Papers by Dong Chen
Exploiting domain-slot related keywords description for Few-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for dialogue state tracking with domain-slot-value labels are expensive . current models are limited due to high cost of data annotation and lack of data in some domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework based on domain-slot related description to tackle the challenge of few-shot cross-domain DST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on MultiWOZ and gains strong slot accuracy compared to existing models. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
Connect-the-Dots: Bridging Semantics between Words and Definitions via Aligning Word Sense Inventories (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised models struggle to make correct predictions on rare word senses due to limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a gloss alignment algorithm that can align definition sentences with the same meaning from different sense inventories to collect rich lexical knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on both frequent and rare word senses. |
Uncertainty Quantification for Clinical Outcome Predictions with (Large) Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) have significant potential for clinical prediction tasks . however, unreliable decisions can result in significant costs due to compromised patient safety and ethical concerns . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine ensembling and multi-tasking approaches to reduce uncertainty in EHRs by using multi-tapping methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces model uncertainty in white-box and black-box settings, and improves model transparency in both settings. |
X-Router: Decoupling Knowledge and Reasoning for Cost-Effective LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adaptive methods focus on a single axis, overlooking evidence need and reasoning depth are only partially correlated. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-axis routing framework that separates retrieval necessity from reasoning necessity under a user-defined cost–quality trade-off. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage and latency while improving answer quality over strong baselines. |
Convolutional Interaction Network for Natural Language Inference (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Attention-based neural models have achieved great success in natural language inference (NLI). |
| Approach: | They propose a general model to capture the interaction between two sentences, which can be an alternative to the attention mechanism for NLI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture complex interactions on three large datasets. |
EmoMM: Benchmarking and Steering MLLM for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Conflict and Missingness (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in MER, but their internal decision-making mechanisms under modality conflict and missingness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model that can detect and control modality conflicts and missing subsets by a lightweight mechanism that detects and controls modality conflict. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across settings, showing it can handle conflict and missing behaviors. |
Joint Representation Learning of Cross-lingual Words and Entities via Attentive Distant Supervision (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning word and entity representations in monolingual settings are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for joint representation learning of cross-lingual words and entities that captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-linguistic inferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-lingual inferences among knowledge bases and texts. |
SQLForge: Synthesizing Reliable and Diverse Data to Enhance Text-to-SQL Reasoning in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing closed-source LLMs have a performance gap in text-to-SQL reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a SQL-based approach to synthesize reliable data to enhance text-to-SQL reasoning in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the widely recognized Spider and BIRD benchmarks, significantly narrowing the performance gap with closed-source methods. |
FB-Bench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Responsiveness to Human Feedback (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on benchmarking LLMs in single-turn dialogues, neglecting the nuanced nature of human feedback within real-world usage scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained, multi-task benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ responsiveness to human feedback under real-world usage scenarios in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that human feedback can significantly impact LLMs’ responsiveness in real-world usage scenarios. |
SUPERB-SG: Enhanced Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark for Semantic and Generative Capabilities (2022.acl-long)
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Hsiang-Sheng Tsai, Heng-Jui Chang, Wen-Chin Huang, Zili Huang, Kushal Lakhotia, Shu-wen Yang, Shuyan Dong, Andy Liu, Cheng-I Lai, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Phil Hall, Hsuan-Jui Chen, Shang-Wen Li, Shinji Watanabe, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Hung-yi Lee
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for transfer learning are limited in speech research . authors show that pre-trained models transfer well across multiple tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate pre-trained models by increasing task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark increases task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB-SG. |
P-INT: A Path-based Interaction Model for Few-shot Knowledge Graph Completion (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode and match entity pairs have only a few observed reference entity pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that infers and leverages paths that can expressively encode the relation of two entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 11.2– 14.2% in terms of Hits@1. |
ActiView: Evaluating Active Perception Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Fuwen Luo, Yurui Dong, Yuanchi Zhang, Yuzhuang Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Peng Li, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs have not addressed active perception . a novel benchmark is proposed to evaluate active perception in ML models . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate active perception in Multimodal Large Language Models . they restrict the perceptual field of a model and require it to actively zoom or shift it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark focuses on a specialized form of Visual Question Answering (VQA) that eases and quantifies the evaluation yet challenging for existing MLLMs. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Neural Machine Translation with Multilingual Pretrained Encoders (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on improving cross-lingual transferability of NMT model is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages a multilingual pretrained encoder to improve cross-lingual transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms mBART and m2m-100 on a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer task. |
OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Iat Long Iong, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Chen, Hanyu Lai, Shuntian Yao, Pengbo Shen, Hao Yu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | OpenWebAgent integrates large language models and large multimodal models to improve web automation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate large language models and large multimodal models into an open toolkit to optimize web automation. |
| Outcome: | The open toolkit integrates both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) it enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web. |
Manifold Learning-based Word Representation Refinement Incorporating Global and Local Information (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show word embedding models underestimate similarities between similar words and overestimate similarities between distant words. |
| Approach: | They propose two new word embedding methods that align original and re-fined embeddable spaces to a new refined semantic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art methods for word representation refinement. |
ExpertGenQA: Open-ended QA generation in Specialized Domains (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating high-quality question–answer (QA) pairs yield generic or shallow questions that fail to reflect the depth and structure of expert-written examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answer generation protocol that combines few-shot prompting with dual categorization by topic and question style to produce more diverse and cognitively meaningful QA pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol achieves twice the efficiency of standard few-shot methods while maintaining 94.4% topic coverage. |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the confidence calibration of LLMs have not explored the effects of different prompting strategies on LLM performance. |
| Approach: | They propose Fact-and-Reflection prompting which improves LLM confidence calibration . they propose to use human cognition to elicit known "facts" and ask model to "reflect" over them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers the expected calibration error by 23.5% on multi-purpose QA tasks. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
SelfRACG: Enabling LLMs to Self-Express and Retrieve for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qian Dong, Jia Chen, Qingyao Ai, Hongning Wang, Haitao Li, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented code generation methods fail to accurately fetch the knowledge required for code generation for consecutive code fragments. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables large language models to Self-express their information needs to enhance retrieval-augmented code generation methods. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SelfRACG can retrieve external knowledge that better aligns with the LLM’s own information needs, resulting in superior generation performance compared to vanilla RACG. |
LearnAlign: Data Selection for LLM Reinforcement Learning with Improved Gradient Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Shipeng Li, Zhiqin Yang, Shikun Li, Xiaobo Xia, Hengyu Liu, Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Dong Fang, Ying Tai, Zhe Peng
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a key technique for enhancing LLMs’ reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-alignment-based method which intelligently selects the learnable and representative training reasoning data for RLVR post-training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly reduces training data requirements while improving performance. |
Unsupervised Multi-scale Expressive Speaking Style Modeling with Hierarchical Context Information for Audiobook Speech Synthesis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has shown that expressiveness of audiobooks is limited by the averaged global-scale speaking style representation. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised multi-scale context-sensitive text-to-speech model for audiobooks . they use hierarchical context encoder to predict global-scale contextual style embeddings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a real-world Mandarin audio dataset. |
