Papers by Fang Chen
CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | HKUST-KnowComp proposes a framework for commonsense reasoning that can be used to conceptualize commonsence knowledge bases at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates event conceptualization and instantiation to conceptualize commonsense knowledge bases at scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on two conceptualization tasks and the acquired abstract commonsense knowledge significantly improves commonsence inference modeling. |
Reinforced Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Answering (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to CQA involve training new models from scratch . existing approaches are expensive and often not feasible . |
| Approach: | They propose to use QA feedback to supervise the rewriting model with reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve QA performance over baselines for extractive and retrieval QA. |
TC–RAG: Turing–Complete RAG’s Case study on Medical LLM Systems (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xinke Jiang, Yue Fang, Rihong Qiu, Haoyu Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Hao Chen, Wentao Zhang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yuchen Fang, Xinyu Ma, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RAG neglect system state variables, resulting in poor performance and erroneous knowledge accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates a Turing Complete System to manage state variables and manage retrieval halting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on seven real-world healthcare datasets and shows that it is more accurate than existing methods. |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data Consistency (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Henry Peng Zou, Zhengyao Gu, Yue Zhou, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Yibo Wang, Yangning Li, Kay Liu, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Test-time computing approaches that leverage additional computational resources during inference have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearly scaling approach that leverages local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data to improve test-time predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as prompting and self-consistency across eight datasets and performs robustly across embedding models. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Complex Reasoning over Logical Queries on Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, language models struggle to generate commonsense inferences for complex tasks due to data scarcity and the difficulty of reasoning over multiple pieces of information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to generate commonsense inferences from commonsensible data . they use a commonsence knowledge graph to extract and form questions from existing commonseense knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves the ability of language models to reason about complex events without expensive human annotations. |
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a number of tools are used to perform complex tasks, but the tool utilization process can cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique evaluation benchmark for tool learning that analyzes function-calling errors on tool evaluation benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed critique evaluation benchmark holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. |
Your Language Model Can Secretly Write Like Humans: Contrastive Paraphrase Attacks on LLM-Generated Text Detectors (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Fang, Jiawei Kong, Tianqu Zhuang, Yixiang Qiu, Kuofeng Gao, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Yaowei Wang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect large language models (LLMs) generated for plagiarism use paraphrases to rewrite them to evade detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that effectively fools text detectors using off-the-shelf LLMs by rewriting them to evade detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method deceives text detectors using off-the-shelf LLMs by rewriting them to produce human-like sentences that are less discernible by detectors. |
TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zezhong Jin, Shubhang Desai, Xu Chen, Biyi Fang, Zhuoyi Huang, Zhe Li, Chong-Xin Gan, Xiao Tu, Man-Wai Mak, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for handwriting generation capture global dependencies and can generate high-quality handwritten samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model for ink generation, TrInk, which captures global dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces character error rate and word error rate by 35.56% on the IAM-OnDB dataset compared to previous models. |
Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis (2020.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Jacob Andreas, John Bufe, David Burkett, Charles Chen, Josh Clausman, Jean Crawford, Kate Crim, Jordan DeLoach, Leah Dorner, Jason Eisner, Hao Fang, Alan Guo, David Hall, Kristin Hayes, Kellie Hill, Diana Ho, Wendy Iwaszuk, Smriti Jha, Dan Klein, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Theo Lanman, Percy Liang, Christopher H. Lin, Ilya Lintsbakh, Andy McGovern, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Adam Pauls, Dmitrij Petters, Brent Read, Dan Roth, Subhro Roy, Jesse Rusak, Beth Short, Div Slomin, Ben Snyder, Stephon Striplin, Yu Su, Zachary Tellman, Sam Thomson, Andrei Vorobev, Izabela Witoszko, Jason Wolfe, Abby Wray, Yuchen Zhang, Alexander Zotov
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to task-oriented dialogue represent dialogue state as a dataflow graph . microsoft's SMCalFlow dataset features complex dialogues about events, weather, places, and people . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataflow graph-based dialogue agent that maps each user utterance to a program that extends this graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves representability and predictability in natural dialogues . it uses dataflow graphs and metacomputation to map user intents to a program . |
LightningDOT: Pre-training Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Real-Time Image-Text Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models suffer from slow inference speed due to cross-modal attention in transformer architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach that accelerates the inference time of ITR by thousands of times . they extract pre-cached feature indexes offline and employ instant dot-product matching online . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models that consume 1000 times magnitude of computational hours using the same features. |
Generalization in Text-based Games via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning (RL) based agents are promising for text-based games, but their generalization remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical framework for reinforcement learning based on knowledge graphs . they propose to decompose the game into subtasks and execute a sub-policy in the low level to conduct goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enjoys favorable generalizability on a set of difficulty levels and is able to handle complex training tasks. |
Enhancing Noise Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Adaptive Adversarial Training (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial capabilities yet face challenges such as hallucination, outdated knowledge, and untraceable reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation approach that leverages adaptive adversarial training to dynamically adjust the model’s training process in response to retrieval noises. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of the LLaMA-2 7B model under diverse noise conditions. |
DOSE: Data Selection for Multi-Modal LLMs via Off-the-Shelf Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing data filtering methods are expensive because they are trained on the same data they are meant to screen. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf pretrained models that have never seen the target data to select training samples for larger and stronger multimodal models without task-specific training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable or even better results than those trained on the full dataset in standard VQA and math benchmarks. |
LearnAlign: Data Selection for LLM Reinforcement Learning with Improved Gradient Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Cluster-Former: Clustering-based Sparse Transformer for Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for encoding long sequences in deep learning suffer from high latency and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a clustering-based sparse Transformer framework to perform attention across chunked sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several major QA benchmarks. |
Spiral of Silence in Large Language Model Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing theories of Spiral of Silence do not apply to large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework for examining SoS in large language models . they consider four controlled conditions that vary the availability of "History" and "Persona" signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the SoS-like dynamics in large language models . it shows that history and persona together produce strong majority dominance . |
SpatialWebAgent: Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Spatial Information Extraction and Map Grounding (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Understanding and extracting spatial information from text is vital for a wide range of applications, says nielsen . inherent complexity of geographic expressions in natural language presents significant hurdles for traditional extraction methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that leverages large language models to extract spatial information from natural language. |
