework that captures dependencies and refactors function dependencies. |
| Outcome: | a new framework achieves 76 consistency versus 56 baseline while reducing token usage by 85 . the framework is based on a framework that captures semantic relationships and structural hierarchies across document elements . it can be used to improve document consistency, but it also reduces token costs and latency . |
RQT: Hierarchical Residual Quantization for Multi-Model Compression (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decomposing fine-tuned LLMs are sensitive to the magnitude of delta values. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical quantization framework that shares low-bit integer weights across similar models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average accuracy degradation of approximately 3% on fine-tuned models across mathematics, coding, chatbot, and Chinese LLMs. |
Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve code translation depend on abundant parallel code of high quality, which may not always be available. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method leverages functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual reinforcement learning (RL) training. |
Jailbreak LLMs through Internal Stance Manipulation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to exploit LLMs' inherent safety mechanism, including GCG and AutoDAN, are ineffective for certain malicious requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates jailbreak prompts to suppress a refusal stance and induce affirmative responses by modifying adversarial prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the best baseline approach in Llama-2-7b-chat and achieves a 92.2% success rate across all models. |
SynGhost: Invisible and Universal Task-agnostic Backdoor Attack via Syntactic Transfer (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing attacks are classified into end-to-end and pre-training types based on the attack phase . Existing backdoor attacks are based upon perplexity, fine-pruning, and maxEntropy. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-based poisoning filter that mitigates backdoor attacks . they propose an invisible and universal task-agnostic backdoor attack via syntactic transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack can transfer backdoors to various downstream tasks while preserving pre-trained language models' pre-training capabilities. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural dialogue models only capture syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained comparison model to capture syntactic and semantic information and then compare each candidate's representation with the whole history to obtain a history consistency representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains higher ranking scores than baseline models on two public dialogue datasets. |
The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of researchers are studying the hallucination issue in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection benchmark and a method to detect hallucines in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects hallucinations and mitigates them using different training stages. |
Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Contextual Language Representations for Domain Natural Language Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Taolin Zhang, Ruyao Xu, Chengyu Wang, Zhongjie Duan, Cen Chen, Minghui Qiu, Dawei Cheng, Xiaofeng He, Weining Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs with relational triples are difficult to adapt to close domains due to the lack of sufficient domain graph semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning framework for various closed domains that captures the implicit graph structure among the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs in closed domains significantly. |
Integrating Audio, Visual, and Semantic Information for Enhanced Multimodal Speaker Diarization on Multi-party Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Luyao Cheng, Hui Wang, Chong Deng, Siqi Zheng, Yafeng Chen, Rongjie Huang, Qinglin Zhang, Qian Chen, Xihao Li, Wen Wang
| Challenge: | Mainstream speaker diarization systems rely only on acoustic information, making it challenging in complex aural environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach that integrates audio, visual, and semantic cues to enhance speaker diarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multi-party conversations . it integrates audio-visual-semantic cues into the clustering process for acoustic speaker embeddings . |
RED: Unleashing Token-Level Rewards from Holistic Feedback via Reward Redistribution (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach to aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
AdaLoGN: Adaptive Logic Graph Network for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and limitations for machine reading comprehension are insufficient for logical reasoning over text. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic approach which passes messages over a graph representing logical relations between text units to predict an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on ReClor and LogiQA. |
Revisiting LoRA through the Lens of Parameter Redundancy: Spectral Encoding Helps (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a prominent technique for fine-tuning large foundation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation technique that harnesses the expressiveness of spectral bases to re-parameterize LoRA from a sparse spectral subspace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves greater efficiency with fewer parameters than baselines on various downstream tasks, including commonsense reasoning, math reasoning, and code generation. |
BLINK with Elasticsearch for Efficient Entity Linking in Business Conversations (2022.naacl-industry)
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Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Cheng Chen, Aliaksandr Martsinovich, Jonathan Johnston, Xue-Yong Fu, Shashi Bhushan Tn, Simon Corston-Oliver
| Challenge: | Existing systems that align textual mentions of entities to knowledge bases are difficult to deploy in production environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural entity linking system that connects entities in business phone conversations to their corresponding Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves inference speed and memory consumption while maintaining high accuracy. |
Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Zuo, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Mingze Li, Ziyue Jiang, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on disentangling speakers and content, while others focus on preserving the source's prosody. |
| Approach: | They propose a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model that transforms the source speaker’s timbre into an unseen one while retaining speech content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts the linguistic content duration to the desired speaking style, facilitating the transfer of the target speaker’s rhythm. |
The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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Bingxiang He, Ning Ding, Cheng Qian, Jia Deng, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Haiwen Hong, Huan-ang Gao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Huimin Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing work on instruction tuning has focused on task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training data arrangement framework that allows for continual learning and loss reduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework promotes continual learning and loss reduction on unseen tasks. |
How do autoregressive transformers solve full addition? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but there is still much to learn about how they operate. |
| Approach: | They investigate the ability of the autoregressive transformer to perform basic addition operations by using causal analysis to find that a few different attention heads in the middle layers control the addition carry . they found that due to the lack of global focus on the sequence within these attention heads, the model struggles to handle long-sequence addition tasks. |
| Outcome: | The model performs basic addition tasks, but it still faces challenges with length generalization. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits. |
On the Impact of Cross-Domain Data on German Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Amin Dada, Aokun Chen, Cheng Peng, Kaleb Smith, Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir, Constantin Seibold, Jianning Li, Lars Heiliger, Christoph Friedrich, Daniel Truhn, Jan Egger, Jiang Bian, Jens Kleesiek, Yonghui Wu