How do Words Contribute to Sentence Semantics? Revisiting Sentence Embeddings with a Perturbation Method (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on sentence representation learning focus on human annotation, but they neglect the critical property that essential contents should contribute to sentence semantics more than non-essential contents when encoding a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbation method for unsupervised semantic analysis that uses a sentence compression metric to adapt sentence compression datasets for automatic evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture the main semantics of sentences better than several SOTA unsupervised sentence embedding models. |
Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation ignore faithfulness between generated text and table . current methods ignore faithfulity, leading to generated information that goes beyond table content . |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based generation framework to enforce faithfulness between generated text and table . they propose metric to evaluate faithfulness and automatic metric for automatic generating . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in automatic evaluations and human evaluations. |
C-MORE: Pretraining to Answer Open-Domain Questions by Consulting Millions of References (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pretrain open-domain question answering systems lack task-specific annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain a two-stage open-domain question answering system with strong transfer capabilities by using a dictionary and a large-scale corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach leads to 2%-10% gains in top-20 accuracy and improves with reader. |
ReCreate: Reasoning and Creating Domain Agents Driven by Experience (2026.acl-long)
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Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jian Luo, Jianqing Zhang, Yuyan Zhou, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Hande Dong, Jiawei Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape, but tasks differ widely, making them labor-intensive to build. |
| Approach: | They propose an experience-driven framework for the automatic creation of domain agents . they leverage agent interaction histories to provide rich concrete signals on success or failure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms human-designed agents and existing methods in experiments across diverse domains. |
Out-of-Distribution Detection via LLM-Guided Outlier Generation for Text-attributed Graph (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are widely used in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to generate OOD-nodes with high quality . they also use LLMs to integrate existing nodes with LLM-generated edges . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on samples outside the In-Distribution (ID) data, but it is difficult to obtain high-quality OOD samples in the real world. |
Sub-Sentence Encoder: Contrastive Learning of Propositional Semantic Representations (2024.naacl-long)
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Sihao Chen, Hongming Zhang, Tong Chen, Ben Zhou, Wenhao Yu, Dian Yu, Baolin Peng, Hongwei Wang, Dan Roth, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Sentence embeddings are typically learned to recognize the semantic relation between two text inputs. |
| Approach: | They introduce a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to produce contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. |
Distributed LLM Serving on Consumer-Grade GPUs by Reconciling Computation and Communication (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lewei Jin, Kui Zhang, Yongqi Chen, null Zhuoyifan, Renjie Li, Yi Gao, Bowei Yang, Zhengong Cai, Wei Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models are reshaping internet services, and serving them is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient distributed LLM serving system that splits prefill and decode requests into smaller chunks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces TTFT, TPOT, and latency compared to the state-of-the-art system. |
Better Highlighting: Creating Sub-Sentence Summary Highlights (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarizations are considered to be less reliable because they distort the original meaning and can be confusing for readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate summary highlights that are understandable on their own to avoid confusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows summaries to be understood in context and avoids misdirecting readers to false conclusions. |
Global Structure Knowledge-Guided Relation Extraction Method for Visually-Rich Document (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Relation Extraction framework that generates relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from scanned images and incorporates global structural knowledge into the representations of the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in fine-tuning setting and yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Search for Optimization Problem Solving (2026.acl-long)
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Linlin Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Chen Zhao, Feng Chen, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Language model hallucinations and limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors and feasibility failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that automates optimization problems from natural language descriptions with efficiency and reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy and reduces token usage. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via Superposition Concept Discrimination (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify entities of target types with limited number of illustrative instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a superposition concept discriminator which solves the intrinsic generalization problem by an active learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves few-shot named entity recognition (FS-NER) with minimal additional efforts. |
Emphasising Structured Information: Integrating Abstract Meaning Representation into LLMs for Enhanced Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics struggle to evaluate adversarial negative examples . existing metrics struggle in handling adversarials, resulting in low correlations with human judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates AMR and domain-specific language models for automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework achieves strong correlations with human judgments across multiple datasets. |
PaperRegister: Boosting Flexible-grained Paper Search via Hierarchical Register Indexing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paper search systems lack detailed information to support finer-grained queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper-based index that transforms abstract-based corpus index into hierarchical index tree and offline can support paper search queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves the SOTA performance and excels in fine-grained scenarios. |
Z-LaVI: Zero-Shot Language Solver Fueled by Visual Imagination (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pretrained language models suffer from reporting bias, describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text. |
| Approach: | They propose to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities by recalling existing images and synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks. |
GenTranslate: Large Language Models are Generative Multilingual Speech and Machine Translators (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stepped forward the development of multilingual speech and machine translation by its reduced representation errors and incorporated external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative paradigm for translation tasks that integrates the diverse translation versions in N-best list. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on speech and machine translation benchmarks on various languages. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots with Deep Attention Matching Network (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for matching dialogue responses rely on semantic and functional dependencies . a recent study only uses the last utterance in context for matching a reply . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that matches a response with its multi-turn context using attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks. |
FAITH: Factuality Alignment through Integrating Trustworthiness and Honestness (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to correct factually inaccurate outputs are lacking the semantic richness needed to properly understand its internal states of trustworthiness and honesty. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for factuality alignment that integrates natural-language uncertainty signals with external knowledge and computes confidence scores and semantic entropy from LLM outputs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that FAITH improves the factual accuracy and truthfulness of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering in Disaster Management (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Chen, Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong, Chengkai Liu, Xiangpeng Li, Bo Li, Junwei Ma, Yiming Xiao, Ali Mostafavi, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for question answering (QA) are lacking in a high-stakes environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions . they propose 'keypoint-based evaluation protocol' emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose models such as MMLU-Pro. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling (2024.acl-long)
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Zekun Li, Zhiyu Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, Paul Crook
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for solving dialogue state tracking (DST) with large language models through function calling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. |
Revisiting Interpolation Augmentation for Speech-to-Text Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Jie Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qian Dong, Chunliang Zhang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Dapeng Man, Wu Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to speech-to-text generation tasks are limited by the lack of extensive labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use interpolation augmentation to construct virtual training samples by transforming inputs and labels to enhance generalization in other domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves performance across diverse tasks, architectures, and data scales, offering a promising avenue for more robust S2T systems in resource-constrained settings. |
Rectified Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Sun, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Yuqing Xia, Jian Chen, Yizhao Gao, Shijie Cao, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency but suffer from KV cache misalignment, resulting in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines block-sparse attention with periodic dense rectification to bound error accumulation and preserve alignment with the pretraining distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning, language modeling, and retrieval tasks show that ReSA achieves near-lossless generation quality with significantly improved efficiency. |
On the Human-level Performance of Visual Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Visual7W has been widely used in assessing multiple-choice visual question-answering systems. |
| Approach: | They replicated a human experiment on Visual7W to examine the human-level performance of VQA. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the better a model performs on Visual7W, the better it aligns with human-level intelligence. |
