Papers by Cheng Qian
Recyclable Tuning for Continual Pre-training (2023.findings-acl)
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Yujia Qin, Cheng Qian, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training is the paradigm where pre-trained language models acquire fresh knowledge and gradually get upgraded. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adapted weights to recycle old PLMs for continual pre-training . they propose to combine initialization and distillation methods to achieve better performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the convergence and performance of the upgraded PLM. |
VoxpopuliTTS: a large-scale multilingual TTS corpus for zero-shot speech generation (2025.coling-main)
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Wenrui Liu, Jionghao Bai, Xize Cheng, Jialong Zuo, Ziyue Jiang, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Xiaoda Yang, Qian Yang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual TTS datasets are limited in speech generation fields due to lack of quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 30,000 hours of high-quality speech data across 3 languages . they filter out low-quality text-text pairs and concatenate short transcripts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset comprises 30,000 hours of high-quality speech data, across 3 languages with multiple speakers and styles, suitable for various speech tasks such as TTS and ASR. |
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. |
Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interaction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs alignment focus on generalizing their behavior to generalized values such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. |
| Approach: | They train large language models to "interact to align" to implicitly infer user preferences . they use a multi-turn preference dataset to generate a personalized alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables dynamic, personalized alignment via interaction with a multi-turn preference dataset. |
CORAL: Benchmarking Multi-turn Conversational Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yiruo Cheng, Kelong Mao, Ziliang Zhao, Guanting Dong, Hongjin Qian, Yongkang Wu, Tetsuya Sakai, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on single-turn RAG, leaving a gap in addressing multi-turn conversations . a new benchmark is designed to assess RAG systems in realistic multi-turned conversations based on Wikipedia . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark to assess RAG systems in multi-turn contexts . CORAL includes diverse information-seeking conversations automatically derived from Wikipedia . authors propose unified framework to standardize various conversational RAG methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports three core tasks of conversational RAG: passage retrieval, response generation, and citation labeling. |
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. |
Few-Shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition Based on Mutlimodal Causal Intervention Graph (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal named entity recognition are limited due to limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task to address these relation types by constructing a multimodal graph and a new multimodal causal intervention strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two multimodal named entity recognition datasets. |
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. |
Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Bingxiang He, Zhong Zhuang, Jia Deng, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Jie Zhou, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current language model-driven agents lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to inspect users’ implicit intentions through explicit queries and a model expert as the upstream in agent design to enhance user-agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. |
Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Transformer Framework for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) is a critical task that aims to identify equivalent entity pairs across multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel MMEA transformer that hierarchically introduces neighbor features, multi-modal attributes, and entity types to enhance alignment task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed transformer hierarchically introduces neighbor features, multi-modal attributes, and entity types to enhance the alignment task. |
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 . |
Balancing Fidelity and Plasticity: Aligning Mixed-Precision Fine-Tuning with Linguistic Hierarchies (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhai Zhou, Shiyang Zhang, Yuhua Zhou, Jun Gao, Qian Qiao, Shichao Weng, Weizhong Zhang, Cheng Jin
| Challenge: | Existing quantization-aware fine-tuning methods decouple weight precision and adapter capacity, overlooking that a layer’s ability to adapt is constrained by the information preserved in its frozen weights. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly optimizes per-layer quantization bit-width and LoRA rank. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models show that the proposed framework matches or approaches 16-bit baselines while using substantially less memory. |
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. |
WESR: A Benchmark and Strong Baseline for Word-level Event-Speech Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenchen Yang, Kexin Huang, Liwei Fan, Qian Tu, Botian Jiang, Dong Zhang, Linqi Yin, Shimin Li, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | aaron carroll: the precise localization of non-verbal vocal events remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. carroll says current methods suffer from insufficient task definitions with limited category coverage. carrol: knowing exactly where an event occurred is not enough; knowing exactly what it happened is. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of 21 vocal events with a new categorization into discrete versus continuous types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model disentangles ASR errors from event detection while maintaining ASR quality. |
Incremental Transformer with Deliberation Decoder for Document Grounded Conversations (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems do not exploit document knowledge effectively enough. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based architecture for document grounded conversations that incorporates document knowledge into a two-pass decoder to improve context coherence and knowledge correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on context coherence and knowledge relevance on a real-world document grounded dataset. |
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. |
Focusing Condition: Inference-Time Self-Contrastive Steering Elicits Better Conditional Text Embeddings in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) relying on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional embeddables, resulting in degradation of quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of prompt-based methods on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets. |
Retaining Key Information under High Compression Ratios: Query-Guided Compressor for LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress long contexts have degraded dramatically as compression ratios increase, sometimes even falling to the closed-book level. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-guided compression method that preserves key information within the compressed context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can consistently perform well even at high compression ratios, and offers significant benefits in terms of inference cost and throughput. |
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. |
Dual-Gated Fusion with Prefix-Tuning for Multi-Modal Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-modal relation extraction lack useful visual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-modal relation extraction framework to capture deeper correlations of text, entity pair, and image/objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the deeper correlations of text, entity pair, and image/objects, and extracts useful information. |
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. |
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%. |
TT-SI: Self-Improving LLM Agents with Test-Time Training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for language model fine-tuning are expensive and inefficient . existing methods rarely assess whether a training sample provides novel information . |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time self-improvement algorithm that generates a sample that model struggles with . they also explore Test-Time Distillation, which leverages 'stronger supervisors' |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves performance with +5.48% absolute accuracy gain on average across benchmarks. |
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. |
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. |
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 . |
