Papers by Cong Zhang

Reasoning in a Combinatorial and Constrained World: Benchmarking LLMs on Natural-Language Combinatorial Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Xia et al., 2018) demonstrate that a large language model can generate and maintain high-quality code documentation.
Approach:	They propose a large language model powered open-source framework for generating, maintaining, and updating code documentation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework generates high-quality documentation for the entire project.

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Xia Jiang, Jing Chen, Cong Zhang, Jie Gao, Chengpeng Hu, Chenhao Zhang, Yaoxin Wu, Yingqian Zhang

A Survey on LLMs for Story Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	NLCO evaluates large language models for combinatorial optimization (CO) . existing evaluations emphasize relatively simple reasoning competencies .
Approach:	They propose a combinatorial optimization benchmark that evaluates large language models on CO reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed model can handle combinatorial optimization without writing code or calling external solvers.

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Maria Teleki, Vedangi Bengali, Xiangjue Dong, Sai Tejas Janjur, Haoran Liu, Tian Liu, Cong Wang, Ting Liu, Yin Zhang, Frank Shipman, James Caverlee

Text Generation

Challenge:	Methods for story generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) have come into the spotlight recently.
Approach:	They propose a novel taxonomy of LLMs for story generation consisting of two major paradigms: independent story generation by an LLM, and author-assistance for story creation .
Outcome:	The proposed taxonomy compares existing work on the topic with those of novel author-assistance models.

Bootstrapping meaning through listening: Unsupervised learning of spoken sentence embeddings (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Jian Zhu, Zuoyu Tian, Yadong Liu, Cong Zhang, Chia-Wen Lo

Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	a new study addresses the challenge of learning semantic representations from speech signals . speech-based semantic representation can be used for speech mining and spoken language understanding .
Approach:	They propose a multimodal sequential autoencoder that converts speech signals into hidden units . they propose s-HuBERT to induce meaning through knowledge distillation .
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves a moderate correlation with human judgments without labels or transcriptions.

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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

DisCal: Distribution-Aware Calibration for Mathematical Reasoning Under Character-Level Noisy Inputs (2026.acl-long)

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.

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Bo Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Cong Gao, Bingxu Han, Minghao Hu, Jun Zhang, Yunbo Cao, Zhunchen Luo, Wen Yao, Guotong Geng, Zhong Wang

AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)

Challenge:	Existing methods for calibration of large reasoning models (LRMs) focus on clean inputs, leaving noise unexplored.
Approach:	They propose a confidence calibration framework for character-level noisy inputs that extracts uncertainty signals from both the empirical answer distribution and the model’s predictive distribution and integrates them via a learned calibrator.
Outcome:	Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that DisCal outperforms existing calibration methods under noisy inputs, reducing expected calibration error (ECE) by up to 39.21% and improving Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) by 31.44%.

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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Two Streams, One Sarcasm: Orthogonal Expert Tuning for Holistic Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs.
Approach:	They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction.
Outcome:	The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI.

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Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Pin Xu, Cheng Hu, Zhicheng Zhang, Yu Liu, Yanbing Liu

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for multimodal satirical cognition hinder evaluation of multimodal Sarcasm Understanding . lack of a unified benchmark for holistic satire cognition hampers evaluation of MSU .
Approach:	They propose a framework to decouple experts into orthogonal shared perception and private execution streams to physically block gradient interference between tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves superior performance on DocMSU-PLUS.

CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)

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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan

Challenge:	Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages .
Approach:	They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models .
Outcome:	The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English .

Towards Provably Secure Generative AI: Reliable Consensus Sampling (2026.findings-acl)

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Yu Cui, Hang Fu, Sicheng Pan, Zhuoyu Sun, Yifei Liu, Yuhong Nie, Bo Ran, Baohan Huang, Xufeng Zhang, Haibin Zhang, Cong Zuo, Licheng Wang

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing research on generative AI security is driven by mutually reinforcing attack and defense methodologies grounded in empirical experience.
Approach:	They propose a new algorithm that uses a random sampling algorithm to control risk.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm improves robustness and utility while maintaining latency comparable to existing algorithms.