How Can Cross-lingual Knowledge Contribute Better to Fine-Grained Entity Typing? (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on multi-lingual datasets show that our method significantly outperforms multiple baselines and can robustly handle negative transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer semantic knowledge from rich-resourced languages to low-resource languages by using multilingual transfer learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and can handle negative transfer. |
Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Boxi Cao, Qiaoyu Tang, Hongyu Lin, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han, Jiawei Chen, Tianshu Wang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memory formation, but vanilla networks without pre-training suffer catastrophic forgetting problem. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments to investigate the retentive-forgetful contradiction between vanilla and pre-trained language models by controlling the target knowledge types, learning strategies and learning schedules. |
| Outcome: | The results show that pre-trained language models are forgetful and pre-training leads to retentive models . |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
InternLM-XComposer2.5-Reward: A Simple Yet Effective Multi-Modal Reward Model (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Cao, Ziyu Liu, Shengyuan Ding, Shenxi Wu, Yubo Ma, Haodong Duan, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Despite the promising performance of Large Vision Language Models, they sometimes generate incorrect outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal reward model that aligns LVLMs with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves excellent results on the latest multi-modal reward model benchmark and shows competitive performance on text-only reward model. |
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)
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Guanting Dong, Daichi Guo, Liwen Wang, Xuefeng Li, Zechen Wang, Chen Zeng, Keqing He, Jinzheng Zhao, Hao Lei, Xinyue Cui, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts. |
Type Enhanced BERT for Correcting NER Errors (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is the task of identifying spans that belong to particular categories, such as person, location, organization, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates named entity’s type information into BERT by an adapter layer and integrates it into a gazetteer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in multiple corpus. |
LLM-Enhanced Query Generation and Retrieval Preservation for Task-Oriented Dialogue (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge retrieval methods for task-oriented dialogues are limited by data scarcity and lack of data to annotate. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-enhanced model of query-guided knowledge retrieval for task-oriented dialogue . they propose to select the most relevant knowledge from retrieved top-K records and incorporate them as prompts to guide a generator in response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art in three benchmarks on three standard benchmarks. |
How Do Your Code LLMs perform? Empowering Code Instruction Tuning with Really Good Data (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yejie Wang, Keqing He, Dayuan Fu, Zhuoma GongQue, Heyang Xu, Yanxu Chen, Zhexu Wang, Yujia Fu, Guanting Dong, Muxi Diao, Jingang Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that code pre-trained models improve coding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a code data pruning strategy to identify which datasets are high-quality code instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance using fewer training data. |
Entailment Tree Explanations via Iterative Retrieval-Generation Reasoner (2022.findings-naacl)
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Danilo Neves Ribeiro, Shen Wang, Xiaofei Ma, Rui Dong, Xiaokai Wei, Henghui Zhu, Xinchi Chen, Peng Xu, Zhiheng Huang, Andrew Arnold, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved high performance on various natural language benchmarks, but the explainability of their output remains elusive. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture called iterative retrieval-generation reasoner that generates an entailment tree that explains a given hypothesis by using premises from C. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on premise retrieval and entailment tree generation with around 300% gain in overall correctness. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
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Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
SocialEval: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Yihan Shi, Xuanming Zhang, Leqi Lei, Yi Feng, Zexuan Xiong, Miao Yan, Xunzhi Wang, Yaru Cao, Jianing Yin, Shuai Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs does not address their social intelligence (SI) and their discrepancy with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based bilingual SI benchmark that integrates outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a script-based bilingual evaluation paradigm that integrates outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
Trajectory2Task: Training Robust Tool-Calling Agents with Synthesized Yet Verifiable Data for Complex User Intents (2026.acl-long)
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Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Yimeng Zhang, Pei Chen, Ziwei Dong, Jing Huang, Jiri Gesi, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Qun Liu, Yisi Sang, Hanqing Lu, Manling Li, Jin Lai, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows . but most studies on tool-callers focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-calling agent-based data pipeline that converts trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be used to study tool use under three scenarios. |
Many Heads Are Better Than One: Improved Scientific Idea Generation by A LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.acl-long)
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Haoyang Su, Renqi Chen, Shixiang Tang, Zhenfei Yin, Xinzhe Zheng, Jinzhe Li, Biqing Qi, Qi Wu, Hui Li, Wanli Ouyang, Philip Torr, Bowen Zhou, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent AI methods have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, but they fail to replicate the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual scientific system that mimics the collaborative nature of scientific research by organizing a team of agents to generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing new scientific ideas and offers valuable insights to guide future research. |
MemBench: Towards More Comprehensive Evaluation on the Memory of LLM-based Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the significance of memory mechanisms in LLM-based agents, which enable them to store observed information and adapt to dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset and benchmark to evaluate the memory capability of LLM-based agents from multiple aspects including their effectiveness, efficiency, and capacity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates factual memory and reflective memory as different levels, and proposes participation and observation as various interactive scenarios. |
XY-Tokenizer: Mitigating the Semantic-Acoustic Conflict in Low-Bitrate Speech Codecs (2026.acl-long)
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Yitian Gong, Luozhijie Jin, Kuangwei Chen, Dong Zhang, Ruifan Deng, Xiaogui Yang, Xin Zhang, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance these objectives at low bitrates . XY-Tokenizer achieves stronger semantic alignment than representative semantic-distillation codec . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-bitrate speech codec that aligns discrete speech representations with text while preserving fine-grained acoustic details for reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing low-bitrate speech codecs in speech understanding and generation tasks. |
Adversarial Attacks on Parts of Speech: An Empirical Study in Text-to-Image Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that text-to-image models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations . |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of adversarial attacks on different POS tags within text prompts on T2I models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is vulnerable to adversarial perturbations with noun perturbations in text prompts. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Han Weng, Puzhen Wu, Cui Longjie, Yi Zhan, Boyi Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Dun Zeng, Yingxiang Yang, Qianru Zhang, Dong Huang, Xiaoming Yin, Yang Sun, Xing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD. |
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang, Yue Chen, Ling Shi, Jiang Zhou, Junru Wu, Zhen Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Juesi Xiao, Tianyu Dong, Zhuowen Han, Zhuo Chen, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks. |
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang, Zhisong Zhang, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems are retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light . current systems lack compositional reasoning, a key component of deep research . |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator to shift agentic paradigm . they use Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge and Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Xiaoqian Liu, Xiaowen Liu, Qingxuan Sun, Yuhao Zhang, Murun Yang, Qianqian Dong, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) and non-autoregressive (NAR) generation are promising in language and speech processing for their advantages of less error propagation and low latency. |
| Approach: | They develop a model that uses connectionist temporal classification to predict the source and target texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average BLEU score of 29.5 with a speed-up of 5.67. |
From Language Modeling to Instruction Following: Understanding the Behavior Shift in LLMs after Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in aligning with user intentions. |
| Approach: | They develop local and global explanation methods and a feed-forward-based method for input-output attribution to investigate the impact of instruction tuning on user intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compares explanations from pre-trained and instruction-tuned models . it empowers LLMs to recognize the instruction parts of user prompts, it encourages response generation . |
Memory-Efficient Differentiable Transformer Architecture Search (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current neural architecture search methods suffer from huge computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible recursive backpropagation algorithm that uses the last layer to store the outputs of the network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms standard Transformers on three sequence-to-sequence datasets. |
SafeConv: Explaining and Correcting Conversational Unsafe Behavior (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets do not provide enough annotation to explain unsafe behavior . current chatbots generate toxic and offensive responses, which can be dangerous . |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset called SafeConv that provides comprehensive annotations for chatbots . they compare safe alternatives to rewrite unsafe responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can explain unsafe behavior and detoxify chatbots, the authors show . the proposed model is able to detect unsafe utterances, extract unsafe spans, and convert unsafe responses to safe versions. |