| Challenge: | Traditionally, large language models have been trained on general web crawls or domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They present a German dataset and a dataset aimed at containing high-quality data to examine the importance of data diversity over quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained on quality data on multiple downstream tasks. |
Linking Knowledge to Care: Knowledge Graph-Augmented Medical Follow-Up Question Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) fail to identify information gaps across diverse symptoms. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-augmented LLM with active in-context learning to generate relevant and important follow-up questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5% - 8% on relevant benchmarks. |
MASFactory: A Graph-centric Framework for Orchestrating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems with Vibe Graphing (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language model-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used to extend agentic problem solving via role specialization and collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-centric framework for orchestrating large language model-based multi-agent systems . they compile a user's natural-language intent into an editable workflow specification and then into an executable graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compiles natural-language intent into an executable graph and then compile and executes it at runtime. |
Too Consistent to Detect: A Study of Self-Consistent Errors in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hexiang Tan, Fei Sun, Sha Liu, Du Su, Qi Cao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing detection methods fail to account for **self-consistent error** . study identifies self-consistency errors and evaluates them . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fuses hidden state evidence from an external verifier LLM to detect self-consistent errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly enhances performance on self-consistent errors across three LLM families. |
Large Language Model Agents in Finance: A Survey Bridging Research, Practice, and Real-World Deployment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Kunlin Zhang, Yilong Dai, Sanjian Zhang, Wanghao Ye, Sihan Chen, Zhi-Qi Cheng
| Challenge: | a systematic review of large language models (LLMs) is conducted to better align their capabilities with real-world demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a functional taxonomy mapping financial domains to tasks, datasets, and institutional constraints. they catalog over 30 financial benchmarks and 20 representative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model frameworks are bridging financial practice and LLM research. |
EDSD: Entropy-Driven Design for Faster Speculative Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for speculative decoding incur substantial training overhead to mitigate information misalignment between autoregressive draft model training and decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entropy-Driven Speculative Decoding framework that uses entropy as a unified, interpretable signal for both draft model training and architectural design. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on seven large language models show that EDSD improves training efficiency by 24.8% and increases acceptance length by 4.0% compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
MTAVG-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multi-Talker Dialogue-Centric Audio-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yanghao Zhou, Haitian Li, Rexar Lin, Heyan Huang, Jinxing Zhou, Changsen Yuan, Tian Lan, Ziqin Zhou, Yudong Li, Jiajun Xu, Jingyun Liao, YiMing Cheng, Xuefeng Chen, Xian-Ling Mao, Yousheng Feng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation are largely designed for human-recorded videos or single-speaker settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-driven diagnostic benchmark for multi-talker dialogue-centric audio-video generation. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates multi-speaker dialogue generation at four levels: audio-visual signal fidelity, temporal attribute consistency, social interaction, and cinematic expression. |
TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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Xize Cheng, Rongjie Huang, Linjun Li, Zehan Wang, Tao Jin, Aoxiong Yin, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Baoxing Huai, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for talking head translation rely on cascading, resulting in delays and cascadic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for talking head translation, TransFace, which can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
Q-Mamba: Towards more efficient Mamba models via post-training quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that Mamba architectures have room for further optimization in linear projections and state caches. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled scale quantization scheme to mitigate outliers in states and channels by applying separate quantization scales. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory consumption by 50% across various quantization settings, model sizes, and generation and zero-shot tasks. |
UnitedQA: A Hybrid Approach for Open Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on open-domain question answering focuses on either extractive or generative readers exclusively. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid approach to extractive and generative readers that leverages both models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on NaturalQuestions and TriviaQA respectively. |
InfuserKI: Enhancing Large Language Models with Knowledge Graphs via Infuser-Guided Knowledge Integration (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have exceptional capabilities in open generation, yet they encounter difficulties with tasks that require intensive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates unknown knowledge into LLMs without overlap . they propose integrating domain-specific knowledge graphs into Llms to reduce knowledge forgetting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in integrating new knowledge into LLMs. |
Question Directed Graph Attention Network for Numerical Reasoning over Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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Kunlong Chen, Weidi Xu, Xingyi Cheng, Zou Xiaochuan, Yuyu Zhang, Le Song, Taifeng Wang, Yuan Qi, Wei Chu
| Challenge: | Numerical reasoning requires both natural language understanding and arithmetic computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph representation for the context of the passage and question needed for numerical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves remarkable results in benchmark datasets such as DROP. |
EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian, Zekun Xi, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Mengru Wang, Shengyu Mao, Xiaohan Wang, Siyuan Cheng, Kangwei Liu, Yuansheng Ni, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for Large Language Models that allows users to easily edit updated knowledge and adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. |
Rumor Detection on Twitter with Claim-Guided Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for rumor detection are limited to the strict relation of user responses or oversimplify the conversation structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reinforces interaction of user opinions while reducing negative impact imposed by irrelevant posts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on three Twitter datasets and can detect rumors at early stages. |
Position Really Matters: Towards a Holistic Approach for Prompt Tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning is effective in extracting knowledge from foundation models, but its effectiveness is uncertain. |
| Approach: | They propose a parametric prompt tuning strategy that dynamically determines different factors of prompts based on specific tasks or instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across a wide range of tasks including NLP, vision recognition, and vision-language tasks. |
Perceive the Passage of Time: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Model in Temporal Relativity (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Temporal perception is crucial for Large Language Models to understand the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-relative ability benchmark to evaluate LLMs' temporal perception . they conduct extensive experiments on popular LLM GPT-4 scenarios . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show a significant performance gap between LLMs and humans in temporal-relative capability. |
Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning with Unrestricted Answer Candidates (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chen Ling, Xuchao Zhang, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Haifeng Chen, Liang Zhao