| Outcome: | SpatialWebAgent is designed to extract, standardize, and ground spatial information from natural language text directly onto maps. |
Noise-powered Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Representation Framework (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current efforts to integrate MMKG with pretraining are scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates multi-modal entity features into MMKGs using a Transformer-based architecture equipped with modality-level noise masking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA performance across ten datasets. |
CKnowEdit: A New Chinese Knowledge Editing Dataset for Linguistics, Facts, and Logic Error Correction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | CKnowEdit is the first-ever knowledge editing dataset designed to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese knowledge editing dataset to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset highlights the challenges that LLMs face in mastering Chinese . CKnowEdit can correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Chinese, the authors show . |
StructMem: Structured Memory for Long-Horizon Behavior in LLMs (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems lack structure and efficiency in capturing relationships between events. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-enriched hierarchical memory framework that preserves event-level bindings and induces cross-event connections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves event-level bindings and induces cross-event connections while reducing token usage, API calls, and runtime compared to prior memory systems. |
Enhancing Entity Boundary Detection for Better Chinese Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) lack explicit word boundary and tenses information. |
| Approach: | They propose a boundary enhanced approach for Chinese Named Entity Recognition . they add an additional Graph Attention Network(GAT) layer to capture internal dependency of phrases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) on OntoNotes and Weibo corpora. |
TLSA: LLM-Guided Text-Label Space Alignment with Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generalized category discovery suffer from weak text–label alignment, inconsistent objectives across known and novel categories, and poor discrimination of semantically similar clusters. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that enforces contrastive alignment between text and label representations within a shared semantic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark datasets. |
Infinity-Parser: Layout-Aware Reinforcement Learning with High-quality Document Parsing Dataset (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Baode Wang, Biao Wu, Weizhen Li, Meng Fang, Zuming Huang, Jun Huang, Yanjie Liang, Haozhe Wang, Ling Chen, Wei Chu, Yuan Qi
| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning methods struggle to generalize across document types, leading to poor performance. |
| Approach: | They propose layoutRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes layout understanding through composite rewards integrating normalized edit distance, paragraph count accuracy, and reading order preservation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms specialized document parsing systems and general-purpose vision-language models on a broad range of document types, languages, and structural complexities. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
i-Code V2: An Autoregressive Generation Framework over Vision, Language, and Speech Data (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyi Yang, Mahmoud Khademi, Yichong Xu, Reid Pryzant, Yuwei Fang, Chenguang Zhu, Dongdong Chen, Yao Qian, Xuemei Gao, Yi-Ling Chen, Robert Gmyr, Naoyuki Kanda, Noel Codella, Bin Xiao, Yu Shi, Lu Yuan, Takuya Yoshioka, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | i-Code V2 is one of the first models capable of generating natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a model that can generate natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. |
| Outcome: | i-Code V2 matches or outperforms state-of-the-art single- and dual-modality baselines on 7 multimodal tasks. |
Watermarking Large Language Models: An Unbiased and Low-risk Method (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the risk of misusing them, raising the need for accurate detection of LLM-generated content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to inject imperceptible identifiers into large language models (LLMs) this method is unbiased and preserves the original token distribution in expectation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves the original token distribution in expectation and has lower risk of producing unsatisfactory outputs in low-entropy scenarios compared to existing unbiased watermarks. |
Retrievals Can Be Detrimental: Unveiling the Backdoor Vulnerability of Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented diffusion models (RDMs) have been developed to enhance performance with reduced parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate retrieval-augmented diffusion models with Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that enhances performance with reduced parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves outstanding attack effects while maintaining benign utility. |
CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapy (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Mian Zhang, Xianjun Yang, Xinlu Zhang, Travis Labrum, Jamie C. Chiu, Shaun M. Eack, Fei Fang, William Yang Wang, Zhiyu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing research has explored mental health condition classifications, empathetic conversations, and chatbots designed for simple discourse structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for systematic evaluation of cognitive behavioral therapy assistance using Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes three levels of tasks covering key aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy that could be enhanced through AI assistance. |
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Jizhou Guo, Yankai Chen, Chunyu Miao, Hoang H Nguyen, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Hanrong Zhang, Fangxin Wang, Pengfei Zhang, Langzhou He, Yangning Li, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems improve system performance, reliability, and safety by integrating human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system. |
KELE: Residual Knowledge Erasure for Enhanced Multi-hop Reasoning in Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing techniques show limitations when applied to multi-hop reasoning . residual single-hop knowledge causes edited models to revert to original answers . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge editing method that incorporates a Knowledge Erasure mechanism for Large language model Editing (KELE) they propose an erasure function for residual knowledge and an injection function for new knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves multi-hop reasoning capability of edited models. |
Expanding before Inferring: Enhancing Factuality in Large Language Models through Premature Layers Interpolation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Dingwei Chen, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Chak Tou Leong, Shiwen Ni, Ahmadreza Argha, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Chengming Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating factually inconsistent outputs are resource-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play intervention designed to enhance factuality by inserting premature layers formed through mathematical interpolation with adjacent layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed intervention reduces hallucinations while outperforming baselines on four datasets. |
Benchmarking Foundation Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Olympic-Level Physics Problem Solving (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new study examines the potential of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with foundation models to enhance expert-level reasoning. |
| Approach: | They introduce PhoPile, a high-quality multimodal dataset specifically designed for Olympiad-level physics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to solve Olympiad-level physics problems. |
Listening Like Humans: Semantics-Guided Noise-Robust Multimodal Speech Recognition (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Severe acoustic degradation results in unreliable ASR outputs . et al., 2024b): critical concerns regarding reliability and fairness of ASR . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that reframes ASR as semantics-guided speech reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average reduction in WER while also attaining 98.71% BERTScore and 96.7% USE over advanced baselines. |
How Do Large Language Models Capture the Ever-changing World Knowledge? A Review of Recent Advances (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving tasks, but they can quickly be outdated after deployment. |
| Approach: | They provide a review of recent advances in aligning deployed large language models with the ever-changing world knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to perform various tasks directly through in-context learning or for further fine-tuning for domain-specific uses. |
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Weijie Shi, Jipeng Zhang, Yaguang Wu, Jingzhi Fang, Shibo Zhang, Yao Zhao, Hao Chen, Ruiyuan Zhang, Yue Cui, Jia Zhu, Sirui Han, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency. |
