Papers by Dawei Liu

47 papers
PricingLogic: Evaluating LLMs Reasoning on Complex Tourism Pricing Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
What Does Your Smile Mean? Jointly Detecting Multi-Modal Sarcasm and Sentiment Using Quantum Probability (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to model multi-modal sarcasm and sentiment are based on quantum probability . sarcasm and feelings embody intrinsic uncertainty of human cognition .
Approach: They propose a quantum probability-driven multi-task learning framework for sarcasm and sentiment recognition using quantum superpositions and quantum interference.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal sarcasm and sentiment recognition.
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning.
Approach: They propose a method that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE.
Hierarchical Memory Organization for Wikipedia Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating Wikipedia articles do not utilize memory directly for outline generation.
Approach: They propose a method to generate Wikipedia articles autonomously by leveraging a hierarchical memory architecture.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in producing informative and reliable articles.
Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks that use large language models as referees are insufficient for accurately assessing their alignment with human intent.
Approach: They propose a calibration framework to address positional bias in large language models as evaluators by manually annotating the “win/tie/lose” outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicun A Benchmark’s question prompt.
Outcome: The proposed framework alleviates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments.
CoRanking: Collaborative Ranking with Small and Large Ranking Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Listwise ranking based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in Information Retrieval (IR) however, their effectiveness often depends on LLMs with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing, leading to substantial efficiency bottlenecks.
Approach: They propose a Collaborative Ranking framework (CoRanking) for LLM-based listwise ranking based on large language models with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces ranking latency by approximately 70% while improving effectiveness compared to the standalone large reranker.
WIKIGENBENCH:Exploring Full-length Wikipedia Generation under Real-World Scenario (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing efforts to generate Wikipedia articles for new events fall short of real-world application.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to generate Wikipedia articles for new events under real-world scenarios . they use systematic metrics and LLM-based metrics to assess verifiability, organization, and other aspects aligned with real-life scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that hierarchical-based methods generate more comprehensive content while fine-tuned methods achieve better verifiability.
DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer’s Disease Questions with Scientific Literature (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models have achieved promising performances across various applications, but the challenge of integrating long-tail knowledge continues to impede the seamless adoption of LLMs in specialized domains.
Approach: They propose a dynamic co-augmentation framework for the refinement of large language models and knowledge graphs in the context of Alzheimer's Disease.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be used to study Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using LLMs and KGs.
How Speculative Can Speculative Decoding Be? (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have a largely increased latency due to their ability to autoregressively model . speculative decoding is a technique that trades generation quality for speed .
Approach: They propose to use a draft model to draft tokens autoregressively and then verify them in parallel.
Outcome: The proposed model could draft tokens autoregressively and then verify them in parallel . the proposed model trades quality for speed and could fail in verification stage .
MasRouter: Learning to Route LLMs for Multi-Agent Systems (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to push the boundaries of LLM capabilities, yet they often face significant costs and challenges in dynamic LLM selection.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent system routing solution that integrates all components of MAS into a unified routing framework.
Outcome: The proposed solution is high-performing, cost-effective, and efficient . it reduces overhead by up to 52.07 compared to current methods on HumanEval .
MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for query expansion lack corpus-specific knowledge and cost.
Approach: They propose a query-query-document generation method that leverages large language models for mutual verification to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents.
Outcome: The proposed method is fully zero-shot and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods.
RACQC: Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chinese Query Correction (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across many tasks, but face critical challenges in the CSC scenario: (1) poor generalization to rare entities in open-domain searches; and (2) failure to adapt to temporal entity variations due to static parameters, resulting in serious over-correction issues.
Approach: They propose a Chinese Spelling Check system with RAG and multi-task learning that integrates dynamic knowledge retrieval and entity-centric RAG to address rare entities.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms existing baselines in the CSC task and achieves a maximum improvement of +9.92% on the search scenario benchmark and +3.2% on the general-domain dataset.
ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing rerankers perform poorly in complex ranking scenarios due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data.
Approach: They propose an automated reasoning-intensive training framework which generates high-quality training labels from training queries and passages.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker.
HyperEdit: Unlocking Instruction-based Text Editing in LLMs via Hypernetworks (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches treat instruction-based text editing as a generic text generation problem. Existing methods either over-edit or fail to apply modifications consistently.
Approach: They propose a framework that processes each editing request to best align with it.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 9% improvement over the state-of-the-art model.