Enhancing Chinese Pre-trained Language Model via Heterogeneous Linguistics Graph (2022.acl-long)

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Yanzeng Li, Jiangxia Cao, Xin Cong, Zhenyu Zhang, Bowen Yu, Hongsong Zhu, Tingwen Liu

SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that pre-trained Chinese language models ignore linguistics knowledge to learn representations.
Approach:	They propose a task-free enhancement module to integrate linguistics knowledge into Chinese pre-trained language models.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves Chinese pre-trained language models on 6 tasks with 10 benchmark datasets.

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Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Zhanxin Hao, Ye He, Zekun Li, Jiangyi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Huiqin Liu, Yu Zhang, Juanzi Li

Challenge:	Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent .

ZeroAE: Pre-trained Language Model based Autoencoder for Transductive Zero-shot Text Classification (2023.findings-acl)

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Kaihao Guo, Hang Yu, Cong Liao, Jianguo Li, Haipeng Zhang

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for text classification use only encoders or decoders that do not allow for the use of labels in unseen domains.
Approach:	They propose an autoencoder that encodes text into two disentangled spaces and decodes it to generate text with labels in the unseen domains.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the existing methods in label-partially-unseen and label-fully-un-seeen scenarios and even outperfects the SOTA methods.

ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)

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Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo

VortexPIA: Indirect Prompt Injection Attack against LLMs for Efficient Extraction of User Privacy (2026.findings-eacl)

Challenge:	Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task.
Approach:	They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5.
Outcome:	The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers.

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Yu Cui, Sicheng Pan, Yifei Liu, Haibin Zhang, Cong Zuo

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed in Conversational AIs . however, the methods proposed in the study rely on a white-box setting .
Approach:	They propose an indirect prompt injection attack that induces privacy extraction in LLMs . they use token-efficient data containing false memories to inject LLM data .
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)

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Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing LLM-based agents have strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor.
Approach:	They propose a reward-based generalizable reward model to guide the policy model for effective test-time search.
Outcome:	The proposed agentRM outperforms existing agents on held-in tasks by 8.8 points on average.

Improving Multilingual Sign Language Translation with Automatically Clustered Language Family Information (2025.coling-main)

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Ruiquan Zhang, Cong Hu, Pei Yu, Yidong Chen

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Recent research has focused on bilingual translation models, but multilingual sign language translation presents unique challenges due to the diversity of sign languages across nations.
Approach:	They propose a method that leverages sign language families to improve MSLT performance.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can achieve balance between translation accuracy and computational cost by regulating the number of language families.

Document Image Machine Translation with Dynamic Multi-pre-trained Models Assembling (2024.naacl-long)

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Yupu Liang, Yaping Zhang, Cong Ma, Zhiyang Zhang, Yang Zhao, Lu Xiang, Chengqing Zong, Yu Zhou

Adaptive Simultaneous Sign Language Translation with Confident Translation Length Estimation (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing TIMT tasks focus on text-line-level images.
Approach:	They propose to extend the existing TIMT task and introduce a new framework to translate a source document image to markdown-formatted target translation.
Outcome:	The proposed task aims to translate a source document image with long context and complex layout structure to markdown-formatted target translation.

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Tong Sun, Biao Fu, Cong Hu, Liang Zhang, Ruiquan Zhang, Xiaodong Shi, Jinsong Su, Yidong Chen

Distance between Relevant Information Pieces Causes Bias in Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing non-simultaneous sign language translation methods suffer from inherent inference delays in real-time scenarios.
Approach:	They propose an adaptive policy for simultaneous sign language translation that progressively converts incrementally received sign video into its corresponding natural sentence.
Outcome:	The proposed policy excels in situations requiring extremely low latency.

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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.

MC-indexing: Effective Long Document Retrieval via Multi-view Content-aware Indexing (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Kuicai Dong, Derrick Goh Xin Deik, Yi Lee, Hao Zhang, Xiangyang Li, Cong Zhang, Yong Liu

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing methods for document question answering do not consider content structures, resulting chunks exclude vital information or include irrelevant content.
Approach:	They propose a method that segments document into content chunks and represents each content chunk in raw-text, keywords, and summary views.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves recall of long document question answering datasets compared to state-of-the-art chunking schemes.