MaskTab: Scalable Masked Tabular Pretraining with Scaling Laws and Distillation for Industrial Classification (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Tabular data is high-dimensional, riddled with missing entries, and rarely labeled at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified pre-training framework for industrial-scale tabular data . MaskTab encodes missing values via dedicated learnable tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms XGBoost and MaskTab-L on industrial-scale . it achieves +5.04% AUC and +8.28% KS over prior art under rigorous scaling . |
CHBias: Bias Evaluation and Mitigation of Chinese Conversational Language Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on social biases in language models have focused on only English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dataset for bias evaluation and mitigation of Chinese conversational language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes under-explored bias categories, such as ageism and appearance biases, which received less attention in previous studies. |
Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | specialized LLMs are often limited in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They provide a comprehensive overview of four key methods to enhance large language models by integrating domain-specific knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorized into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. |
Structural Bias for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing structural bias adapters for aspect sentiment triplet extraction are under-confident . a large-scale dataset for ASTE shows the adapter is effective and efficient to a larger scale. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a structural adapter to integrate structural bias into pretrained language models . they propose to add a relative position structure in place of the syntactic dependency structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter achieves state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines, but with a light parameter demand and low latency. |
Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Reward Models for Subjective Ambiguity (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu, Xiong Liu, Jing Ye, Ziqiang Liu, Haonan Zhang, Liang Zhu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reward modeling in reinforcement learning tasks are limited when dealing with ambiguous preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AAM to dynamically calibrate preference margins using the Bradley-Terry model's internal parameter knowledge to improve reward modeling in subjective tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. |
RetrievalQA: Assessing Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Short-form Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing retrieval of relevant information are understudied . previous studies have neglected to evaluate ARAG methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate existing ARAG methods that use threshold tuning to adjust retrieval for queries instead of indiscriminate retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to evaluate existing ARAG methods without calibration or training. |
BotChat: Evaluating LLMs’ Capabilities of Having Multi-Turn Dialogues (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Haodong Duan, Jueqi Wei, Chonghua Wang, Hongwei Liu, Yixiao Fang, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitate high-quality, multi-turn dialogues with humans, but human-based evaluation of such a capability requires substantial manual effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs' ability to emulate human-like, multi-turn conversations using an LLM-centric approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model emulates human-like, multi-turn conversations using an LLM-centric approach. |
AutoAct: Automatic Agent Learning from Scratch for QA via Self-Planning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shuofei Qiao, Ningyu Zhang, Runnan Fang, Yujie Luo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuchen Jiang, Chengfei Lv, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing language agent systems struggle with costly data reliance and need multiple models for multiple functions. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic agent learning framework for QA that synthesizes planning trajectories without human intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on question-answering tasks with a division-of-labor strategy. |
Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memory (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Runnan Fang, Yuan Liang, Xiaobin Wang, Jialong Wu, Shuofei Qiao, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based agents suffer from brittle procedural memory that is manually engineered or entangled in static parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedural-memory repository that distills past agent trajectories into fine-grained, step-by-step instructions and higher-level, script-like abstractions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed repository can be used to improve agents' performance on travelplanner and Alfworld. |
CaKE: Circuit-aware Editing Enables Generalizable Knowledge Learners (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods fail to generalize updates to multi-hop reasoning tasks . Existing methods only edit single or a few model layers, inadequately integrate updated knowledge into reasoning pathways. |
| Approach: | They propose a circuit-aware method that enhances the effective integration of updated knowledge in large language models by leveraging curated data samples guided by their analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy of 20% on the MQuAKE dataset while requiring less memory. |
A Simple and Effective Method to Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Weiquan Mao, Zhe Zhao, Tao Zhu, Haoyan Liu, Rong Tian, Yiren Chen
| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries . however, its effect is limited by the gap between embedding clusters of different languages . |
| Approach: | They propose Embedding-Push, Attention-Pull, and Robust targets to transfer English embeddings to virtual multilingual embedders without semantic loss. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods on cross-lingual tasks and can achieve a better multilingual alignment. |
LSDC: An Efficient and Effective Large-Scale Data Compression Method for Supervised Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoguang Long, Yuhao Zhou, Shangqing Zhao, Yupei Ren, Li Cai, Chenghao Jia, Zhe Chen, Zhe Fang, Yuxiang Song, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expanding in scale and size, increasing computational costs . large-scale data compression techniques can reduce the size of training datasets while maintaining data integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale data compression method to reduce the size of training data . they use a bifurcated quantization strategy to maximize the diversity of samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the size of training data while maximizing the submodular gain. |
PresentAgent: Multimodal Agent for Presentation Video Generation (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating static slides or text summaries are limited to producing narrated presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal agent that transforms long-form documents into narrated presentations. |
| Outcome: | The present agent produces fully synchronized visual and spoken content that closely mimics human-style presentations. |
Forget the Token and Pixel: Rethinking Gradient Ascent for Concept Unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaqi Li, Chuanyi Zhang, Miaozeng Du, Hui Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Qianshan Wei, Junfeng Fang, Ruipeng Wang, Sheng Bi, Guilin Qi
| Challenge: | Gradient Ascent (GA) has emerged as a promising approach for concept unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (MGMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that selectively applies GA to targeted Conceptual Knowledge while preserving Natural Knowledge through Gradient Descent (GD). |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach removes Conceptual Knowledge and inadvertently diminishes Natural Knowledge, resulting in utility degradation. |
Backdooring Neural Code Search (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural code search models are used to find code snippets from online repositories . however, their security aspect is rarely studied . |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf code snippets from online repositories to find desired code . they propose to inject a backdoor into neural code search models which return buggy code if attacker modifies one variable/function name . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack outperforms baselines on two neural code search models by 60%. |
Dual-Reasoner: Bridging Interleaved Atomicity and Streaming Latency via Thinking-while-Talking (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yangzhuo Li, Shengpeng Ji, Yifu Chen, Tianle Liang, Haoyu Yang, null Junboli, Jun Fang, Lin Li, Qingyang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate Chain-of-Thought into spoken dialogue models incur prohibitive latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Streaming Masking Mechanism to ensure uninterrupted audio streaming . they use a quadruple-constraint system to reconstruct logical atomicity . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Dual-Reasoner improves speech generation performance with low latency. |
OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zekun Xi, Wenbiao Yin, Jizhan Fang, Jialong Wu, Runnan Fang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in machine writing such as open domain long-form generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a slow-thinking machine writing framework that emulates the human-like process of iterative expansion and reflection to improve the knowledge density of generated articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the knowledge density of generated articles without compromising metrics such as coherence and depth. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
Beyond Hard Masks: Progressive Token Evolution for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Linhao Zhong, Linyu Wu, Bozhen Fang, Tianjian Feng, Chenchen Jing, Wen Wang, Jiaheng Zhang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
| Challenge: | Existing Diffusion Language Models rely on hard binary masking and discrete token assignments, which hinder the revision of early decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based language modeling approach that replaces hard binary masks with evolving soft token distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing DLMs on multiple benchmarks. |
SciExplore: Evaluating Autonomous Agents from Scientific Navigation to Information Integration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun, Wenran Liu, Weiming Zhang, Bin Liu, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks emphasize general-domain retrieval or static scientific question answering . SciExplore focuses on scientific database navigation, ambiguous literature retrieval, missing reference completion, and cross-source structured knowledge synthesis tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate scientific information-seeking and reasoning capabilities of LLMs and agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark assesses the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs and agents in scientific research workflows. |
Analyzing the Intensity of Complaints on Social Media (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior studies on identifying the existence or the type of complaints focus on building automatic classification models for identifying complaints. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure the intensity of complaints from text using Best-Worst Scaling method to estimate the popularity of posts on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can estimate the popularity of complaints on social media with best-worst scaling (BWS) method. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks. |
When Efficiency Meets Safety: A Benchmark Security Analysis of KV Cache Compression in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Key-Value (KV) caching is widely used in large language models to enable long-context inference efficiently, yet its security implications remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a history-aware, per-head feedback merging strategy that prevents safety degradation while maintaining efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy prevents safety degradation while maintaining efficiency. |
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Beyond Accuracy: Unveiling Inefficiency Patterns in Tool-Integrated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) is a tool that can be used to solve complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hardware-aware TIR-efficiency metric that unifies internal reasoning and external tool-use costs while explicitly accounting for non-reusable KV-Cache and long-tool-response scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric explains wall-clock latency significantly better than token-count metric in a simulated high-concurrency industrial setting. |
Knowledgeable Preference Alignment for LLMs in Domain-specific Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Domain-specific question answering (QA) requires a comprehensive understanding of a specific domain to answer specialized questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new alignment objective to align the LLM preference with different human preferences uniformly to optimize LLM performance in real-world, domain-specific QA settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline is superior for real-scenario domain-specific question answering with LLMs. |
TLM: Token-Level Masking for Transformers (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Structured dropout approaches have been investigated to regularize the multi-head attention mechanism in Transformers. |
| Approach: | They propose a new regularization scheme based on token-level rather than structure-level to reduce overfitting by manipulating the connections between tokens in the multi-head attention via masking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed regularization scheme outperforms attention dropout and DropHead on 18 datasets and can establish a new record on the data-to-text benchmark Rotowire (18.93 BLEU). |
HierDiffuse: Progressive Diffusion for Robust Interest Fusion in CTR Prediction (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Ziheng Ni, Congcong Liu, Yuying Chen, Zhiwei Fang, Changping Peng, Zhangang Lin, Ching Law, Jingping Shao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches fuse long-term behavioral profiles and short-term interactions, suffering from representational misalignment and noise in transient signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that redefines interest fusion as a hierarchical denoising process through diffusion models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework redefines interest fusion as a hierarchical denoising process through diffusion models. |
PATIENT-𝜓: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionals (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ruiyi Wang, Stephanie Milani, Jamie Chiu, Jiayin Zhi, Shaun Eack, Travis Labrum, Samuel Murphy, Nev Jones, Kate Hardy, Hong Shen, Fei Fang, Zhiyu Chen
| Challenge: | Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a patient simulation framework for cognitive behavior therapy training that uses large language models to act as a simulated therapy patient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the skill acquisition and confidence of mental health trainees beyond textbooks, videos, and role-play with non-patients. |
Dashboard2Code: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Reconstructing Interactive Dashboards (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianhao Niu, Ziyu Han, Qiguang Chen, Shiqi Zhou, Baocai Shan, Hengjie Fang, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to generate static visualizations focus on static charts and interactive dashboards. |
| Approach: | They propose a dashboard2code task that requires a model to explore an interactive dashboard, acquire feedback from its own interactions and generate code that reproduces the target dashboard. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on 180 carefully designed and manually verified dashboard–code pairs spanning three difficulty levels and covering eight common real-world interaction patterns. |
HCL-TAT: A Hybrid Contrastive Learning Method for Few-shot Event Detection with Task-Adaptive Threshold (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection have failed to address the problem of constantly emerging event types with limited data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method for event detection with a task-adaptive threshold . they propose to learn discriminative representations with 'two-view contrastive loss' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark dataset. |
OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, but their ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces by combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework emulates human-like cognitive adaptation and operates via a general perception–memory–reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback. |
Editing the Mind of Giants: An In-Depth Exploration of Pitfalls of Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge editing is a promising technique for updating factual knowledge in large language models (LLMs) but studies have identified side effects such as knowledge distortion and the deterioration of general abilities that have emerged after editing. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the side effects of knowledge editing in large language models using metrics and benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The results of the study highlight the limitations of current knowledge editing methods and outline potential research directions. |
AutoBreach: Universal and Adaptive Jailbreaking with Efficient Wordplay-Guided Optimization via Multi-LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Perceiving the World: Question-guided Reinforcement Learning for Text-based Games (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text-based games provide an interactive way to study natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase training framework to decouple language learning from reinforcement learning and improve the sample efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance and sample efficiency against compound error and limited pre-training data. |
Is Neural Topic Modelling Better than Clustering? An Empirical Study on Clustering with Contextual Embeddings for Topics (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work incorporates pre-trained word embeddings into Neural Topic Models (NTMs), generating highly coherent topics. |
| Approach: | They conduct thorough experiments to investigate whether embeddings directly with an appropriate word selection method can generate more coherent and diverse topics than NTMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more coherent and diverse topics than traditional NTMs, achieving higher efficiency and simplicity. |