MARS-RA: Rank Aggregation for Credit Assignment via Multimodal Comparisons in Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Embodied AI systems are open, where agents may leave or enter mid-task due to hardware failures or task-related errors.
Approach: They propose a framework that reformulates credit assignment as a rank aggregation problem using contribution-based pairwise comparisons among agents generated by large multimodal models.
Outcome: The proposed framework can guide agents toward effective cooperation in complex tasks of different types.
More Tokens, Lower Precision: Towards the Optimal Token-Precision Trade-off in KV Cache Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: storing more tokens in the KV cache at lower precision can enhance the long-context performance of large language models.
Approach: They propose a token-precision trade-off strategy to optimize KV cache compression . they also propose storing more tokens in the KV at lower precision .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves an optimal point within the Information Bottleneck compared to standalone KV pruning or KV quantization.
InfoCL: Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Text Classification from An Information Theoretic Perspective (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent studies have identified the severe performance decrease on analogous classes as a key factor for catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a replay-based continual text classification method that uses fast-slow and current-past contrastive learning to perform mutual information maximization and better recover previously learned representations.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three text classification tasks.
TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on large language models (LLMs) focus on basic plan validity, but neglect critical aspects such as route efficiency, POI appeal, and real-time adaptability.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for retrieval-augmented, spatiotemporal-aware travel planning that integrates retrieved trajectories with LLMs’ intrinsic reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves spatial efficiency and POI rationality while challenging universality and robustness due to conflicting references and noisy data.
ToolPRMBench: Evaluating and Advancing Process Reward Models for Tool-using Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Reward-guided search methods have shown potential in enhancing tool-using agents . however, there is a lack of reliable evaluation benchmarks for PRMs in tool-use settings .
Approach: They propose a large-scale benchmark specifically designed to evaluate PRMs for tool-using agents.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark shows that tool reward models perform better in tool-using environments.
Knowledge Diffusion for Neural Dialogue Generation (P18-1)

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Challenge: End-to-end neural dialogue generation does not employ knowledge to guide the generation.
Approach: They propose a neural knowledge diffusion model to introduce knowledge into dialogue generation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a real-world dataset.
CausalEval: Towards Better Causal Reasoning in Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have been used for a variety of tasks, including problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of the world.
Approach: They propose a review of existing methods aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning . they categorize existing methods as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional methods .
Outcome: The proposed methods perform better than existing methods on a range of tasks.
EvoNarrator: Modeling Scientific Evolution for Feasible Hypothesis Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Scientific discovery evolution does not occur ex nihilo but is characterized by structural deepening and reconfiguration of existing functionalities.
Approach: They propose a framework for hypothesis generation based on evolutionary narratives . they extract structured P-M-L-F quadruples from citation networks and introduce a mechanism to assess their semantic compatibility.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces logical disconnects by evaluating its semantic compatibility.
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately.
Approach: They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks.
Outcome: The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks.
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG.
Approach: They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern.
Outcome: The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data.
ViFT: Towards Visual Instruction-Free Fine-tuning for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Visual instruction tuning is the predominant technology in eliciting multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models.
Approach: They propose a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for large vision-language models . they require only text-only instructions and image caption data during training .
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on visual instruction tuning, but requires images as input . it can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several downstream benchmarks with less training data.
Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing retrievers for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) rely on similarity-based retrievers, but similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented-generation retriever that integrates reasoning with retrieval . they use local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility .
Outcome: The proposed retriever outperforms existing retrievers on QA benchmarks on seven single-hop and multi-hop searches.
Tracing the Light of Thought: A Probabilistic Self- and Cross-Consistency Verification Mechanism Improving Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating reasoning paths are not efficient, but they are prone to errors.
Approach: They propose a probabilistic self- and cross-consistency framework for mathematical reasoning that employs an accept-reject mechanism to encourage high-quality reasoning paths.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on 9 LLMs across 4 challenging benchmarks.
Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning from large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a data distribution lens to understand when and why CoT reasoning fails . they propose 'data-based' training that trains LLMs from scratch .
Outcome: The proposed model enables models to generate reasoning trajectories that approximate those observed during training.
Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graph completion models lack textual information, which limits their performance . a plug-in-and-play approach is needed to train small models in descriptive context .
Approach: They propose a plug-in-and-play approach to knowledge graph completion that prompts LLMs to generate descriptive context.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance on Wikipedia articles and synset definitions.
