Papers by Fang Fang
Verified Critical Step Optimization for LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Critical Step Optimization (CSO) focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on GAIA-Text-103 and XBench-DeepSearch while requiring supervision at only 16% of trajectory steps. |
ICL CIPHERS: Quantifying ”Learning” in In-Context Learning via Substitution Ciphers (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that In-Context Learning operates in dual modes . however, disentangling these modes remains a challenging goal . |
| Approach: | They propose a class of task reformulations based on substitution ciphers borrowed from classic cryptography. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can solve tasks with a BIJECTIVE mapping, but it requires 'deciphering' the latent cipher. |
Plan-then-Seam: Towards Efficient Table-to-Text Generation (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work explicitly decomposes the generation process into content planning and surface generation stages, employing two autoregressive networks for them respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parallelelizable table-to-text model that produces outputs in parallel with one network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 3.0 5.6 times speedup for inference time, reducing 50% parameters, while maintaining as least comparable performance against strong two-stage table-to-text competitors. |
CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |
DiffuSpec: Unlocking Diffusion Language Models for Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) decoding in large language models is latency-bounded by strictly sequential token generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based drafter that proposes multi-token candidates and then verifies them in parallel by the target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed drafter generates multi-token proposals in a single forward pass while remaining compatible with standard AR verifiers. |
OmniCharacter: Towards Immersive Role-Playing Agents with Seamless Speech-Language Personality Interaction (2025.acl-long)
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Haonan Zhang, Run Luo, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Ting-En Lin, Pengpeng Zeng, Qiang Qu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on replicating dialogues in textual form, neglecting the role’s voice traits as a crucial effect in interaction, which tends to be more immersive experiences in realistic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a first seamless speech-language personality interaction model to achieve immersive RPAs with low latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits role-specific personality traits and vocal traits throughout the interaction, enabling a mixture of speech and language responses. |
Reinforced Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Answering (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| 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. |
Class Name Guided Out-of-Scope Intent Classification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Chandan Gautam, Sethupathy Parameswaran, Aditya Kane, Yuan Fang, Savitha Ramasamy, Suresh Sundaram, Sunil Sahu, Xiaoli Li
| Challenge: | SCOOS leverages semantic cues embedded in class labels to improve classification accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to create a compact feature space around class label semantics . they use a shared latent space between ID features and class names to minimize losses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for out-of-scope intent detection and ID intent classification. |
ConstraintChecker: A Plugin for Large Language Models to Reason on Commonsense Knowledge Bases (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning over Commonsense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) is a way to acquire new commonsense knowledge based on reference knowledge in original CSKB and external prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a plugin to provide and check explicit relational constraints over prompting techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing prompting techniques and CSKB reasoning. |
VoxpopuliTTS: a large-scale multilingual TTS corpus for zero-shot speech generation (2025.coling-main)
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Wenrui Liu, Jionghao Bai, Xize Cheng, Jialong Zuo, Ziyue Jiang, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Xiaoda Yang, Qian Yang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual TTS datasets are limited in speech generation fields due to lack of quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 30,000 hours of high-quality speech data across 3 languages . they filter out low-quality text-text pairs and concatenate short transcripts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset comprises 30,000 hours of high-quality speech data, across 3 languages with multiple speakers and styles, suitable for various speech tasks such as TTS and ASR. |
EvoAgentX: An Automated Framework for Evolving Agentic Workflows (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing MAS frameworks often require manual workflow configuration and lack native support for dynamic evolution and performance optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source platform that automates generation, execution, and evolutionary optimization of multi-agent workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform automates generation, execution, and evolutionary optimization of multi-agent workflows. |
Thinking with DistilQwen: A Tale of Four Distilled Reasoning and Reward Model Series (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | In the rapidly evolving landscape of large language models, the need for efficient reasoning models has become increasingly urgent. |
| Approach: | They extend the Qwen model family by introducing four model series specifically designed for industrial applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform previous models in multiple benchmarks and provide scalable training and inference functionality on the Alibaba Cloud PAI platform. |
GQLBench: A Large-Scale Cross-Domain, Cross-Dialect Benchmark for NL2GQL (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite growing interest in NL2GQL, benchmarking progress has been constrained by the lack of resources that are simultaneously large-scale, cross-domain, and cross-dialect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates NL2SQL-to-NL2GQL conversion with graph-native data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports execution-based evaluation on Cypher and ISO-GQL, covering hundreds of graph databases and over 20k natural language questions for each dialect. |
mPresenter: An Agentic Framework for Generating Multilingual Presentation Videos from Scientific Papers (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Paper2Video systems are monolingual and often rely on single-pass pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual agentic Paper2Video system that decomposes the task into planning, audience-oriented critique, layout-aware slide generation, and multilingual figure interpretation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves question-answering accuracy relative to previous systems while maintaining affordable cost and latency. |
CART: A Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval Framework With Coarse-To-Fine Semantic Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Jieming Zhu, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Wenrui Liu, Gang Wang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Cross-modal retrieval tasks are used to retrieve data from one modality or another based on a query from another modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative cross-modal retrieval framework based on coarse-to-fine semantic modeling . they propose combining K-Means and RQ-VAE to discretize multimodal data into token sequences that support autoregressive generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves excellent performance and efficiency in multimodal retrieval tasks. |
TC–RAG: Turing–Complete RAG’s Case study on Medical LLM Systems (2025.acl-long)
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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)
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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)
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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. |
REALM: A Dataset of Real-World LLM Use Cases (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM adoption and their social implications lack empirical grounding, weakening their validity. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a dataset of over 94,000 LLM use cases collected from Reddit and news articles to provide insights into LLM adoption across different domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 94,000 LLM use cases collected from Reddit and news articles. |