Representation Interventions Enable Lifelong Knowledge Memory Control in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Xuyuan Liu, Shengyu Chen, Xinshuai Dong, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Haoyu Wang, Yujun Yan, Haifeng Chen, Zhengzhang Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) produce outdated or inaccurate content. Updating their knowledge efficiently and accurately without costly retraining is a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and scalable method that treats knowledge control as interventions within the model’s representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves fine-grained control over complex, unstructured knowledge while maintaining general utility with frozen base weights. |
LongReD: Mitigating Short-Text Degradation of Long-Context Large Language Models via Restoration Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have extended context windows through scaling positional encodings and lightweight continual pre-training, but performance degradation is still not fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to reduce short-text performance degradation by minimizing distribution drift in hidden states and attention scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes the distribution discrepancy between the extended and original models while maintaining or even enhancing the model's long-context abilities. |
Knowledge Extraction on Semi-Structured Content: Does It Remain Relevant for Question Answering in the Era of LLMs? (2026.eacl-long)
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Kai Sun, Yin Huang, Srishti Mehra, Mohammad Kachuee, Xilun Chen, Renjie Tao, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Jessee, Nirav Shah, Alex L Betty, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on knowledge extraction for question answering questions whether it is still relevant for question answerrs. |
| Approach: | They extend an existing benchmark with knowledge extraction annotations and evaluate commercial and open-source LLMs of varying sizes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve high QA accuracy, but can still benefit from knowledge extraction through augmentation with extracted triples and multi-task learning. |
Learning from Diverse Reasoning Paths with Routing and Collaboration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) grows with model size and pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine quality filtering, conditional routing, and cooperative peer teaching to transfer knowledge from powerful teacher models to compact and transparent students. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that QR-Distill is superior to traditional methods. |
The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Dan Wang, Boxi Cao, Ning Bian, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Le Sun, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent studies have discovered notable disparities in their performance across different languages. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic investigation into the behaviors of large language models across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios and reveals a Linguistic Map correlates with the richness of available resources and linguistic family relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model demonstrates that there are significant disparities in performance across languages across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios. |
Multi-Document Summarization with Determinantal Point Processes and Contextualized Representations (D19-54)
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| Challenge: | Determinantal point processes (DPP) is one of the best performing techniques for extractive summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine determinantal point processes with surface indicators for effective identification of summary-worthy sentences. |
| Outcome: | The determinantal point processes (DPP) framework is one of the best performing in summarization competitions. |
Zemi: Learning Zero-Shot Semi-Parametric Language Models from Multiple Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing semi-parametric language models lack the capacity to perform zero-shot tasks . large language models have shown impressive zero-shoot ability, but huge model size costs . semi-parametric language model can be used to augment a smaller language model with retrieved background knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-parametric language model for zero-shot task generalization that augments a smaller language model with retrieved related background knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms T0-3B by 16% across seven diverse evaluation tasks while being 3.8x smaller in scale. |
AutoBreach: Universal and Adaptive Jailbreaking with Efficient Wordplay-Guided Optimization via Multi-LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak research exhibits limitations in universality, validity, and efficiency . Existing methods for jailbreaking LLMs have limited validity and effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box approach that uses wordplay-guided mapping rule sampling to create universal adversarial prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method efficiently identifies security vulnerabilities across various LLMs, achieving an average success rate of over 80% with fewer than 10 queries. |
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xukai Wang, Xuanbo Liu, Mingrui Chen, Haitian Zhong, Xuanlin Yang, Bohan Zeng, Jinbo Hu, Hao Liang, Junbo Niu, Xuchen Li, Ruitao Wu, Ruichuan An, Yang Shi, Liu Liu, Qiang Liu, Zhouchen Lin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Dong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models are limited in scope and lack flexibility to adapt difficulty according to evolving reasoning capacities of models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
READoc: A Unified Benchmark for Realistic Document Structured Extraction (2025.findings-acl)
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Zichao Li, Aizier Abulaiti, Yaojie Lu, Xuanang Chen, Jia Zheng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Document Structured Extraction (DSE) is a field of document structure analysis that aims to extract structured content from raw documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate document structured extraction systems by converting unstructured PDFs into semantically rich Markdown. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on 3,576 diverse and real-world documents from arXiv, GitHub, and Zenodo. |
Beyond Detection: Evaluating Fallacy Awareness of LLMs in Interactive Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models fail to recognize fallacious reasoning in real-world interactions despite strong performance on static fallacy detection tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark to assess fallacy awareness without explicit cues . they propose 'fate' evaluation framework that assesses fallacy without explicit . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses fallacy awareness without explicit cues, combining natural dialogue responses and reasoning-based decisions. |
YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model (2025.acl-long)
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Hu Yiwen, Huatong Song, Jie Chen, Jia Deng, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Zican Dong, Yang Lu, Xu Miao, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | prevailing pre-training approaches for large language models involve several complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-cost training recipe and a robust optimization approach to mitigate training instability . they also propose synthesis, curriculum, and data selection pipelines to integrate data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves top-tier performance among models with similar parameter scale . it is comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data . |
ET-Agent: Incentivizing Effective Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent via Behavior Calibration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing training frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on answers’ accuracy, overlooking specific alignment for behavior patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework for calibrating agent’s tool-use behavior through two synergistic perspectives: self-evolving data flywheel and behavior calibration training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy, efficiency, reasoning conciseness, and tool execution accuracy of large language models. |
Live-Aid: A Large-Scale Dialogue Dataset and Benchmark for Interleaved Multi-party Interactions in Live Streaming (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiming Lei, Yize Fan, Zeming Liu, Jiaji Dong, Hui Qiu, Haitao Leng, Qingjie Liu, Kehai Chen, Tingting Gao, Yunhong Wang
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models struggle with dynamic interactions due to the scarcity of high-quality interleaved data. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale interleaved live interaction Chinese dataset with human-annotated video responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to evaluate live interactions in Chinese over 1,100 hours and 80,037 dialogue turns. |
Controllable Natural Language Generation with Contrastive Prefixes (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on controllable natural language generation has focused on fine-tuning existing models or using attribute discriminators. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework for controllable GPT2 generation that utilizes attribute-specific vectors to steer natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can guide generation towards desired attributes while keeping high linguistic quality. |
VLMGuard-R1: Proactive Safety Alignment for VLMs via Reasoning-Driven Prompt Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | integrating vision and language models with safety standards is essential to mitigate multimodal complexity . integrating visual inputs with vision and text unveils subtle threats beyond the reach of conventional safeguards . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines vision and language to provide a multimodal reasoning-driven prompt rewriting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on five benchmarks with six VLMs. |
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets. |
MedDialog: Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets (2020.emnlp-main)
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Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Zeqian Ju, Yue Yang, Sicheng Wang, Ruisi Zhang, Meng Zhou, Jiaqi Zeng, Xiangyu Dong, Ruoyu Zhang, Hongchao Fang, Penghui Zhu, Shu Chen, Pengtao Xie
| Challenge: | telemedicine is a medical practice that provides patient care remotely using video conferencing tools. |
| Approach: | They build large-scale medical dialogue datasets to facilitate research . they pretrain several models on the Chinese MedDialog dataset and compare their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that models trained on MedDialog can generate doctor-like medical dialogues. |
Hybrid Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder Modeling for Speech-to-Text Tasks (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural based end-to-end frameworks have achieved remarkable success in speech-totext tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech- totext translation (ST). |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) for speech-to-text tasks and leverage AED's strength in non-monotonic sequence to sequence learning while retaining Transducers streaming property. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) on the MuST-C dataset and shows that it is not bound by any specific language model. |
LLM-Powered Test Case Generation for Detecting Bugs in Plausible Programs (2025.acl-long)