| Challenge: | Current approaches to commonsense reasoning are limited due to limited answer scope. |
| Approach: | They propose to solve a commonsense question without a pre-defined answer scope . they leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance on two commonsense benchmark datasets. |
Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haoyu Huang, Yongfeng Huang, Yang Junjie, Zhenyu Pan, Yongqiang Chen, Kaili Ma, Hongzhi Chen, James Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods do not utilize hierarchical knowledge in human cognition, which limits the capabilities of RAG systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based approach that utilizes hierarchical knowledge to enhance the semantic understanding and structure capturing capabilities of RAG systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. |
Zero-Shot Spoken Language Understanding via Large Language Models: A Preliminary Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in zero-shot settings, which motivates us to explore prompt-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework which transforms the SLU task into a question-answering problem by directly prompting LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be built by directly prompting LLMs to understand user needs without training data. |
Confidence is not Timeless: Modeling Temporal Validity for Rule-based Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature on temporal knowledge Graph Forecasting lacks in-depth investigation into how confidence evolves with time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to model the temporal validity of rules for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (TKGF) they propose rule-adversarial negative sampling and time-aware negative sampling strategies to facilitate TempValid learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) rule-based methods on six TKGF datasets. |
AI Coach Assist: An Automated Approach for Call Recommendation in Contact Centers for Agent Coaching (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | In recent years, the utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the contact center industry is on the rise. |
| Approach: | They present a transformer-based pairwise sentence classification model that analyzes call transcripts to determine which calls are most relevant for coaching purposes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can determine which calls are most relevant for coaching purposes based on quality assurance queries/questions asked by managers or supervisors . |
Optimizing Length Compression in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models suffer from producing unnecessary and verbose reasoning chains. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-training method that uses a Length Reward and a Compress Reward to remove the invalid portion of the thinking process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces sequence length by 50% with only a marginal (2%) drop in accuracy. |
AI Knowledge Assist: An Automated Approach for the Creation of Knowledge Bases for Conversational AI Agents (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base is time-consuming and deters the adoption of conversational AI systems in contact centers. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that extracts knowledge in the form of question-answer (QA) pairs from historical customeragent conversations to automatically build a knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms larger closed-source LLMs on internal data and achieves above 90% accuracy in answering informationseeking questions. |
MCLF: A Multi-grained Contrastive Learning Framework for ASR-robust Spoken Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Trending ASR-robust SLU systems have seen impressive improvements through global contrastive learning, but they can easily lead to severe semantic changes. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage multi-grained contrastive learning framework to improve ASR robustness . they first adapt pre-trained language models to downstream SLU datasets and then fine-tune it on the corresponding dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on four datasets and four BERT-like backbone models. |
DecisionFlow: Advancing Large Language Model as Principled Decision Maker (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current language models lack the structured deliberation needed for high-stakes tasks such as healthcare and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a decision-making framework that guides models to reason over structured representations of actions, attributes, and constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 30% accuracy gains over strong prompting baselines and enhances alignment in outcomes. |
Enabling Agents to Communicate Entirely in Latent Space (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, Runze Wang, Huiyu Bai, Zouying Cao, Xiaoyong Zhu, Yu Cheng, Bo Zheng, Wei Chen, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Natural language is the de facto communication medium for LLM-based agents, but it presents a fundamental constraint . natural language downsampling limits the depth and nuance of information that can be transmitted . et al.: inter-agent latent space communication is a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that leverages the last hidden states of an LLM as a representation of its thought for direct communication. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms fine-tuned chain-of-thought prompting and single-agent baselines even across heterogeneous models. |
DSEE: Dually Sparsity-embedded Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Conventional fine-tuning works through updating all of the parameters in the pre-trained model, but as the size of pre-train models grows, it can be time-consuming and computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for resource- and parameter-efficient fine-tuning by leveraging the sparsity prior in both weight updates and the final model weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework saves 25% inference FLOPs while maintaining competitive downstream performance. |
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. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
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Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
Aligning Large Language Models to Follow Instructions and Hallucinate Less via Effective Data Filtering (2025.acl-long)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Gang Chen, Cheng Gao, Yuzhuo Bai, Zhitong Wang, Kaikai An, Kangyang Luo, Chen Qian, Fanchao Qi, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that training LLMs on data containing unfamiliar knowledge during instruction tuning can encourage hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures how familiar the LLM is with instruction data and introduce an expert-aligned reward model to ensure the quality of selected samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucinations while maintaining a competitive ability to follow instructions. |
LoRaDA: Low-Rank Direct Attention Adaptation for Efficient LLM Fine-tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques allow for adjustments to only a minor fraction of the parameters of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank direct attention adapted method for efficient LLM fine-tuning . they propose LMAM, which can bring negative attention to self-attention modules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the full fine-tuning method by 2.1% on GLUE benchmark. |
Can ChatGPT’s Performance be Improved on Verb Metaphor Detection Tasks? Bootstrapping and Combining Tacit Knowledge (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised metaphor detection are limited by their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ChatGPT to detect most prevalent verb metaphors among metaphors . they use literal collocations of target verbs and subject-object pairs of verbs to detect them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best performance on the unsupervised verb metaphors detection task compared to existing unsupervised methods or direct prediction using ChatGPT. |
ModelingAgent: Bridging LLMs and Mathematical Modeling for Real-World Challenges (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Cheng Qian, Hongyi Du, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Avirup Sil, ChengXiang Zhai, Kathleen McKeown, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models fail to reflect real-world complexity . existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-life problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features real-world-inspired, open-ended problems from competitions . they propose 'ModelingBench' that supports multiple valid solutions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and produces well-grounded, creative solutions. |