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for listwise passage ranking use sliding window approach, which is inefficient as it requires repetitive and serialized processing.
Approach: They propose a listwise label construction approach and importance-aware learning objective for full ranking.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in listwise ranking tasks.
Beyond Literal Mapping: Benchmarking and Improving Non-Literal Translation Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced machine translation (MT) a meta-evaluation dataset focused on non-literal translations is lacking . experimental results show the inaccuracies of traditional MT metrics and the limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge.
Approach: They propose a meta-evaluation framework that leverages sub-agents to evaluate machine translation metrics.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on the knowledge cutoff and score inconsistency problem.
A Robust Semantics-based Watermark for Large Language Model against Paraphrasing (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to detect LLM-generated content use simple hashes of precedent tokens to partition vocabulary.
Approach: They propose a semantics-based watermark framework to enhance the robustness against paraphrase.
Outcome: The proposed framework is robust under different paraphrases and the semantic meaning of the sentences will be likely preserved under paraphrase.
SDAR-VL: Stable and Efficient Block-wise Diffusion for Vision-Language Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing block-wise discrete diffusion models lack robust autoregressive (AR) decoders.
Approach: They propose a block-wise discrete diffusion framework for large-scale vision-language understanding with a progressive beta noise curriculum.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves training efficiency, convergence stability, and task performance over conventional block diffusion.
Minimal Distillation Schedule for Extreme Language Model Compression (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for teacher assistant-based distillation require multiple trials to find the optimal teacher assistant.
Approach: They propose a method that allows scheduling of an optimal teacher assistant in just one trial . they show that student performance is positively correlated with the scale-performance tradeoff .
Outcome: The proposed method can select the optimal teacher assistant in just one trial . it can be used to compare performance of student and teacher assistants on GLUE benchmarks.
Lifting the Curse of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that pretrained language models require a tremendous amount of inference compute to perform.
Approach: They propose to compress pretrained language models to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm to fill the capacity gap.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with competitive baselines.
The Butterfly Effect of Model Editing: Few Edits Can Trigger Large Language Models Collapse (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Even a single edit can trigger model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks.
Approach: They propose to use perplexity as a surrogate metric to determine whether an edited model's performance is affected by a single edit.
Outcome: The proposed method shows that even a single edit can cause model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks.
Do Emergent Abilities Exist in Quantized Large Language Models: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) require significant computational resources for deployment and use.
Approach: They propose to use low-bit quantization methods to reduce memory footprint and increase inference rate to improve performance of Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed methods can reduce the memory footprint and increase the inference rate of LLMs.
LLMs as World Models: Data-Driven and Human-Centered Pre-Event Simulation for Disaster Impact Assessment (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promise in simulating complex scenarios.
Approach: They examine multiple LLMs to proactively estimate perceived earthquake impacts using multimodal datasets and multimodal imagery.
Outcome: The framework generates Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) predictions at zip code and county scales using multimodal datasets.
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art.
Approach: They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data.
Outcome: The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art.
Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users’ interactions.
Approach: They propose a goal-adaptive supervised fine-tuning framework that generates proactive guidance for users to click for the next turn of the conversation.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 86.10% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95% over baseline) and 25.28% CTR in online deployment (149.06% relative improvement).
LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play LLM model that embeds a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module.
Outcome: Experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches.
Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing surveys focus on LLMs' specific utility for data annotation and synthesis.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to generate annotations from raw data . they also propose to review learning strategies for models utilizing LLM-generated annotations .
Outcome: The proposed models can be used to improve the efficacy of machine learning models by generating and labeling raw data with relevant information.
Diversity and Consistency: Exploring Visual Question-Answer Pair Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing tasks to generate question-answer pairs from visual images are under-explored.
Approach: They propose a task that targets question-answer pair generation from visual images.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate diverse or consistent QAPs on two benchmarks.
MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making them insufficient for evaluating the latest IR models.
Approach: They propose a multi-task instruction-tuned IR benchmark that includes 126 distinct IR tasks across 6 domains.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better on instruction-tuned models than non-instruction-tunned models on MAIR.
Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on large language models for document utility annotations have shown that they improve retrieval performance and RAG outcomes compared to models trained on human annotations.
Approach: They propose a model that maximizes their summed marginal likelihood to annotate document utility on multiple positive samples per query.
Outcome: The proposed model maximizes the marginal likelihood of multiple positive samples per query.

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