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Kaibo Liu, Zhenpeng Chen, Yiyang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Yudong Han, Yun Ma, Yihong Dong, Ge Li, Gang Huang
| Challenge: | TrickCatcher generates test cases that pass existing tests yet contain bugs . a recent study found that tricky bugs are not detected by test suites . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered approach to generating test cases for uncovering bugs in plausible programs . they use a PUT and specification to generate program variants, an input generator and an Llm to construct test inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves recall, precision, and F1 scores that are 1.80, 2.65, and 1.66 . trickCatcher generates program variants based on the program under test and its specification . |
Semantic Sentence Matching via Interacting Syntax Graphs (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research efforts have been devoted to the task of matching two natural language sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed syntactic structures into an embedding vector and combine them with other features to predict matching scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets and can interpret sentences in interpretable way. |
CalibraEval: Calibrating Prediction Distribution to Mitigate Selection Bias in LLMs-as-Judges (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations of large language models demonstrate that they improve performance in a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-free method for mitigating selection bias during inference by reformulating debiasing as an optimization task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates selection bias and improves performance compared to existing methods. |
PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health (2026.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Yu ji, Zhenyu Lv, Yang Yi, Yizhe Yang, Luyao Ji, Chaoyi Chen, Xianyang Wang, Tian Lan, Zhihua Wang, Juan Wang, Xunde Dong, Fuze Tian, Qunxi Dong, Bin Hu
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based training approaches lack faithful responses to clinical errors and explainable feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic virtual standardized patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture that embeds LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic and patient mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in faithfulness and pedagogical value. |
Sticker-TTS: Learn to Utilize Historical Experience with a Sticker-driven Test-Time Scaling Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models have exhibited strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, but current test-time scaling methods rely on redundant sampling and ignore historical experience utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time scaling framework that coordinates three collaborative LRMs to iteratively explore and refine solutions guided by historical attempts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses strong baselines on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including AIME-24, AIME-25, and OlymMATH. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
THE-X: Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference with Homomorphic Encryption (2022.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Chen, Hangbo Bao, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Haoyi Zhou, Jianxin Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | enabling pre-trained models inference on ciphertext data is difficult due to the complex computations in transformer blocks. |
| Approach: | They propose an approximation approach for transformers which enables inference on ciphertext data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can infer pre-trained models on encrypted data with negligible performance drop but enjoy theory-guaranteed privacy-preserving advantage. |
Improving Question Answering with External Knowledge (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | ARC-Easy, ARC Challenge, and OpenBookQA use Wikipedia to augment training data . performance degrades when additional instances exhibit higher difficulty than original training data. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods for exploiting external knowledge for QA in science . they enrich the original corpus with relevant text snippets from an open-domain resource . the second method simply increases the amount of training data by appending additional in-domain instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve gains in accuracy of 8.1%, 13.0%, and 12.8% on science QA tasks. |
Communication-Efficient Desire Alignment for Proactive Embodied Human–Agent Interaction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Effective real-world human–agent interactions are long-term and repeated. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulation that uses a proxy user with value-driven preferences and natural language behavior to evaluate how agents adapt to users across interactions and satisfy their desires. |
| Outcome: | HA-Desire, a home assistance simulation, shows that agents can adapt to user needs and provide proactive assistance within limited communication. |
Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on simple settings, but their reliability in complex tasks remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as judges to evaluate reliability in complex tasks . they use a challenge benchmark to expose and quantify Auxiliary Information Induced Biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exposes and quantifies Auxiliary Information Induced Biases across 12 basic and 3 advanced scenarios. |
Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains (2026.acl-long)
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Zhonghang Yuan, Zhefan Wang, Fang Hu, Zihong Chen, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jie Ying, Huanjun Kong, Songyang Zhang, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, but their applications on knowledge-intensive domains have not been explored due to the scarcity of high-quality verifiable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extends reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to knowledge-intensive domains through automated verififiability data synthesis while enabling verification of the LLM's reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework enhances the reasoning of large language models in knowledge-intensive domains without significantly compromising the model’s general capabilities. |
Large Language Model Agents in Finance: A Survey Bridging Research, Practice, and Real-World Deployment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Kunlin Zhang, Yilong Dai, Sanjian Zhang, Wanghao Ye, Sihan Chen, Zhi-Qi Cheng
| Challenge: | a systematic review of large language models (LLMs) is conducted to better align their capabilities with real-world demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a functional taxonomy mapping financial domains to tasks, datasets, and institutional constraints. they catalog over 30 financial benchmarks and 20 representative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model frameworks are bridging financial practice and LLM research. |
Improving Cross-task Generalization of Unified Table-to-text Models with Compositional Task Configurations (2023.findings-acl)
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Jifan Chen, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Rui Dong, Xinchi Chen, Patrick Ng, William Yang Wang, Zhiheng Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multitask learning typically use a dataset name as input prefix, which limits the effectiveness of multitask training. |
| Approach: | They propose compositional task configurations, a set of prompts prepended to the encoder to improve cross-task generalization of unified models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the UnifiedSKG baseline by noticeable margins in both in-domain and zero-shot settings. |
Multimodal Language Models See Better When They Look Shallower (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haoran Chen, Junyan Lin, Xinghao Chen, Yue Fan, Jianfeng Dong, Xin Jin, Hui Su, Jinlan Fu, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multimodal large language models extract visual features from the final layers of a pretrained Vision Transformer. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature fusion method that strategically incorporates shallower layers . they propose MLLMs that extract visual features from the final layers of a pretrained Vision Transformer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms deep layers on fine-grained visual tasks . it is the first comprehensive study of visual layer selection for MLLMs . |
EvoCoT: Overcoming the Exploration Bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) are limited by difficulty or lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving curriculum learning framework based on chain-of-thought reasoning optimization that constrains exploration space by self-generating and verifying CoT trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to solve previously unsolved problems without external supervision and is compatible with various RL fine-tuning methods. |
More Than Spoken Words: Nonverbal Message Extraction and Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on extracting NMs from small-scale well-structured corpora such as movie scripts wherein NM is enclosed in parentheses by scriptwriters, which greatly decreases the difficulty of extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract nonverbal messages (NMs) from written text and NMs from spoken text by using a semi-supervised learning algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The extracted NMs can generate more relevant, valid, and factually consistent NM than the purely supervised generator. |
Learning-by-Narrating: Narrative Pre-Training for Zero-Shot Dialogue Comprehension (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue comprehension are not available for the pre-training of such a model. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative-guided pre-training strategy that learns by narrating key information from a dialogue input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on four dialogue-based tasks and is comparable to existing models. |
Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis (2024.findings-naacl)
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Wenhao Zhu, Hongyi Liu, Qingxiu Dong, Jingjing Xu, Shujian Huang, Lingpeng Kong, Jiajun Chen, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual machine translation (MMT) However, the multilingual translation ability of LLMs remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They evaluate eight popular LLMs including ChatGPT and GPT-4 to determine their performance in multilingual machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate moderate translation even on zero-resource languages and cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task guidance for low-resourced translation than exemplar in the same language pairs. |
KERAG: Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Advanced Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely on semantic parsing to retrieve knowledge strictly necessary for answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-filtering-summarization pipeline that enhances QA coverage by retrieving a broader subgraph likely to contain relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art solutions by about 7% in quality and exceeds GPT-4o (Tool) by 10-21%. |
EffiQA: Efficient Question-Answering with Strategic Multi-Model Collaboration on Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)