MTPChat: A Multimodal Time-Aware Persona Dataset for Conversational Agents (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing time-aware datasets that focus on persona-grounded conversations focus on temporal dynamics, which narrows their scope and diminishes their complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, time-aware persona dialogue dataset that integrates linguistic, visual, and temporal elements within dialogue and persona memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates linguistic, visual, and temporal elements within dialogue and persona memory to assess a model’s ability to understand implicit temporal cues and dynamic interactions. |
VaseVQA: Multimodal Agent and Benchmark for Ancient Greek Pottery (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Jinchao Ge, Tengfei Cheng, Biao Wu, Zeyu Zhang, Shiya Huang, Judith Bishop, Gillian Shepherd, Meng Fang, Ling Chen, Yang Zhao
| Challenge: | MLLMs that use domain-specific data are limited in understanding cultural heritage artifacts such as ancient Greek pottery . supervised fine-tuning improves adaptation to domain knowledge, but it struggles with deeper reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual question-answer tool that augments SFT with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on reasoning-intensive questions on ancient Greek pottery. |
EduMARS: Can Vision-Language Models Grade Like Teachers? Benchmarking Multimodal, Rubric-Based Assessment on Chinese K-12 Answers (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for automated grading of student work fail to evaluate real student responses . existing models fail to assess real student work, especially on cognitively demanding tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for rubric-aligned evaluation of real Chinese K-12 student answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance and interpretability of existing models on EduMARS . existing models fail to perform on real-world, cognitively demanding tasks, authors say . |
MedDialog: Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
MACSum: Controllable Summarization with Mixed Attributes (2023.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yusen Zhang, Yang Liu, Ziyi Yang, Yuwei Fang, Yulong Chen, Dragomir Radev, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng, Rui Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing work on controllable summarization with mixed attributes lacks designated annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-annotated summarization benchmark for controllable summarizing with mixed attributes based on news and dialogue sources . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains human-annotated summarization datasets with mixed attributes . hard prompt models yield the best performance on most metrics and human evaluations . mixed-attribute control is still challenging for summarizing tasks . |
Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance reasoning capabilities of large language models incur significant overhead in token usage, leading to increased costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-budget-aware LLM reasoning framework that adjusts the number of reasoning tokens based on the reasoning complexity of each problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token costs in CoT reasoning with only a slight performance reduction. |
Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jialong Zuo, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Mingze Li, Ziyue Jiang, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on disentangling speakers and content, while others focus on preserving the source's prosody. |
| Approach: | They propose a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model that transforms the source speaker’s timbre into an unseen one while retaining speech content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts the linguistic content duration to the desired speaking style, facilitating the transfer of the target speaker’s rhythm. |
Knowledge-Guided Cross-Topic Visual Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual question generation use answers or question types as constraints to generate questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-guided cross-topic visual question generation task to generate unseen topics in cross-section scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and can generate unseen topic-related questions in cross-topic scenarios. |
VIMI: Grounding Video Generation through Multi-modal Instruction (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuwei Fang, Willi Menapace, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Tsai-Shien Chen, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Ivan Skorokhodov, Graham Neubig, Sergey Tulyakov
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-video diffusion models rely on text-only encoders for their pretraining, restricting their versatility and application in multimodal integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal conditional video generation framework for pretraining on augmented text prompts and then utilize a two-stage training strategy to enable diverse video generation tasks within a model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can synthesize consistent and temporally coherent videos with large motion while retaining the semantic control. |
DeKeyNLU: Enhancing Natural Language to SQL Generation through Task Decomposition and Keyword Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jian Chen, Zhenyan Chen, Xuming Hu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Han Fang, Cissy Hing Yee Choy, Xinmei Ke, Jingfeng Luo, Zixuan Yuan
| Challenge: | NL2SQL provides a model-centric paradigm that simplifies database access for non-technical users . challenges such as inaccurate task decomposition and keyword extraction remain major bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a RAG-based NL2SQL pipeline that employs three modules for query understanding, entity retrieval, and generation to improve SQL generation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the accuracy of query generation on BIRD and Spider datasets. |
Enhancing Transformation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic Using LLMs with Diverse External Knowledge (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Temporal Logic (STL) is a formal specification tool for cyber-physical systems . but it is difficult to transform ambiguous and complex data into STL, a paper argues . |
| Approach: | They propose a NL-STL dataset with 16,000 samples enriched with diverse patterns . they propose KGST framework to transform natural language into STL using a generate-then-refine process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms baseline models in diversity and accuracy . the proposed dataset contains 16,000 samples enriched with diverse patterns . |
Smart-Searcher: Incentivizing the Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wenqing Tian, Zhipeng Chen, Yuhuan Wu, Jiahao Zhao, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Lei Fang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the model’s internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train large language models to leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. |
XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition pre-trained Language Models for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a Prompt tuning model with an eXtremely small scale that learns soft prompts to condition the frozen Pre-trained Language Models for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the vanilla Prompt-Tuning and can significantly improve across tasks and model scales. |
Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, but they are not designed to mitigate these failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight plugin framework that allows controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into web environments. |
MuBench: Assessment of Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models Across 61 Languages (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation datasets lack cross-lingual alignment, leaving assessments of multilingual capabilities fragmented in both language and skill coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual consistency as a complementary metric to assess performance bottlenecks and guide model improvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model lacks cross-lingual alignment and language coverage gaps between state-of-the-art models. |
ATLAS: Agent Tuning via Learning Critical Steps (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing agent tuning approaches employ supervised finetuning on entire expert trajectories, but behavior-cloning of full traitories introduces expert bias and weakens generalization to states not covered by the expert data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that finetunes LLMs on critical steps in expert trajectories and identifies and finetuns them on these steps with reduced costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and open-source LLM agents on only 30% critical steps in extensive experiments. |
Summarization Evaluation in the Absence of Human Model Summaries Using the Compositionality of Word Embeddings (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing summary evaluation methods rely on multiple model summaries to evaluate quality of summary outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a new summary evaluation approach that does not require human model summaries . they exploit compositional capabilities of word embeddings to develop features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric replicates human-generated summarization scores on data from TAC 2008 and 2009 . the features are then used to train a learning model for predicting the summary content quality in the absence of gold models. |
DEFT: Distribution-guided Efficient Fine-Tuning for Human Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the methods enhanced by DEFT outperform the original methods in both alignment capability and generalization ability, with significantly reduced training time. |