Adaptive Textual Label Noise Learning based on Pre-trained Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning with noisy labels are limited due to the time and labor costs involved. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive warm-up and hybrid training frameworks to learn with noisy labels based on pre-trained models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs comparable or even surpasses state-of-the-art methods in various noise scenarios, including scenarios with the mixture of multiple types of noise. |
Efficient Beam Search for Large Language Models Using Trie-Based Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face memorybound performance bottlenecks due to their high memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a trie-based parallel decoding method that shares a single KV cache across beams with common prefixes to dramatically reduce memory usage and enables efficient decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces memory usage and enables efficient decoding without compromising generation quality. |
ControlSpeech: Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control (2025.acl-long)
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Shengpeng Ji, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Jialong Zuo, Minghui Fang, Ziyue Jiang, Hai Huang, Zehan Wang, Xize Cheng, Siqi Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior zero-shot TTS models only mimic the speaker’s voice without further control and adjustment capabilities while prior controllable TTS systems cannot perform speaker-specific voice generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a style control module that captures codec representations corresponding to timbre, content, and style in a discrete decoupling codec space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can fully clone the speaker's voice and perform speech-specific adjustment and control functions. |
Stop When Enough: Adaptive Early-Stopping for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that adaptively determines when to stop reasoning to mitigate overthinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by 20-55% while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to standard CoT prompting. |
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets agents learn shortcuts from their past tasks and use them for future task execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. |
Sample-Efficient Human Evaluation of Large Language Models via Maximum Discrepancy Competition (2025.acl-long)
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Kehua Feng, Keyan Ding, Tan Hongzhi, Kede Ma, Zhihua Wang, Shuangquan Guo, Cheng Yuzhou, Ge Sun, Guozhou Zheng, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluation of large language models are inefficient and inefficient due to inaccuracy of standard metrics in human perception of text quality and inefficiency in sampling informative test examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-efficient human evaluation method for large language models based on the principle of MAximum Discrepancy (MAD) competition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the “golden” ranking of LLMs with a minimum set of input instructions, which in turn reveal their relative strengths and weaknesses. |
EnAnchored-X2X: English-Anchored Optimization for Many-to-Many Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong machine translation capabilities for English-centric language pairs but underperform in direct non-English (x2x) translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation framework that leverages models’ established English-to-x (en2x) capabilities by extending English parallel corpora into omnidirectional datasets and developing an English-referenced quality evaluation proxy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant improvement across 72 x2x directions while generalizing to enhance en2x performance. |
CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing language models rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to emulate character behaviors but neglect the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving these behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RPLA adopting a cognize-then-respond reasoning paradigm that leverages dual cognition for more contextually grounded and psychologically coherent responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed RPLA outperforms baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks. |
A Survey on Detection of LLMs-Generated Content (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Xianjun Yang, Liangming Pan, Xuandong Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Linda Petzold, William Yang Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to an increase in synthetic content generation . the ability to detect LLMs-generated content has become of paramount importance . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a detailed overview of existing detection strategies and benchmarks, scrutinizing their differences and advocating for more adaptable and robust models to enhance detection accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model will be able to detect human-written content in real time. |
OneGen: Efficient One-Pass Unified Generation and Retrieval for LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jintian Zhang, Cheng Peng, Mengshu Sun, Xiang Chen, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the generative capabilities for various NLP tasks, but they still suffer from hallucinations due to their exclusive reliance on parametric knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates retrieval tokens generated autoregressively into a single LLM to handle both tasks simultaneously in a unified forward pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the traditionally separate training approaches for generation and retrieval by incorporating retrieval tokens generated autoregressively. |
Enhancing Legal Case Retrieval via Scaling High-quality Synthetic Query-Candidate Pairs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on case-to-case retrieval using lengthy queries, which does not match real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct query-candidate pairs and build the largest LCR dataset to date, LEAD. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the method can provide ample training signals for LCR models. |
Beyond Binary Preferences: Semi-Online Label-Free GRACE-KTO with Group-Wise Adaptive Calibration for High-Quality Long-Text Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generating high-quality long-text remains challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs), as conventional supervised fine-tuning fails to ensure overall quality due to its teacher-forcing nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-online framework that transforms KTO’s binary signals into dynamically calibrated intra-group rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms binary signals into dynamically calibrated intra-group rewards. |
Merely Judging Metaphor is Not Enough: Research on Reasonable Metaphor Detection (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current metaphor detection tasks only provide labels without interpreting how to understand them. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the current metaphor detection task by using mainstream Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on the original sentence, target word, and usage . the model is then evaluated using manual evaluation . |
DeepSieve: Information Sieving via LLM-as-a-Knowledge-Router (2026.findings-eacl)
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Minghao Guo, Qingcheng Zeng, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Wenchao Yu, Mengnan Du, Haifeng Chen, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods lack fine-grained control over query and source sides, resulting in noisy retrieval and shallow reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic RAG framework that integrates information sieving via LLM-as-a-knowledge-router. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multi-hop QA tasks across heterogeneous sources demonstrate improved reasoning depth, retrieval precision, and interpretability over conventional approaches. |
Recommend for a Reason: Unlocking the Power of Unsupervised Aspect-Sentiment Co-Extraction (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing review-based recommenders favor large and complex language encoders that can only learn latent and uninterpretable text representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a tightly coupled two-stage approach to extract latent user sentiments and item properties from reviews and an Attention-Property-aware Rating Estimator (APRE). |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on seven real-world Amazon review datasets show that the proposed approach extracts the latent user sentiments, item properties, and the complicated interactions between the two components. |
bert2BERT: Towards Reusable Pretrained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