Can Reasoning Path still be Effective as Input? Bridging Post-Reasoning to Chain-of-Thought Compression (2026.acl-long)

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Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing work on reducing CoT generation in reasoning impairs the necessary information for deriving the correct answer.
Approach:	They propose a reasoning paradigm that takes CoT as a part of context to simplify the reasoning task for Large Language Models (LLMs).
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces the generation length of LLMs, but its effectiveness hinges on the efficiency and reliability of the contextual CoT generation.

CCIM: Cross-modal Cross-lingual Interactive Image Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Cong Ma, Yaping Zhang, Mei Tu, Yang Zhao, Yu Zhou, Chengqing Zong

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Existing research on text image machine translation (TIMT) lacks recognized source language information resulting in a decrease in translation performance.
Approach:	They propose a cross-modal cross-lingual interactive model which incorporates source language information by synchronizing source and target language results.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms end-to-end models and has faster decoding speed with smaller model size than cascade models.

Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Yaxi Lu, Haolun Li, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Fangming Liu, Maosong Sun

Adaptive Tool Use in Large Language Models with Meta-Cognition Trigger (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models have facilitated the development of intelligent applications like automatic web search (Qin et al., 2023) Several methods exist for generating JSON strings from LLMs, including Prompting but often miss certain schemas.
Approach:	They propose to use 40K different JSON schemas to assess models' ability to generate valid JSON outputs.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves both in generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks.

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Wenjun Li, Dexun Li, Kuicai Dong, Cong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu

SafeConf: A Confidence-Calibrated Safety Self-Evaluation Method for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing research expands the tool arrays of large language models (LLMs), but the necessity of using these tools is often overlooked, leading to indiscriminate tool invocation.
Approach:	They propose a meta-cognition proxy proxy for LLMs self-assessment of their capabilities, reflecting the model’s awareness of its own limitations.
Outcome:	The proposed strategy is fine-tuned-free and costs minimal.

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Bo Zhang, Cong Gao, Linkang Yang, Bingxu Han, Minghao Hu, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng, Xiaoying Bai, Jun Zhang, Wen Yao, Zhong Wang

Born a BabyNet with Hierarchical Parental Supervision for End-to-End Text Image Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have many advantages but they also pose significant safety risks.
Approach:	They propose a method to enhance the safety self-evaluation capability of LLMs . they perform semantic mutations on the original safety evaluation questions .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves safety self-evaluation accuracy by 5.86% and 7.79% over baseline methods on Chinese and English datasets.

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Cong Ma, Yaping Zhang, Zhiyang Zhang, Yupu Liang, Yang Zhao, Yu Zhou, Chengqing Zong

Revisiting Representation Degeneration Problem in Language Modeling (2020.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing research on text image machine translation (TIMT) is divided into two types: Cascade methods combine text image recognition and MT models to recognize source language text images.
Approach:	They propose a method which is optimized with hierarchical parental supervision to improve translation performance.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on synthetic and real-world tests on both synthetic and realistic images.

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Zhong Zhang, Chongming Gao, Cong Xu, Rui Miao, Qinli Yang, Junming Shao

From Informal to Formal – Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Language modeling is a fundamental task in natural language processing, applications include machine translation, image captioning and speech recognition.
Approach:	They propose a cosine regularization method to solve the representation degeneration problem by analyzing the limitations of the proposed method and then propose an alternative regularization technique to tackle the problem.
Outcome:	The proposed method is effective in language modeling and image captioning.

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Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Meiziniu Li, Haoyang Ma, Haokun Li, Mengda He, Cheng Wen, Le Sun, Hongyu Zhang, Shengchao Qin, Shing-Chi Cheung, Cong Tian

StyleDubber: Towards Multi-Scale Style Learning for Movie Dubbing (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent studies in formal mathematical reasoning have shown an unstoppable growth trend.
Approach:	They constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five mainstream formal specification languages and evaluated them against ten open-sourced LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed model compared instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages and found that the LLMs were good at writing proof segments when given either the code, or the detailed description of proof steps.