IAM: A Comprehensive and Large-Scale Dataset for Integrated Argument Mining Tasks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Argument mining (AM) is a computational process that is used to analyze information in a debating system. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large dataset to automate the manual process of debating . they propose to integrate claim extraction, stance classification and evidence extraction tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks can extract claims, stances, evidence and more from a large dataset . the proposed tasks are highly efficient and can be applied to argument mining tasks . |
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 . |
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. |
MultiAgentBench : Evaluating the Collaboration and Competition of LLM agents (2025.acl-long)
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Kunlun Zhu, Hongyi Du, Zhaochen Hong, Xiaocheng Yang, Shuyi Guo, Zhe Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Cheng Qian, Robert Tang, Heng Ji, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities as autonomous agents, yet existing benchmarks focus on single-agent tasks or are confined to narrow domains, failing to capture the dynamics of multi-agent coordination and competition. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based multi-agent systems across diverse, interactive scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures task completion and quality of collaboration and competition using novel, milestone-based key performance indicators. |
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. |
Distinguish Sense from Nonsense: Out-of-Scope Detection for Virtual Assistants (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Out of Scope (OOS) detection is a problem with chatbots that cannot make sense of a query . a real-world solution to this problem is to identify out-of-domain queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective OOS detection method that outperforms standard methods . they propose analyzing data from an enterprise virtual assistant platform to test the method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard OOS detection methods in a real-world deployment of virtual assistants. |
Distance between Relevant Information Pieces Causes Bias in Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yanghao Li, Yuepeng Fu, Siyang Deng, Qinyu Luo, Cheng Qian, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Xiaojiang Liu
| Challenge: | Positional biases in large language models hinder their ability to process long inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess positional bias in large language models involving multiple pieces of relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of long-context language models by examining their models with different input lengths and tasks. |
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. |
CostBench: Evaluating Multi-Turn Cost-Optimal Planning and Adaptation in Dynamic Environments for LLM Tool-Use Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on task completion, but neglect a crucial capability: the ability to devise and adjust cost-optimal plans in response to changing environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable, cost-centric benchmark to evaluate agents’ economic reasoning and replanning abilities. |
| Outcome: | Evaluating leading open-sourced and proprietary models on CostBench reveals a substantial gap in cost-aware planning . |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
ConvTrans: Transforming Web Search Sessions for Conversational Dense Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that conversational dense retrieval is a promising technique for realizing conversational search, but its implementation is severely hindered by the lack of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transforms easily-accessible web search sessions into conversational search sessions to alleviate the data scarcity problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transform easily-accessible web search sessions into conversational search sessions. |
Search-Oriented Conversational Query Editing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing CQR models are not learned toward improving the downstream search performance . existing models generate the rewrite token-by-token from scratch . |
| Approach: | They propose a text editing-based CQR model tailored for conversational search . they propose rewrite tokens are selected from the dialogue in a non-autoregressive fashion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three conversational search benchmarks while having low rewriting latency. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
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Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuji Zhang, Sha Li, Cheng Qian, Jiateng Liu, Pengfei Yu, Chi Han, Yi R. Fung, Kathleen McKeown, ChengXiang Zhai, Manling Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%). |
Learning Compressed Sentence Representations for On-Device Text Processing (P19-1)
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Dinghan Shen, Pengyu Cheng, Dhanasekar Sundararaman, Xinyuan Zhang, Qian Yang, Meng Tang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning sentence embeddings assume they are continuous and real-valued. |
| Approach: | They propose four different strategies to transform continuous and generic sentence embeddings into a binarized form while preserving their rich semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce storage requirements by over 98% and improve performance on downstream tasks. |
Toolink: Linking Toolkit Creation and Using through Chain-of-Solving on Open-Source Model (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in utilizing tools, but their closed-source nature and high inference costs pose limitations on their adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs task-solving by first creating a toolkit and then integrating the planning and calling of tools through a chain-of-solve approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs task-solving by harnessing Toolink's creativity and CoS ability on ChatGPT and finetunes the LLaMA-7B model. |
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. |
Rescorla-Wagner Steering of LLMs for Undesired Behaviors over Disproportionate Inappropriate Context (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | Incorporating external context can enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). however, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Poisoned Context Testbed to pair queries with real-world contexts . they propose 'rw-Steering' to internalize inappropriate signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses undesirable behavior curve. |
Answer-Supervised Question Reformulation for Enhancing Conversational Machine Comprehension (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Existing question reformulation models are based on supervised question labels without considering feedback information from answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a question reformulation model that integrates conversational history information with reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more effective in conversational machine comprehension with reinforcement learning. |
APE: Argument Pair Extraction from Peer Review and Rebuttal via Multi-task Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Argument mining is an important research field that attracts growing attention in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to extract argument pairs from peer review and rebuttal . they use an open review platform to analyze the contents, structure and connections . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a dataset of 4,764 fully annotated review-rebuttal passage pairs . it is able to detect argumentative propositions and extract argument pairs from the corpus . |
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. |
An End-to-End Generative Architecture for Paraphrase Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating paraphrases with linguistic knowledge are often domain specific and hard to scale, or yield inferior results. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end conditional generative architecture for generating paraphrases via adversarial training which does not depend on extra linguistic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on automatic metrics and human evaluations on four public datasets. |
ISACL: Internal State Analyzer for Copyrighted Training Data Leakage (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods address leaks only after content is generated, which can lead to the exposure of sensitive information. |
| Approach: | They propose a proactive approach: examining LLMs’ internal states before text generation to detect potential leaks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures adherence to copyright and licensing requirements while enhancing data privacy and ethical standards. |
CREATOR: Tool Creation for Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasoning of Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in utilizing tools, but their ability is limited by API availability and the instability of implicit reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables LLMs to create their own tools using documentation and code realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing chain-of-thought, program-of thought, and tool-using baselines on MATH and TabMWP benchmarks. |