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Cheng Chen, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Yujia Qin, Fengyu Wang, Zhi Wang, Xiao Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Pre-training large language models can be expensive and wasteful. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and a two-stage learning method to further accelerate the pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. |
Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Xuchao Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning have focused on quantifying the uncertainty associated with the model's response, but they neglect the complexity of the LLM and the uniqueness of in-constitut learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the uncertainty associated with in-context learning and propose corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. |
FARSS: Fisher-Optimized Adaptive Low-Rank and Singular-Vector Selection for Knowledge-Preserving Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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Renxing Chen, Ziwei Xiang, Peisong Wang, Hongjian Fang, Meng Li, Fanhu Zeng, Yanan Zhu, Peipei Yang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Jian Cheng
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation methods for large language models have limitations in preserving world knowledge and limiting updates to preserve world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fisher-optimized adaptive low Rank and Singular-VectorSelection framework for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning that allows efficient and task-sensitive updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. |
A Survey of Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: From Perception, Alignment to Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Tianyu Yang, Sihong Wu, Yilun Zhao, Zhenwen Liang, Lisen Dai, Chen Zhao, Minhao Cheng, Arman Cohan, Xiangliang Zhang
| Challenge: | Multimodal mathematical Reasoning (MMR) has attracted increasing attention for its ability to solve mathematical problems involving both textual and visual modalities. |
| Approach: | They review the theoretical frameworks of multimodal reasoning and examine the challenges they face in visual math tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can solve problems involving both textual and visual modalities. |
SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia (2024.acl-demos)
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Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Mahani Aljunied, Zhiqiang Hu, Chenhui Shen, Yew Ken Chia, Xingxuan Li, Jianyu Wang, Qingyu Tan, Liying Cheng, Guanzheng Chen, Yue Deng, Sen Yang, Chaoqun Liu, Hang Zhang, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing large language models favor high-resource languages, such as English, at the expense of low-resourced and regional languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian languages. |
| Outcome: | SeaLLM models outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages by large margins . linguistic disparity impedes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies for non-English-speaking populations . |
Multi-Agent Procedural Graph Extraction with Structural and Logical Refinement (2026.findings-eacl)
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Wangyang Ying, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Wenchao Yu, Yanjie Fu, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show potential for graph extraction, but often yield ill-formed structures or misinterpret logical constructs such as gateways. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats procedural graph extraction as a multi-round reasoning process with structural and logical refinement agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant improvements in structural correctness and logical consistency over strong baselines. |
TRANS-ZERO: Self-Play Incentivizes Large Language Models for Multilingual Translation Without Parallel Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped machine translation, but multilingual MT still relies heavily on parallel data for supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages only monolingual data and the intrinsic multilingual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches models trained on large-scale parallel data and excels in non-English translation directions. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
SCALE: Synergized Collaboration of Asymmetric Language Translation Engines (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a collaborative framework that connects a compact Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework that connects a Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both LLMs and supervised models in high-resource or challenging low-resourced settings. |
Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are constrained by their fixed model capacities when the number of tasks grows in instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine all training tasks and apply fixed sampling weights without considering the importance of different tasks as the model training state changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used on knowledge & reasoning tasks and open-ended queries with limited training budget. |
Syntax Matters: Towards Spoken Language Understanding via Syntax-Aware Attention (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on SLU systems have focused on integrating syntactic information into language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model where attention scopes are constrained based on syntactic relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three datasets and can be integrated into other language models to further boost their performance. |
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Qiwei Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Huaxiu Yao, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Xujiang Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over multi-step decision-making process and dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 20%. |
RRInf: Efficient Influence Function Estimation via Ridge Regression for Large Language Models and Text-to-Image Diffusion Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Influence function estimates the impact of training data on model predictions . high computational cost has hindered their applicability in large-scale applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the impact of training data on model predictions . they use a ridge regression problem to transform the estimation into a problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on noisy data detection and influential data identification tasks. |
Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yijia Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Yushi Bai, Yue Wu, Xianjun Yang, Xiao Luo, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Quanquan Gu, Haifeng Chen, Wei Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic comprehension and generation capability, but when applied to specialized industries, they face challenges such as hallucination, insufficient domain knowledge, and failing to incorporate the latest domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model protects private data while enhancing the model's knowledge. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
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Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
DAGS: A Dependency-Based Dual-Attention and Global Semantic Improvement Framework for Metaphor Recognition (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for metaphor recognition ignore interference caused by literal annotations . et al., 2018: Metaphor recognition plays an important role in cognition and communication . |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-based Dual-Attention and Global Semantic Improvement framework to improve metaphor recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract features from multiple information sources while improving on mainstream metaphor datasets. |
Crossroads, Buildings and Neighborhoods: A Dataset for Fine-grained Location Recognition (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) datasets annotate coarse-grained entities such as a continent, a country, or a city. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset HarveyNER with fine-grained locations annotated in tweets that characterizes many complex and long location mentions in informal descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing systems on hard cases and improves on the heuristic curricula. |
MT-PATCHER: Selective and Extendable Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Machine Translation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown their strong ability in the field of machine translation, yet they suffer from high computational cost and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which transfers knowledge from LLMs to existing MT models in a selective, comprehensive and proactive manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transfers knowledge from LLMs to existing MT models in a selective, comprehensive and proactive manner. |