| Approach: | They propose a distribution-based alignment framework that integrates data filtering and distributional guidance to improve alignment efficiency and generalization ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in alignment capability and generalization ability with significantly reduced training time. |
CITB: A Benchmark for Continual Instruction Tuning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning do not leverage the rich natural language instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to study how instruction tuning works in CL tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve similar or better results than existing CL methods. |
GUICourse: From General Vision Language Model to Versatile GUI Agent (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wentong Chen, Junbo Cui, Jinyi Hu, Yujia Qin, Junjie Fang, Yue Zhao, Chongyi Wang, Jun Liu, Guirong Chen, Yupeng Huo, Yuan Yao, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are a pivotal medium for human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of datasets for training visual-based GUI agents using general VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUICourse datasets show that even a small-sized GUI agent performs better on GUI tasks. |
LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoling Chen, Robert Tang, Gangda Deng, Fang Wu, Jialong Wu, Zhiwei Jiang, Viktor Prasanna, Arman Cohan, Xingyao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches struggle to efficiently navigate complex codebases when identifying relevant code snippets. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-guided agent framework that addresses code localization through a distributed graph-based agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy on real-world benchmarks and can be used to locate code snippets at a cost of 86%. |
Beyond Completion: A Foundation Model for General Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yin Hua, Zhiqiang Liu, Mingyang Chen, Zheng Fang, Chi Man Wong, Lingxiao Li, Chi Man Vong, Huajun Chen, Wen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing foundation models for general knowledge graph reasoning have focused on their structural aspects, with most efforts restricted to in-KG tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional encoding architecture that bridges the gap between textual and structural modalities, enabling seamless integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on 28 datasets and is generalized to out-of-KG tasks. |
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-goal navigation fail to extract informative visual cues, leading agents to wander around. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both simulation and real-world environments. |
Hazards in Daily Life? Enabling Robots to Proactively Detect and Resolve Anomalies (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zirui Song, Guangxian Ouyang, Meng Fang, Hongbin Na, Zijing Shi, Zhenhao Chen, Fu Yujie, Zeyu Zhang, Shiyu Jiang, Miao Fang, Ling Chen, Xiuying Chen
| Challenge: | Existing household robots are inability to recognize potential problems or dangers in home environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of creating anomaly scenarios using generative models instead of manually labeled data to build simulated environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in terms of task description and scene diversity. |
Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Sheng Yang, Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Zineng Zhou, Bin Zhu, Xiaodi Sun, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Anbang Hu, Yuan Fang, Yunsong Li, Junyan Chen, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt engineering techniques are limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that iteratively develops a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best results across five tasks and demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to adoption of a minimal search strategy. |
Who Can Withstand Chat-Audio Attacks? An Evaluation Benchmark for Large Audio-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research focused on model-specific adversarial methods, but real-world applications demand a more generalizable approach to audio adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chat-Audio Attacks benchmark to evaluate LALMs' robustness . they propose standard evaluation, GPT-4o-based evaluation and human evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to explore the robustness of six state-of-the-art LALMs with voice interaction capabilities. |
From Language to Driving: A Dual-Loop SLM-Enhanced Framework for Multi-Planner Scheduling via a Domain-Specific Language (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiawei Liu, Xun Gong, Muli Yang, Xingrui Yu, Fen Fang, Xulei Yang, Ivor Tsang, Yunfeng hu, Hong Chen, Qing Guo
| Challenge: | Recent large language model-based AD research offers new avenues to address this challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a small language model (SLM) for high-level semantic reasoning and schedule generation, while an inner loop performs low-level, high-frequency schedule execution and vehicle control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction completion rates while maintaining high safety and compliance relative to multiple baselines. |
A Split-and-Recombine Approach for Follow-up Query Analysis (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Context-dependent semantic parsing has proved to be an important but challenging task. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform follow-up query analysis to restate context-dependent queries with contextual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by nearly 8% on the FollowUp dataset . the extensibility of STAR on the SQA dataset is also promising . |
ControlSpeech: Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shengpeng Ji, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Jialong Zuo, Minghui Fang, Ziyue Jiang, Hai Huang, Zehan Wang, Xize Cheng, Siqi Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior zero-shot TTS models only mimic the speaker’s voice without further control and adjustment capabilities while prior controllable TTS systems cannot perform speaker-specific voice generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a style control module that captures codec representations corresponding to timbre, content, and style in a discrete decoupling codec space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can fully clone the speaker's voice and perform speech-specific adjustment and control functions. |
UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Baining Zhao, Jianjie Fang, Zichao Dai, Ziyou Wang, Jirong Zha, Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Yue Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Large multimodal models exhibit remarkable intelligence, yet their embodied cognitive abilities during motion in open-ended urban aerial spaces remain to be explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate whether large multimodal models can process continuous first-person visual observations like humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process first-person visual observations like humans, enabling recall, perception, reasoning, and navigation. |
Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yougang Lyu, Jitai Hao, Zihan Wang, Kai Zhao, Shen Gao, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Fang Wang, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting judgment results for multiple defendants are ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to predict the judgment results for each defendant in multi-defendant cases . they formalize the multi-diffendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict the judgment results for multiple defendants in multi-defendant cases. |
Forge: Quality-Aware Reinforcement Learning for NP-Hard Optimization in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on correctness, overlooking optimality . large language models excel at math, coding, logic and puzzles . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training and evaluating Large Language Models on NP-hard optimization problems through quality-aware RLVR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks on math, coding, logic and puzzles. |
Self-imitation Learning for Action Generation in Text-based Games (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text-based games are situated systems where the game agents observe textual descriptions, and generate textual commands to interact with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-based self-imitation model to generate action candidates for the RL agent by exploiting past valuable trajectories to adapt a pre-trained language model towards a target game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in multiple challenging games. |
A Survey for Efficient Open Domain Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Open domain question answering (ODQA) is a longstanding task that can answer factoid questions without explicit evidence in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose to use open domain question answering to answer factual questions from a large knowledge corpus without explicit evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can answer factoid questions from a large knowledge corpus without explicit evidence. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
ChartThinker: A Contextual Chain-of-Thought Approach to Optimized Chart Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for chart summarization lack visual-language matching and reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which synthesizes deep analysis based on chains of thought and strategies of context retrieval to improve the logical coherence and accuracy of the generated summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 8 state-of-the-art models over 7 evaluation metrics and can significantly reduce time and cognitive resources required. |
EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Honghao Gui, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Runnan Fang, Lei Li, Zhen Bi, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across tasks and domains . instruction tuning is a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of LLMs - but there is no standard open-source instruction processing framework available for the community . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source instruction tuning framework for Large Language Models that modularizes instruction generation, selection, prompting and their combination and interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is open-source and available on Github. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qiyue Gao, Xinyu Pi, Kevin Liu, Junrong Chen, Ruolan Yang, Xinqi Huang, Xinyu Fang, Lu Sun, Gautham Kishore, Bo Ai, Stone Tao, Mengyang Liu, Jiaxi Yang, Chao-Jung Lai, Chuanyang Jin, Jiannan Xiang, Benhao Huang, Zeming Chen, David Danks, Hao Su, Tianmin Shu, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, but a systematic evaluation of VLMs’ fundamental WM abilities remains absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses perception and prediction to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses perception and prediction abilities on 15 latest VLMs and compares them to human-level models. |
Getting Sick After Seeing a Doctor? Diagnosing and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Event Temporal Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Event temporal reasoning aims at identifying the temporal relations between two or more events from narratives. |
| Approach: | They propose to detect knowledge conflicts in event temporal reasoning using bias indicators such as event relation prior bias, tense bias, narrative bias, and dependency bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied to Pre-trained Language Models and Large Language Model (LLMs) as additional training data or demonstrations for In- Context Learning. |
FARSS: Fisher-Optimized Adaptive Low-Rank and Singular-Vector Selection for Knowledge-Preserving Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Renxing Chen, Ziwei Xiang, Peisong Wang, Hongjian Fang, Meng Li, Fanhu Zeng, Yanan Zhu, Peipei Yang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Jian Cheng
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation methods for large language models have limitations in preserving world knowledge and limiting updates to preserve world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fisher-optimized adaptive low Rank and Singular-VectorSelection framework for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning that allows efficient and task-sensitive updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. |
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
KVFKT: A New Horizon in Knowledge Tracing with Attention-Based Embedding and Forgetting Curve Integration (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge tracing models do not incorporate forgetting features to improve the learning and answering processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach in knowledge tracing with attention-based embedding and forgetting curve integration using four real-world datasets to test the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing knowledge tracing models and eliminates the need for artificial engineering features. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods. |
Infinite Babble: Inflating 3D Vision-Language Model Inference Overhead via Adversarial Geometric Perturbation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | 3D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are critical cognitive backbone for spatial intelligence, but their reliance on autoregressive decoding introduces a fundamental vulnerability regarding inference efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that triggers computational and economic exhaustion in 3D-VLMs by injecting imperceptible noise that forces the model into a state of pathological verbosity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework amplifies output length and energy consumption by up to 6.45, demonstrating a potent capability to drain system resources. |
A Graph-theoretic Summary Evaluation for ROUGE (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ROUGE is one of the most widely used evaluation metrics for text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ROUGE to evaluate summaries based on lexical and semantic similarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ROUGE's correlation with human judgments by exploiting lexical and semantic similarities. |
Redundancy Principles for MLLMs Benchmarks (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zicheng Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Xinyu Fang, Chunyi Li, Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Haodong Duan, Kai Chen, Guangtao Zhai
| Challenge: | Rapid growth of Multi-modality Large Language Models has led to significant redundancy among benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve MLLM benchmark design by identifying redundancy at three levels: dimension, instance, and cross-benchmark redundancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework streamlines evaluations and enhances reliability. |
Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tingxu Han, Wei Song, Ziqi Ding, Ziming Li, Chunrong Fang, Yuekang Li, Dongfang Liu, Zhenyu Chen, Zhenting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing work probes when biased outputs appear, but gives little insight into the mechanisms that generate them, leaving existing mitigations largely fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight debiasing framework that detects bias heads and selectively masks only those heads that activate under DA and CoT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces unfairness by 391.9%- 534.5% in both one- and two-turn dialogues. |
Context-Aware Sentiment Forecasting via LLM-based Multi-Perspective Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict sentiments on social media are limited and do not consider reciprocal influences among social media users. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective role-playing framework to simulate human response processes to extract sentiment-related features from social media messages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves sentiment forecasting at microscopic and macroscopic levels. |
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Kwok, Minghao Liu, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Junxian He, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. |
TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and difficult to efficiently execute on resource-restricted devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer distillation method that performs Transformer distillations at pre-training and task-specific learning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method accelerates inference and reduces model size while maintaining accuracy. |
QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Songxin Qu, Tai-Ping Sun, Yun-Jie Wang, Huan-Yu Liu, Cheng Xue, Xiao-Fan Xu, Han Fang, Yang Yang, Yu-Chun Wu, Guo-Ping Guo, Zhao-Yun Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models lack reliability in scientific domains that require strict adherence to physical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models and is competitive with proprietary models. |
Enhancing Temporal Sensitivity and Reasoning for Time-Sensitive Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing language models have limited sensitivity to temporal information and inadequate temporal reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances temporal awareness and reasoning . they propose to use Temporal Information-Aware Embedding and Granular Contrastive Reinforcement Learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs on time-sensitive question answering tasks. |
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwei Wang, Junjie Zheng, Leyang Yang, Sheng Zhou, Xiaoxuan Tang, Fang Zhouhua, Zhiwei Liu, Dajun Chen, Yong Li, Jiajun Bu
| Challenge: | Advanced GUI agents suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight GUI agent with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability . LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. |
MedINST: Meta Dataset of Biomedical Instructions (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical data and tasks require extensive preprocessing and standardization for effective use in training LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MedINST as a meta-dataset to evaluate LLMs' generalization ability. |
| Outcome: | The meta-dataset of biomedical instruction measures the generalization ability of LLMs across multiple open-domain tasks. |
Leveraging Adjective-Noun Phrasing Knowledge for Comparison Relation Prediction in Text-to-SQL (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for text-to-SQL do not explicitly introduce common knowledge to address comparison relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage adjective-noun phrasing knowledge mined from the web to predict comparison relations in text-to-SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the original and re-split Spider datasets on comparison relation prediction. |
Turn-Level Active Learning for Dialogue State Tracking (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to annotate dialogues require supervised training, which requires human workers to manually annotates dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a turn-level active learning framework to actively select dialogue turns to annotate . their approach can achieve comparable performance to traditional training approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to existing training approaches with significantly less annotated data. |