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Zixuan Dong, Baoyun Peng, Yufei Wang, Jia Fu, Xiaodong Wang, Xin Zhou, Yongxue Shan, Kangchen Zhu, Weiguo Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that integrate LLMs and KGs either underutilize the reasoning abilities of LLM or suffer from prohibitive computational costs due to tight coupling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational auto-encoders have been used for text generation but their representation power is limited due to two reasons. |
| Approach: | They advocate sample-based representations of variational distributions for natural language . they further develop an LVM to directly match the aggregated posterior to the prior . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be viewed as a natural extension of VAEs with a regularization of maximizing mutual information, mitigating the "posterior collapse" issue. |
CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Xinnan Guo, Wentao Deng, Yongrui Chen, Yang Li, Mengdi Zhou, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Dong Yang, Liubin Wang, Yong Pan
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product features from unstructured text still suffer from problems . e-commerce platforms are focusing on multi-scale values, which can be confusing . |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training technique to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing token-level masking strategy and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks. |
XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a multi-lingual approach to training dialog systems is expensive and tedious, but it can be useful for cross-lingual support. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate data for multiple languages and train a multi-lingual dialog system for each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bypasses the expensive human annotation and achieves promising results. |
When Safety Alignment Fails to Generalize: Probing with Language Game Jailbreaks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods rely on fixed or narrow transformation schemes to generalize . existing methods based on fixed and narrow transformations are often inadequate . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for discovering and refining language game-based jailbreaks to probe alignment generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows controlled exploration of alignment behavior across closely related linguistic variants. |
Rethinking Table Pruning in TableQA: From Sequential Revisions to Gold Trajectory-Supervised Parallel Search (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Guo, Shenghao Ye, Shuangwu Chen, Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang, Bai Qirui, Dong Jin, Yunpeng Hou, Huasen He, null Jianyang, Xiaobin Tan
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods rely on sequential revisions and unreliable critique signals . Existing methods fail to detect the loss of answer-critical data . |
| Approach: | They propose a table pruning framework which transforms table pruning to gold trajectory-supervised parallel search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the strongest baseline pruning framework by 3.2% on various tabular reasoning tasks. |
Athena: Safe Autonomous Agents with Verbal Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety benchmarks on the ability of large language models to perform tasks are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages verbal contrastive learning to guide agents towards safety . they use past safe and unsafe trajectories as in-context examples to guide them towards safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages verbal contrastive learning to guide agents towards safety while performing tasks. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
Towards Abstractive Grounded Summarization of Podcast Transcripts (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Podcast summarization is of practical benefit to content providers and consumers . however, podcast summarizing faces significant challenges including factual inconsistencies . speech recognizers induce transcription errors and abstractive summarisation models may hallucinate . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate podcast summaries while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can produce an abstractive summary while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
FIRST: Teach A Reliable Large Language Model Through Efficient Trustworthy Distillation (2024.emnlp-main)
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KaShun Shum, Minrui Xu, Jianshu Zhang, Zixin Chen, Shizhe Diao, Hanze Dong, Jipeng Zhang, Muhammad Raza
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that a well-calibrated model is more reliable than a fine-tuned model due to “tuning-induced mis-calibration”. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which utilizes a small portion of teacher’s knowledge to obtain a reliable language model in a cost-efficient way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational burden by utilizing teacher's knowledge to obtain a reliable language model in a cost-efficient way. |
RAPID: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Long Text Generation with Writing Planning and Information Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge-intensive long texts struggle with issues like hallucinations, topic incoherence, and significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented long text generation framework with writing P**lanning and I**nformation to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a freshWiki-2024 dataset. |
V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun, Yida Xu, Yadong Xue, Ye Tian, Zhimin Bao, Lan Yang, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Deciphering oracle bone scripts using AI technology is not an overnight task due to the evolution of written language over millennia. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting Oracle Bone Script (OBS). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability. |
AHA: Aligning Large Audio-Language Models for Reasoning Hallucinations via Counterfactual Hard Negatives (2026.findings-acl)
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Yanxi Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Zhipeng Wang, Xin Li, Peijie Qiu, Hao Wang, Xuanzhao Dong, Yujian Xiong, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Yalin Wang
| Challenge: | Large Audio-Language Models suffer from hallucinations, e.g., generating text not grounded in the audio input. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to address hallucination problems in large audio-language models . they use a preference dataset to test the model's accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the latest SOTA methods in terms of performance and generalization. |
Language Model Analysis for Ontology Subsumption Inference (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on simple, triple-based, relational KBs but omit more sophisticated, logic-based conceptualised KB. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ontology subsumption axioms to probe LMs' knowledge of ontologies by probing datasets from atomic and complex concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods encode less background knowledge of Subsumption Inference (SI) than traditional Natural Language Inference but can improve on SI significantly when a small number of samples are given. |
Think Both Ways: Teacher-Student Bidirectional Reasoning Enhances MCQ Generation and Distractor Quality (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating high-quality MCQs struggle with contextual relevance and plausible distractors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates bidirectional reasoning perspectives to generate contextually relevant questions and plausible distractors while student reasoning evaluates question clarity and the misleading nature of distractors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in generating text-grounded questions and high-quality distractors for narrative contexts. |
Training Medical QA Models Based on Mixed Rewards from Multiple-Choice and Open-Ended Questions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models typically requires clear reward signals, which are often unavailable for open-ended (OE) questions where answer evaluation is ambiguous without scalable expert labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-data approach to training large language models with varying reward clarity . they combine Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) with OE questions for which they use simpler, potentially noisy rewards such as Jaccard similarity or LLM-based evaluators. |
| Outcome: | The mixed-data approach improves medical question-answering performance across model scales. |
Bridging Continuous and Discrete Spaces: Interpretable Sentence Representation Learning via Compositional Operations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn sentence embeddings do not capture the semantic similarity of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates compositional sentence operations into the embedding space and optimizes operator networks and a bottleneck encoder-decoder model to produce meaningful and interpretable sentence embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the interpretability of sentence embeddings on four textual generation tasks while maintaining strong performance on traditional semantic similarity tasks. |
DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Peijie Qiu, Xuanzhao Dong, Hao Wang, Haiyu Wu, Huayu Li, Aris Sotiras, Yalin Wang, Abolfazl Razi
| Challenge: | Existing methods for group-relative policy optimization rely on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on five math benchmarks with 7,000 samples and 55 cost. |
Improving Retrospective Language Agents via Joint Policy Gradient Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have sparked interest in creating autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly optimizes both task-planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves task planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
Perovskite-LLM: Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models for Perovskite Solar Cell Research (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiang Liu, Penglei Sun, Shuyan Chen, Longhan Zhang, Peijie Dong, Huajie You, Yongqi Zhang, Chang Yan, Xiaowen Chu, Tong-yi Zhang
| Challenge: | a rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells has led to an exponential growth in research publications. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced system for perovskite solar cells that integrates three key components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing models in domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks. |
Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing entity typing models are subject to spurious correlations due to shortcuts and biased training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to augment existing model biases by combining spurious correlations with debiasedcounterparts to improve generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization of different entity typing models on the original and debiased test sets. |
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Shiwan Zhao, Hao Chen, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Ruiqi Sun, Xin Zhou, Enzhi Wang, Xiaohang Dong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in natural language processing, driven by large language models such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for role-play prompting and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard zero-shot prompting approach across 12 reasoning benchmarks. |
Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entropy Change Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Haoyang Liu, Jian Luo, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Jiawei Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable reasoning capabilities in complex tasks such as mathematics and coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-modulation method that adaptively reweighs tokens based on theoretically-estimated entropic variations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in six mathematical reasoning and three coding benchmarks. |