MixLLM: Dynamic Routing in Mixed Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Xinyuan Wang, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Xujiang Zhao, Zhengzhang Chen, Wenchao Yu, Yanjie Fu, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potential artificial generic intelligence, however, their usage is costly with high response latency. |
| Approach: | They develop a dynamic contextual-bandit-based routing system for query-LLM assignment that leverages query tags to enhance query embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maximizes response quality and minimizes cost and latency. |
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. |
SpellGCN: Incorporating Phonological and Visual Similarities into Language Models for Chinese Spelling Check (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese take external input or just heuristic rules. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate phonological and visual similarity knowledge into Chinese language models by using a specialized graph convolutional network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three human-annotated datasets. |
MoE-SLU: Towards ASR-Robust Spoken Language Understanding via Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a crucial task in task-oriented dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an ASR-Robust SLU framework based on the mixture-of-experts technique to generate additional transcripts from clean transcripts and use it to weigh the representations of the generated transcripts, ASR transcripts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark SLU datasets. |
QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Songxin Qu, Tai-Ping Sun, Yun-Jie Wang, Huan-Yu Liu, Cheng Xue, Xiao-Fan Xu, Han Fang, Yang Yang, Yu-Chun Wu, Guo-Ping Guo, Zhao-Yun Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models lack reliability in scientific domains that require strict adherence to physical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models and is competitive with proprietary models. |
Following the Autoregressive Nature of LLM Embeddings via Compression and Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jingcheng Deng, Zhongtao Jiang, Liang Pang, Zihao Wei, Liwei Chen, Kun Xu, Yang Song, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches when using the same amount of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new contrastive learning method built on embedding conditional probability distributions that integrates two tasks: information compression and conditional distribution alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art models when using the same amount of data. |
Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System (P19-3)
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Guo Zhipeng, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Wenhao Li, Cheng Yang, Jiannan Liang, Huimin Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ruoyu Li
| Challenge: | Existing systems for automatic poetry generation are model-oriented, resulting in poor user participation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-machine collaborative Chinese classical poetry generation system called Jiuge . Jiuge allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. |
Prune as You Generate: Online Rollout Pruning for Faster and Better RLVR (2026.acl-long)
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Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Chen Luo, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an online pruning method that prunes rollouts while steering correct ones to enhance learning signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves average accuracy by +2.30 to +2.99 across GRPO and DAPO on Qwen-3 and LLaMA-3.2 models. |
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. |
Mitigating Safety Context Amnesia in Multimodal Reasoning Models via Intent-Guided Safety Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have enabled explicit chain-of-thought inference across vision and language, improving performance on complex cognitive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time defense that uses a percept decoupler to extract objective visual evidence into a structured intent output and a cognitive arbiter to enforce explicit safety constraints prior to generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense improves defense success rates by over 62% compared to baselines while preserving task utility. |
GRPO-CARE: Consistency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent reinforcement learning approaches have advanced reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their adaptation to multimodal LLMs remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that eliminates KL penalties and rewards consistency . they propose GRPO-CARE, which outperforms standard GR PO, with a base reward for accuracy and an adaptive bonus for consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard GRPO on the most difficult evaluation level and reasoning consistency test benchmarks. |
Privacy Checklist: Privacy Violation Detection Grounding on Contextual Integrity Theory (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy studies focus on sub-fields, but they focus on a few sub-domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 as an example to develop a checklist that covers social identities, private attributes, and existing privacy regulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed checklist covers social identities, private attributes, and existing privacy regulations. |
Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup: A New Axis of Sparsity for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Cheng, Wangding Zeng, Damai Dai, Qinyu Chen, Bingxuan Wang, Zhenda Xie, Kezhao Huang, Xingkai Yu, Zhewen Hao, Han Zhang, Yu-Kun Li, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, but lacks knowledge lookup primitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional memory instantiated via Deep Sparse Embedding (DSE) they propose 'u-shaped scaling law' that identifies optimal balance between MoE experts and DSE memory . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms an iso-parameter and isoFLOPs MoE baseline across knowledge and reasoning benchmarks and is infrastructure-efficient. |
LLM Evaluate: An Industry-Focused Evaluation Tool for Large Language Models (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability to solve a wide range of tasks in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to build an on-premise system for LLM evaluation to address the challenges in the evaluation of LLMs in real-world industrial settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation system protects customer privacy and protects data integrity in real-world industrial environments. |
Chinese Metaphorical Relation Extraction: Dataset and Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Metaphor identification is a core task in metaphor processing, which involves recognizing and analyzing metaphorical expressions in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a new formulation of metaphor identification as a relation extraction problem . they use a dataset to analyze metaphorical relations between two spans, a target and a source . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture the properties of the target and source in Chinese sentences. |
A Multi-Task Incremental Learning Framework with Category Name Embedding for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular natural language processing task in academia and industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to use category name encoding network to weaken catastrophic forgetting problem . they set both encoder and decoder shared among all categories to weaker the catastrophic forgetting problem a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two (T)ACSA benchmark datasets. |
Improving Instruct Models for Free: A Study on Partial Adaptation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ozan Irsoy, Pengxiang Cheng, Jennifer L Chen, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Shiyue Zhang, Duccio Pappadopulo
| Challenge: | Instruct models are deemed superior and more usable but can be eroded by instruction tuning . a recent study shows that instruct models are better at following instructions than base models . |
| Approach: | They scale down the strength of instruction tuning to improve model performance . they show that reducing instruction tuning results in material improvement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a few-shot in-context learning benchmark . but it loses some degree of its in-training ability . |