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Gaoxiang Cong, Yuankai Qi, Liang Li, Amin Beheshti, Zhedong Zhang, Anton Hengel, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Chenggang Yan, Qingming Huang

Dynamic Evil Score-Guided Decoding: An Efficient Decoding Framework For Red-Team Model (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for movie dubbing break phonemes in scripts, resulting in incomplete phoneme pronunciation and poor identity stability.
Approach:	They propose a method that switches dubbing learning from frame level to phoneme level . it uses a multimodal style adaptor to learn pronunciation style from audio .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves on two benchmarks, V2C and Grid, and is available on github.

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Cong Gao, Bo Zhang, Linkang Yang, Minghao Hu, Zhunchen Luo, Xiaoying Bai, Guotong Geng, Jun Zhang, Yunhua Xue

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing red-teaming methods require expensive fine-tuning, especially for large LLMs.
Approach:	They propose a red-teaming method that uses an ‘evil score’ to evaluate the potential of tokens to contribute to harmful outputs during decoding.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves an ASR of 92.83% on the Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct model, compared to 83.48% with adversarial fine-tuning while using less computational resources.

RoDEval: A Robust Word Sense Disambiguation Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Luyang Zhang, Shuaimin Li, Yishuo Li, Kunpeng Kang, Kaiyuan Zhang, Cong Wang, Wenpeng Lu

Continual Named Entity Recognition without Catastrophic Forgetting (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing studies rely on single-task evaluations and classification-based metrics that overlook the fundamental differences between generative LLMs and traditional classification models.
Approach:	They propose to use four new metrics to evaluate LLM-based word sense disambiguation (WSD) . experimental results reveal significant limitations in LLMs' WSD performance .
Outcome:	The proposed evaluation framework is open-source at https://github.com/DayDream405/RoDEval.

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Duzhen Zhang, Wei Cong, Jiahua Dong, Yahan Yu, Xiuyi Chen, Yonggang Zhang, Zhen Fang

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is a burgeoning area of research . a new paradigm has ushered NER into a non-entity type at the current step t .
Approach:	They propose a pooled feature distillation loss that skillfully navigates the trade-off between retaining knowledge of old entity types and acquiring new ones.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on ten CNER settings using three datasets.

ToolDNA: Autonomous Evolution of Tool Metadata for Robust Dialogue Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Qiuyuan Ai, Cong Wang, Jiaqi Zhang, Zengxin Han, Jie Song

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Task-oriented dialogue systems face labor-intensive manual metadata tuning and sparse reinforcement learning (RL) rewards that fail to diagnose invocation errors.
Approach:	They propose a framework that enables auto-evolution of policy networks and tool metadata via RL . a tool metadata loop coordinates metadata through policy-generated candidates during rollouts .
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves +11% problem resolution and +54% accuracy over commercial LLMs with prompt engineering and +25%/+35% over supervised fine-tuning.

See the Forest for the Trees: Loosely Speculative Decoding via Visual-Semantic Guidance for Efficient Inference of Video LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Yicheng Ji, Jun Zhang, Jinpeng Chen, Cong Wang, Lidan Shou, Gang Chen, Huan Li

Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for video understanding suffer from autoregressive generation of tokens.
Approach:	They propose a training-free loosely SD framework for Video-LLMs that uses visual-relevant tokens to accurately pinpoint the latter.
Outcome:	The proposed framework boosts the accepted length and speedup ratio by 136% and 35% compared to SOTA training-free SD methods for Video-LLMs.

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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

Free-MAD: Consensus-Free Multi-Agent Debate (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Yu Cui, Hang Fu, Haibin Zhang, Licheng Wang, Cong Zuo

Time-aware ReAct Agent for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Existing multi-agent debate methods rely on multiple rounds of interaction among agents to reach consensus, and the final output is decided by majority voting in the last round.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent debate framework that eliminates the need for consensus among agents and reconstructs the debate phase by introducing anti-conformity.
Outcome:	Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that Free-MAD significantly improves reasoning performance while requiring only a single-round debate and thus reducing token costs.

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QianyiHu QianyiHu, Xinhui Tu, Guo Cong, Shunping Zhang