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuan Xiao, Jiaming Wang, Yuchen Chen, Wei Song, Jun Sun, Shiqing Ma, Yanzhou Mu, Juan Zhai, Chunrong Fang, Jin Song Dong, Zhenyu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dataset poisoning require full-dataset poison, which breaks code compilability. |
| Approach: | They propose a functionality-preserving poisoning approach that injects short, compilable weak-use fragments into executed code paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method contaminates 10% of the dataset while maintaining 100% compilability and functional correctness. |
Salience Allocation as Guidance for Abstractive Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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Fei Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Hongming Zhang, Lifeng Jin, Sangwoo Cho, Wenlin Yao, Xiaoyang Wang, Muhao Chen, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models implicitly learn to capture the salient information from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses salience expectation to guide abstractive summarization by averaging salient content to a fixed threshold. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be easily adapted to documents with various abstractiveness and achieves high performance. |
Dense Retrieval as Indirect Supervision for Large-space Decision Making (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Dense Decision Retrieval (DDR) is a learning-to-retrieve task for discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks with large label spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to learning large-space discriminative NLU tasks as a learning-to-retrieve task by adopting a dual-encoder architecture that learns to predict by retrieving from a decision thesaurus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines greatly on multi-label classification tasks, 1.17% in F1 score ultra-fine entity typing, and 1.26% in accuracy on three few-shot intent classification tasks on average. |
ZPR2: Joint Zero Pronoun Recovery and Resolution using Multi-Task Learning and BERT (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Zero pronoun recovery and resolution aim at recovering the dropped pronounce and pointing out its anaphoric mentions. |
| Approach: | They propose to solve two tasks together to recover the dropped pronoun and point out its anaphoric mentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous state of the arts benchmarks on two benchmarks. |
Semi-Supervised Disfluency Detection (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Detecting disfluency can be difficult because of the flexible nature of reparandum structure and the lack of a nested structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised approach which extracts hidden features from self-attention without any Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or Convolutional Neural Net (CNN). |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves over baselines by using unlabelled data . identifying and removing non-fluent factors would help to improve spontaneous speech quality . |
Advancing Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models with Denoising Process Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for improving reasoning in diffusion language models rely on outcome-based rewards that provide no direct supervision over the denoising process. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides a process-level reinforcement signal over denoising trajectory of diffusion language models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed model improves reasoning stability, interpretability and overall performance. |
AdaPrompt: Adaptive Model Training for Prompt-based NLP (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based learning can tackle zero-shot and few-shot NLP tasks . authors propose a method that makes use of pre-trained language models . |
| Approach: | They propose to map NLP tasks into natural language prompts, which are then filled by pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard prompt-based methods in few-shot settings. |
Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are constrained by their fixed model capacities when the number of tasks grows in instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine all training tasks and apply fixed sampling weights without considering the importance of different tasks as the model training state changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used on knowledge & reasoning tasks and open-ended queries with limited training budget. |
Skills-in-Context: Unlocking Compositionality in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | eliciting compositional generalization capabilities in large language models is challenging for advanced LLMs because they lack foundational skills and compositional examples in the same prompt context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use compositional generalization capabilities in large language models to elicit compositional skills in a prompt context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure enables LLMs to tackle more challenging problems with as few as two exemplars and unlocks their latent potential. |
Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bohao Yang, Dong Liu, Chenghao Xiao, Kun Zhao, Chen Tang, Chao Li, Lin Yuan, Yang Guang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Qiwei Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Huaxiu Yao, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Xujiang Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over multi-step decision-making process and dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 20%. |
ProTOD: Proactive Task-oriented Dialogue System Based on Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialogue systems engage with users in a reactive manner, relying on a basic single-query mechanism and employing passive policy planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based proactive TOD framework to improve system proactivity and goal completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves system proactivity and goal completion rates by 10% while enhancing proactive engagement. |
Optimizing NLU Reranking Using Entity Resolution Signals in Multi-domain Dialog Systems (2021.naacl-industry)
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Tong Wang, Jiangning Chen, Mohsen Malmir, Shuyan Dong, Xin He, Han Wang, Chengwei Su, Yue Liu, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | In dialog systems, the Natural Language Understanding component makes the interpretation decision before the mentioned entities are resolved. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage Entity Resolution (ER) features in NLU reranking to learn model weights . they propose a score distribution matching method to ensure the models are calibrated . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model on multiple domain evaluations. |
SeedBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Seed Science (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Ying, Zihong Chen, Zhefan Wang, Wanli Jiang, Chenyang Wang, Zhonghang Yuan, Haoyang Su, Huanjun Kong, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, but its application in seed science remains limited due to a shortage of experts and limited availability of online resources. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 26 leading large language models and compare them against a set of benchmarks . they find that there is a gap between the power of LLMs and real-world seed science problems . |
| Outcome: | The new seed benchmark highlights the gap between the power of large language models and real-world seed science problems. |
Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Fangda Ye, Kuicai Dong, Xie Zhifei, Yuxin Hu, Yihang Yin, Shurui Huang, Shikai Dong, Chen Zhang, Jianzhu Bao, Shuicheng Yan
| Challenge: | Recent agentic search frameworks are text-centric, overlooking multimodal evidence . a pressing task is multimodal long-form generation, a new paper argues . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation. |
MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Fuxiao Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Jianshu Chen, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Yaser Yacoob, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing large language models have limited ability to perform tasks effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multimodal chart instruction dataset with 600k instances supporting diverse tasks and chart types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LMM achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing chart QA benchmarks. |
Rich Semantic Knowledge Enhanced Large Language Models for Few-shot Chinese Spell Checking (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) is a widely used technology for speech to text and optical character recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese rich semantic information to introduce large language models as the foundation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on few-shot CSC task than existing methods. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
Exploring Dual Encoder Architectures for Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dual encoders have been used for question-answering and information retrieval tasks with good results. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two different versions of dual encoders for QA retrieval tasks . they propose to share parameters in projection layers between two encoder towers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures outperform SDE and ADE on QA retrieval tasks. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
Can Large Language Models Translate Spoken-Only Languages through International Phonetic Transcription? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on spoken-only languages has focused on low-resource languages . spoken- only languages are among the most vulnerable to extinction . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified language understanding framework that learns to translate spoken-only languages via in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can translate spoken-only languages into high-resource languages using phonetic transcription and automatic dictionary construction and knowledge retrieval. |
Mitigating Safety Context Amnesia in Multimodal Reasoning Models via Intent-Guided Safety Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have enabled explicit chain-of-thought inference across vision and language, improving performance on complex cognitive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time defense that uses a percept decoupler to extract objective visual evidence into a structured intent output and a cognitive arbiter to enforce explicit safety constraints prior to generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense improves defense success rates by over 62% compared to baselines while preserving task utility. |
Synthesizing Post-Training Data for LLMs through Multi-Agent Simulation (2025.acl-long)
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Shuo Tang, Xianghe Pang, Zexi Liu, Bohan Tang, Rui Ye, Tian Jin, Xiaowen Dong, Yanfeng Wang, Siheng Chen
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively generates both general and domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent simulator that automatically generates diverse text-based scenarios, capturing a wide range of real-world human needs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms Meta’s Llama-3-8B-Instruct model on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks with just 20K instruction-response pairs. |
FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern machine learning models require a huge collection of precisely labeled data, which can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative learning framework that interactively distills and filters the task-specific knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves zero-shot performance on eight benchmark datasets without human supervision. |
RADAR: Risk-Aware Distilled Adaptive Routing for Efficient Short-Form Video Platform Ecosystem Governance (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to address inefficiency in large-scale integrity enforcement on short-form video platforms require multiple specialized vertical modules . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight risk-aware routing framework that selectively releases low-risk content while dispatching high-risk instances to appropriate vertical modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework selectively releases low-risk content while dispatching high-risk instances to appropriate vertical modules. |
ShieldHead: Decoding-time Safeguard for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in LLM-based moderation methods have demonstrated remarkable promise in identifying safety risks associated with both inputs and outputs in human-AI interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a classification head on the last-layer hidden states of a dialogue model and use it to detect harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is 300 faster (**1ms**) than previous LLM-based moderation models with 99% less parameters than LlamaGuard. |
Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a learned dense retrieval model is often overlooked when using a corpus for inference, resulting in a design choice of retrieval unit . granularity of retrievals is important for both retrieval and downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval unit for dense retrieval that uses propositions to index corpus . propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval unit outperforms passage-level units on retrieval and downstream tasks. |
Recurrent Chunking Mechanisms for Long-Text Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to machine reading comprehension (MRC) on long texts typically chunk text into equally-spaced segments without considering information from other segments. |
| Approach: | They propose to let a model learn to chunk in a more flexible way via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts a text span from document and query as answer . previous models can only take a fixed-length (e.g., 512) text as input . |
Query-Aware Knowledge Retrieval via Hyperbolic Structuring (2026.acl-long)
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Chuang Zhou, Junnan Dong, Yilin Xiao, Shengyuan Chen, Su Dong, di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhaozhuo Xu, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus primarily on retrieving isolated factual knowledge entities while neglecting the critical reasoning relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-centric retrieval framework that explicitly integrates structured knowledge graphs to support complex reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that HyperRAG outperforms baselines. |
AICA-Bench: Holistically Examining the Capabilities of VLMs in Affective Image Content Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on factual correctness, semantic grounding, visual reasoning, or multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess AICA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and generation into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework corrects intensity errors and significantly enhances descriptive depth. |
Q-PRM: Adaptive Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Step-level Process Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rewriting queries often lack supervision signals for intermediate steps . existing approaches rely on outcome-supervised training or heuristic rules to guide the rewrite process . |
| Approach: | They propose a query rewriting framework that generates process-level supervision signals for intermediate steps. |
| Outcome: | a new query rewriting framework outperforms existing approaches on open-domain QA benchmarks. |
Anchoring the Cache: Mitigating Contextual Hallucination in KV-Compressed Long-Context Summarization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that KV cache compression can increase hallucination scores in LLMs . modern LLM models support extremely long sequences, but their impact on model hallucinosity remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination across multiple models and datasets while preserving computational efficiency. |
Document Hashing with Mixture-Prior Generative Models (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative hashing methods only consider the use of simple priors, which limits them to further improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Gaussian and Bernoulli priors to generate hashing codes . they propose to cast a Gausssian latent representation into binary code . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing methods on a benchmark dataset using Gaussian and Bernoulli priors. |
PIVOINE: Instruction Tuning for Open-world Entity Profiling (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction focus on a closed-world setting, but PIVOINE is a promising solution to tackle the open-world problem of entity profiling. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop an LLM that performs Open-world Entity Profiling with instruction tuning to extract desirable entity profiles . they construct INSTRUCTOPENWIKI, a substantial instruction-tuning dataset for Open-World Entity Profiles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and ChatGPT-based baselines on unseen and out-of-ontology cases. |
Improving Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks require unstated knowledge to perform well. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract a new kind of structured knowledge from scripts and use it to improve machine reading comprehension (MRC) They propose a teacher-student paradigm to facilitate the transfer of knowledge in weakly-labeled MRC data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms methods that use weakly-labeled data and improves a state-of-the-art baseline by 4.3% in accuracy on a Chinese multiple-choice MRC dataset C3. |
CodeV: Issue Resolving with Visual Data (2025.findings-acl)
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Linhao Zhang, Daoguang Zan, Quanshun Yang, Zhirong Huang, Dong Chen, Bo Shen, Tianyu Liu, Yongshun Gong, Huang Pengjie, Xudong Lu, Guangtai Liang, Lizhen Cui, Qianxiang Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded to more complex repository-level tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a first approach to leveraging visual data to enhance the issue-resolving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) they demonstrate the effectiveness of CodeV and provide valuable insights into leveraging visualization to resolve GitHub issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the issue-resolving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using visual data. |
Hierarchical Visual Agent: Managing Contexts in Joint Image-Text Space for Advanced Chart Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs are strong at understanding single plots, but struggle with multi-step reasoning . Existing approaches to manage context in chart reasoning include text-based chain-of-thought prompting . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical visual agent framework that iteratively constructs a working context in an image–text space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on strong multimodal baselines. |
From Recognition to Reasoning: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs on Real-World Receipt Document Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for visual information extraction suffer from limitations in scale and realism . ReceiptBench is a large-scale, human-annotated benchmark for receipts . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, human-annotated benchmark for visual information extraction . the method organizes information extraction into four hierarchical sub-tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses proprietary models on complex reasoning tasks. |
Continual Named Entity Recognition without Catastrophic Forgetting (2023.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
GoViG: Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation via Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengyi Wu, Yifei Dong, Yilong Dai, Guangyu Chen, Qifeng Wu, Huiting Huang, Hang Wang, Qi Dai, Alexander G Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng
| Challenge: | Current methods for instruction generation depend on privileged inputs such as semantic maps, landmark annotations, and panoramic views. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that generates coherent navigation instructions from egocentric visual observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task generates coherent navigation instructions from egocentric visual data . the proposed task improves performance over state-of-the-art methods in BLEU-4 and CIDEr scores . |
Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automated feature generation rely on predefined operator libraries and do not incorporate feature semantics, limiting their ability to produce high-quality features. |
| Approach: | They propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) that decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. |
RL-PLUS: Countering Capability Boundary Collapse of LLMs in Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid-policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Yongding Tao, Huanyu Liu, Kechi Zhang, Lili Mou, Rongyu Cao, Yingwei MA, Jue Chen, Binhua Li, Zhi Jin, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid-policy optimization approach that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks and superior performance on out-of distribution reasoning tasks. |
Saliency-based Multi-View Mixed Language Training for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Classification (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent multilingual pre-trained models have been demonstrated effective in many cross-lingual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages code-switched data with multi-view learning to fine-tune XLM-R. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on zero-shot cross-lingual sentiment classification and dialogue state tracking tasks. |
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)
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Keke Lian, Wang Bin, Lei Zhang, Libo Chen, Junjie Wang, Ziming Zhao, Yujiu Yang, Miaoqian Lin, Haotong Duan, Haoran Zhao, Shuang Liao, Mingda Guo, Quan Jiazheng, Yilu Zhong, Chenhao He, Chen Zichuan, Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Hui LI, Dong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows . |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation. |
When TableQA Meets Noise: A Dual Denoising Framework for Complex Questions and Large-scale Tables (2026.acl-long)
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Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo, Dong Jin, Yuxiang Wang, Yikai Shen, Yunpeng Hou, Shuangwu Chen, null Jianyang, Xiaofeng Jiang
| Challenge: | Extensive research shows that noisy data significantly degrades the performance of table reasoning in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual denoising framework for complex questions and large-scale tables that uses Tree-guided table pruning to remove irrelevant data step by step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves outstanding performance on TableQA tasks with complex questions and large-scale tables. |