TKGT: Redefinition and A New Way of Text-to-Table Tasks Based on Real World Demands and Knowledge Graphs Augmented LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on text-to-table tasks that ignore domain structures and use simple datasets to extract structured information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a new text-to-table task that generates domain knowledge graphs from raw text using a mixed-IE method and a hybrid retrieval augmented generation method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves compatibility with long text-processing tasks by incorporating domain knowledge graphs (KGs) classes into tables. |
Beyond A Fixed Seal: Adaptive Stealing Watermark in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing detection methods for large language models rely on fixed strategies to steal watermarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel steal-based watermark algorithm that derives watermark information from watermarked texts to craft highly targeted adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly increases steal efficiency against target watermarks under identical conditions. |
LanguageNet: Learning to Find Sense Relevant Example Sentences (C18-2)
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| Challenge: | LanguageNet is a system that can help second language learners to search for different meanings and usages of a word . the polysemy of words, namely words with more than one sense, is one of the major challenges for ESOL learners . |
| Approach: | They propose a system which can help second language learners to search for different meanings of a word. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can help second language learners to search for different meanings and usages of a word. |
False Sense of Security: Why Probing-based Malicious Input Detection Fails to Generalize (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has leveraged probing-based approaches to study the separability of malicious and benign inputs in Large Language Models’ internal representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use probing-based methods to study separability of malicious and benign inputs in LLMs' internal representations to detect harmful and benign content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that they learn superficial patterns rather than semantic harmfulness. |
Shallow Focus, Deep Fixes: Enhancing Shallow Layers Vision Attention Sinks to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Chaochen Gu, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Jiawei Cao, Hao Cheng, Kaijie Wu, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities for understanding visual information, but the hallucination remains a challenging problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach to enhance vision attention sinks to facilitate convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers and strengthens the layer’s focus on the image itself. |
Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for User Intention Relation Modeling (2026.eacl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Zhaobo Wang, Junfei Cheng, Dan Yu, Zerui Huang, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Chen Luo, Yanming Zhu, Bo Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs focus on connecting intentions but lacks the ability to model the relationships between different intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically generate an intention knowledge graph, capturing connections between user intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and shows its utility. |
Revisiting Self-training for Few-shot Learning of Language Model (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Unlabeled data are useful for few-shot learning of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based few-shot learner that uses unlabeled data to fine-tune language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on six sentence classification and six sentence-pair classification benchmarking tasks. |
Contrastive Demonstration Tuning for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach to prompt tuning that is free of demonstration sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be pluggable, extensible, and efficient on 16 datasets. |
Improving Textual Network Embedding with Global Attention via Optimal Transport (P19-1)
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Liqun Chen, Guoyin Wang, Chenyang Tao, Dinghan Shen, Pengyu Cheng, Xinyuan Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning textual network embeddings are noisy and sparse. |
| Approach: | They propose to use text-based attention parsing to learn context-aware network embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in a number of domains. |
LAGCL4Rec: When LLMs Activate Interactions Potential in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Leqi Zheng, Chaokun Wang, Canzhi Chen, Jiajun Zhang, Cheng Wu, Zixin Song, Shannan Yan, Ziyang Liu, Hongwei Li
| Challenge: | Traditional contrastive learning methods treat negative feedback as equally hard or easy, ignoring informative semantic difficulty during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework leveraging Large Language Models to Activate interactions in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on multiple benchmarks. |
Exploring Speaker-Related Information in Spoken Language Understanding for Better Speaker Diarization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current speaker diarization systems consider only acoustic information, resulting in performance degradation when encountering adverse acustic environment. |
| Approach: | They propose methods to extract speaker-related information from conversational semantics in multi-party meetings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on AISHELL-4 and AliMeeting datasets on speakers diarization and speaker-turn detection. |
A Mechanistic Perspective and Difficulty Metric for Unlearning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that machine unlearning success varies across samples . easy-to-unlearn samples are associated with shorter, shallower interactions . hard-to unlear rely on longer and deeper pathways closer to late-stage computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-unlearning metric that assigns each sample a continuous difficulty score . they show that CUD reliably separates intrinsically easy and hard samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reliably separates intrinsically easy and hard samples and remains stable across unlearning methods. |
Inverse is Better! Fast and Accurate Prompt for Few-shot Slot Tagging (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent results show that prompting methods are inefficient for slot tagging tasks . inverse prompting only requires a one-turn prediction for each slot type . |
| Approach: | They propose an inverse prompting paradigm that reversely predicts slot values given slot types . the method is faster and significantly improves the effect on 10-shot setting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over 6.1 F1-scores on 10-shot setting and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. |
Taming Extreme Tokens: Covariance-Aware GRPO with Gaussian-Kernel Advantage Reweighting (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Excessive exploitation can cause the model to become overconfident in its suboptimal solutions, thereby limiting its capabilities to explore novel reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically down-weights extreme token-level updates via a Gaussian kernel and reduces the instability caused by the trade-off. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves downstream performance across reasoning benchmarks and stabilizes entropy as training progresses. |
Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts for Low-Resource Domains via Adversarial Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection methods are poor at detecting false rumors about breaking news or trending topics due to the lack of training data and prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial contrastive learning framework to detect false rumors by adapting features learned from well-resourced rumor data to that of the low-resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two low-resource datasets and shows superior performance . it overcomes restriction of domain and/or language usage and improves robustness . |
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. |
Logical Structure as Knowledge: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Structured Logical Knowledge Density Estimation (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhen Bi, Zhenlin Hu, Xueshu Chen, Mingyang Chen, Cheng Deng, Yida Xue, Zhen Wang, Qing Shen, Ningyu Zhang, Jungang Lou
| Challenge: | Existing data-centric paradigms equate quality with factuality or diversity and ignore the internal logical complexity of training samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a density-aware re-cognizing optimization strategy that prioritizes high-density logical samples to align training with the model's reasoning boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms existing methods and improves reasoning performance without increasing total data volume. |
Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt Pre-trained Language Models to downstream tasks are limited by their inference APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-prompting decoding framework that query PLMs with multiple prompts . they propose to query Plms with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting. |
GoViG: Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation via Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengyi Wu, Yifei Dong, Yilong Dai, Guangyu Chen, Qifeng Wu, Huiting Huang, Hang Wang, Qi Dai, Alexander G Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng
| Challenge: | Current methods for instruction generation depend on privileged inputs such as semantic maps, landmark annotations, and panoramic views. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that generates coherent navigation instructions from egocentric visual observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task generates coherent navigation instructions from egocentric visual data . the proposed task improves performance over state-of-the-art methods in BLEU-4 and CIDEr scores . |
HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | HERO is a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning that encodes multimodal inputs in a hierarchical structure and uses Masked Language Modeling and Masked Frame Modeling to train models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks over text-based video/video-moment retrieval, video question answering (QA), Video-and-language Inference and video Captioning tasks across different domains. |
HoLLMwood: Unleashing the Creativity of Large Language Models in Screenwriting via Role Playing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jing Chen, Xinyu Zhu, Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Yadong Xi, Yuxiang Zhang, Junjie Wang, Jiashu Pu, Tian Feng, Yujiu Yang, Rongsheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Generative AI has demonstrated unprecedented creativity in the field of computer vision, yet such phenomena have not been observed in the realm of literary creation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for unleashing the creativity of large language models (LLMs) they assign LLMs to different roles involved in real-world scenario, they write . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in terms of coherence, relevance, interestingness and overall quality on automatically generated screenplays. |
An Exploration of Mamba for Speech Self-Supervised Models (2026.acl-long)
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Tzu-Quan Lin, Heng-Cheng Kuo, Tzu-Chieh Wei, Hsi-Chun Cheng, Chun Wei Chen, Hsien-Fu Hsiao, Yu Tsao, Hung-yi Lee
| Challenge: | Mamba-based SSL models are promising for long-sequence modeling, speech unit extraction, and speech self-supervised learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mamba-based HuBERT models as an alternative to Transformer-based SSL architectures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform Transformer-based models in language modeling tasks while showing superior performance on streaming ASR. |
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)
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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark. |
Entity-level Sentiment Analysis in Contact Center Telephone Conversations (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Xue-yong Fu, Cheng Chen, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Shayna Gardiner, Pooja Hiranandani, Shashi Bhushan Tn
| Challenge: | Entity-level sentiment analysis is useful in a business context to understand user emotions towards certain entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model that predicts the sentiment about entities mentioned in a given text to build an entity-level sentiment analysis system that analyzes English telephone conversation transcripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system analyzes English telephone conversation transcripts to provide business insight. |
TST: A Schema-Based Top-Down and Dynamic-Aware Agent of Text-to-Table Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract text content based on static table structures neglect to deal with precise inner-document evidence extraction and dynamic information such as multiple entities and events. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic content extraction agent framework that uses type recognition to extract context evidences with the conduction of domain schema sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on a large dataset. |
Graph Neural News Recommendation with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative user and news representations fail to consider high-order connectivity underlying the user-news interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Graph Neural News Recommendation model with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement which can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph and disentangle latent preference factors by a neighborhood routing algorithm. |
The Role of Exploration Modules in Small Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2025.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate knowledge graphs into large language models often rely on proprietary or extremely large models . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate knowledge graphs into reasoning processes of large language models . they propose to use simple and efficient exploration modules to handle knowledge graph traversal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed modules improve the performance of small language models on knowledge graph question answering tasks. |
AutoTinyBERT: Automatic Hyper-parameter Optimization for Efficient Pre-trained Language Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically searches architecture hyper-parameters in BERT . they use one-shot learning and the search space to provide an adaptive development way . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms both the baseline and distillation-based methods on GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks. |
Improving Long-Context Translation via Self-Supervised Dual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models with long context windows suffer from catastrophic information distortion, undermining the strict faithfulness required for translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised post-training framework that improves long-document translation reliability via round-trip consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves long-document translation reliability via round-trip consistency. |
DialogVED: A Pre-trained Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Dialog Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Song Wang, Bolun Yao, Weizhen Qi, Zhongyu Wei, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Yi Mao, Weizhu Chen, Biao Cheng, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained dialog models shed light on various downstream tasks in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a dialog pre-training framework that introduces latent variables into the enhanced encoder-decoder pre-train framework to increase relevance and diversity of responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on personaChat, DailyDialog, and DSTC7-AVSD datasets. |
PTP: Boosting Stability and Performance of Prompt Tuning with Perturbation-Based Regularizer (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt tuning methods have training instability issues due to large variance of scores . existing prompt tuning algorithms have training stability issues due a slight change of input data . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that smooths the loss landscape of vanilla prompt tuning by perturbation-based regularizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art prompt tuning methods by 1.94% and 2.34% on SuperGLUE and FewGLUE benchmarks. |
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Circular Convolution (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has gained popularity for fine-tuning large foundation models, but its intrinsic low-rank characteristic may limit its performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptive method that uses low-ranked matrices to represent weight changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces trainable parameters and mitigates heavy memory consumption associated with full delta matrices by sequentially multiplying mathbf A and mathbb B with the activation. |
BiasFilter: An Inference-Time Debiasing Framework for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for debiasing large language models incur high human and computational costs and are limited in their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic, inference-time debiasing framework that enforces fairness by filtering generation outputs in real time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates social bias across a range of LLMs while preserving overall generation quality. |