Benchmarking Large Language Models on Answering and Explaining Challenging Medical Questions (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical board exams or general clinical questions do not capture the complexity of real clinical cases. |
| Approach: | They construct two datasets that are structured as multiple-choice question-answering tasks accompanied by expert-written explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets are harder than previous benchmarks. |
SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement (2025.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Runnan Fang, Xiaobin Wang, Yuan Liang, Shuofei Qiao, Jialong Wu, Zekun Xi, Ningyu Zhang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Using Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents can enhance their understanding of environments and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine their action knowledge in the current environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and performs Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine action knowledge in the current environment. |
On-the-fly Denoising for Data Augmentation in Natural Language Understanding (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve data augmentation performance may introduce noisy data that impairs training. |
| Approach: | They propose an on-the-fly denoising technique that learns from soft augmented labels provided by an organic teacher model trained on the cleaner original dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on text classification and question-answering tasks on general augmentation techniques and prevents overfitting on noisy labels. |
Exploring the Hidden Reasoning Process of Large Language Models by Misleading Them (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Guanyu Chen, Peiyang Wang, Yizhou Jiang, Yuqian Liu, Chujie Zhao, Ying Fang, Tianren Zhang, Feng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing large language models can perform abstract reasoning tasks but are they actually engaging in rule-based reasoning beyond mere memorization? |
| Approach: | They propose a method to examine whether large language models perform abstract reasoning . they fine-tune the model to learn those contradictory rules and assess its generalization ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach examines whether large language models perform abstract reasoning by altering their original understanding of fundamental rules. |
Continual Named Entity Recognition without Catastrophic Forgetting (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Deep Research with Open-Domain Evaluation and Multi-Stage Guardrails for Safety (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wei-Chieh Huang, Henry Peng Zou, Yaozu Wu, Dongyuan Li, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Yangning Li, Angelo Zangari, Jizhou Guo, Chunyu Miao, Liancheng Fang, Langzhou He, Yinghui Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing deep research frameworks lack adequate evaluation procedures and stage-specific protections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework with open-domain evaluation and a stage-wise safety benchmark to address this oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves defense success rates by 16.53% while reducing over-refusal rates to approximately 6%. |
From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models focus more on the structure of summary, not on the personal and logical inconsistency problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to solve the problem of personal and logical inconsistency . they use an utterance rewriter to complete the ellipsis content of dialogue content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on both SAMSum and DialSum datasets. |
Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Systems with Large Language Models: A Survey of Recent Advances, Resources, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yaozu Wu, Dongyuan Li, Yankai Chen, Renhe Jiang, Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yangning Li, Liancheng Fang, Zhen Wang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are used to assist with driving decisions, but they face limitations in perception and computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey of LLM-based multi-agent ADSs and their applications . they analyze agent-human interactions in scenarios where LLM agents engage with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human intervention and improves safety and efficiency. |
Exploiting Position Bias for Robust Aspect Sentiment Classification (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aspect sentiment classification models suffer from the issue of robustness when domains of test and training data are different or test data is adversarially perturbed. |
| Approach: | They propose two mechanisms for capturing position bias to reduce the probability of mis-attending . they propose position-biased weight and position-based dropout to enhance existing models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches improve the robustness and effectiveness of existing models. |
OpenRLHF: A Ray-based Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Jian Hu, Xibin Wu, Wei Shen, Jason Klein Liu, Weixun Wang, Songlin Jiang, Haoran Wang, Hao Chen, Bin Chen, Wenkai Fang, null Xianyu, Yu Cao, Haotian Xu, Yiming Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RLHF frameworks face inference bottlenecks and complexity barriers restricting their accessibility for newcomers. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source RLHF framework that can be used to train large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior training efficiency with speedups ranging from 1.22 to 1.68 across different model sizes compared to state-of-the-art frameworks, while requiring significantly fewer lines of code for implementation. |
ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research has neglected instances-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates and comprehends prompt sensitivity in large language models. |
More than Minorities and Majorities: Understanding Multilateral Bias in Language Generation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on bias dataset construction and mitigation focus on one demographic group . in real-world applications, there are more than two demographic groups at risk of the same bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze and reduce biases across multiple demographic groups using a multi-demographic bias dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can mitigate biases among multiple demographic groups effectively, the authors show . |
OmniAlign-V: Towards Enhanced Alignment of MLLMs with Human Preference (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangyu Zhao, Shengyuan Ding, Zicheng Zhang, Haian Huang, Maosongcao Maosongcao, Jiaqi Wang, Weiyun Wang, Xinyu Fang, Wenhai Wang, Guangtao Zhai, Hua Yang, Haodong Duan, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing open-source multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) focus on enhancing foundational capabilities, leaving a significant gap in human preference alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 200K high-quality training samples featuring diverse images, complex questions, and varied response formats to improve MLLMs’ alignment with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset of 200K high-quality training samples improves human preference alignment while maintaining or enhancing performance on standard VQA benchmarks. |
Adversarial Self-Supervised Data-Free Distillation for Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation algorithms rely on the accessibility of the training dataset, which may be unavailable due to privacy issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-free distillation method for a pre-trained transformer-based model that uses plug & play Embedding Guessing to craft pseudo embeddings from the teacher's hidden knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is the first data-free distillation framework designed for NLP tasks. |
CTAP for Chinese:A Linguistic Complexity Feature Automatic Calculation Platform (2022.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tools to analyze linguistic complexity are limited and different because of different research purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Chinese component into CTAP to analyze linguistic complexity . they propose to use 196 linguistic complex indexes to calculate linguistic characteristics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed indexes are compared with three linguistic complexity tools for Chinese . the proposed index sets include four levels of 196 linguistic complex indexe . |
Open-Domain Conversational Question Answering with Historical Answers (2022.findings-aacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conversational question answering are limited due to the large number of candidate documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages historical answers to boost retrieval performance . they propose to use open-domain conversational question answering to solve these problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in extractive and generative reader settings on OR-QuAC dataset. |
Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite their growing importance, the quality of these datasets remains under-researched. |
| Approach: | They propose guidelines and recommendations to address quality issues in future dataset development . they find that macro-level issues are more prevalent in less institutionalized, often under-resourced languages . |
| Outcome: | The results highlight the need for proactive language planning and enhanced data quality control in the process of automatic speech recognition dataset creation. |