Bridging the Gap between Synthetic and Authentic Images for Multimodal Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models require associated image with input sentence, which is difficult to satisfy at inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to use synthetic and authentic images to generate translations using text-to-image generation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on En-De and En-Fr datasets while remaining independent of authentic images during inference. |
Retrieval Augmentation for Commonsense Reasoning: A Unified Approach (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving encyclopedic knowledge lack a large corpus and effective commonsense retriever. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for retrieval-augmented commonsense reasoning with a large commonsensense corpus and a commonseense retriever. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Neural Machine Translation with Phrase-Level Universal Visual Representations (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal machine translation methods require paired input of source sentence and image, which makes them suffer from shortage of sentence-image pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level retrieval-based method to get visual information from existing sentence-image data sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on multiple MMT datasets, especially when the textual context is limited. |
IntentCoding: Amplifying User Intent in Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | IntentCoding captures the influence of user intent by masking out the intent, and integrates seamlessly with existing decoding procedures. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy that captures the influence of user intent by masking out the intent and applies a multi-strength ensemble mechanism to amplify the effect of user intention during generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves both constraint satisfaction and functional correctness compared to greedy decoding approaches. |
Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach for Dialogue Policy Learning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is the main dialogue policy learning method in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach to dialogue policy learning . they propose evaluating the quality of experiences generated by the world model using a discriminator . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the effectiveness and efficiency of dialogue policy learning by 20% with fewer human-machine interactions. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Annotations Are Not All You Need: A Cross-modal Knowledge Transfer Network for Unsupervised Temporal Sentence Grounding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on temporal sentence grounding rely on expensive video-query paired annotations . despite this, there are no ground-truth annotations in the current work . |
| Approach: | They propose to use paired video-query and segment boundary annotations to generate temporal sentence grounding without training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing unsupervised methods and beats supervised ones on two challenging datasets. |
From Trade-off to Synergy: A Versatile Symbiotic Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking methods face limitations that hinder their effectiveness in diverse and adversarial scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbiotic watermarking framework with three strategies: serial, parallel, and hybrid. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. |
Complex Reasoning over Logical Queries on Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (2024.acl-long)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
Recall with Reasoning: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Mamba’s Long-Context Memory and Extrapolation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing long-context memory methods such as Mamba struggle with long-constituency when the length of the processed text exceeds the model's training length. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses chain-of-thought summarization to teach Mamba to actively recall and reason over long contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LONGMEMEVAL and HELMET show that RwR outperforms existing long-term memory methods while preserving short-context capabilities. |
Your Language Model Can Secretly Write Like Humans: Contrastive Paraphrase Attacks on LLM-Generated Text Detectors (2025.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Enhancing Emotional Support Conversations: A Framework for Dynamic Knowledge Filtering and Persona Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue models struggle to interpret context accurately due to irrelevant or misclassified knowledge, limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically filters relevant commonsense knowledge and extracts personalized information to improve empathetic dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in coherence, emotional understanding, and response relevance on the ESConv dataset. |
HTMuon: Improving Muon via Heavy-Tailed Spectral Correction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Muon’s orthogonalized update rule suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes the training along noise-dominated directions. |
| Approach: | They propose to preserve Muon's ability to capture parameter interdependencies while producing heavier-tailed updates and inducing heavier-tail weight spectra. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes training along noise-dominated directions. |
Controlling Distributional Bias in Multi-Round LLM Generation via KL-Optimized Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods focus on single-round inference, but this view is problematic in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that couples Steering Token Calibration with Semantic Alignment to ensure that LLMs are correctly aligned across gender, race, and sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in achieving precise distributional control in attribute generation tasks. |
TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network (2025.emnlp-main)
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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. |
LLaMA-Omni 2: LLM-based Real-time Spoken Chatbot with Autoregressive Streaming Speech Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LLaMA-Omni 2 is a series of speech language models (SpeechLMs) based on large language models. |
| Approach: | They introduce a series of speech language models capable of real-time speech interaction . LLaMA-Omni 2 trains on 200K multi-turn speech dialogue samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed speech language models surpass state-of-the-art models on spoken question answering and speech instruction. |
CLHA: A Simple Yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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Feiteng Fang, Liang Zhu, Xi Feng, Jinchang Hou, Qixuan Zhao, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention from academic and industrial communities due to their outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment to evaluate the noise within the data and dynamically adjust the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses other algorithms in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used dataset "Helpful and Harmless" |
Multi-Hop Question Generation via Dual-Perspective Keyword Guidance (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work fails to fully utilize the guiding potential of keywords and neglect to differentiate the distinct roles of question-specific and document-specific keywords. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-perspective keyword-guided framework that integrates question and document keywords into the multi-hop question generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates question and document keywords into the multi-hop question generation process. |
RFS-Guard: Detecting Reasoning Hallucinations via Cross-Phase Routing Focus in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate intermediate reasoning traces before the final answer, yet they remain vulnerable to reasoning hallucinations such as subtle arithmetic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Routing Focus Score (RFS) that measures how strongly cross-step attention routing aligns with semantic proximity derived from hidden-state cosine similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects and localizes hallucinations without external tools or repeated sampling. |
Video2Commonsense: Generating Commonsense Descriptions to Enrich Video Captioning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Observable changes in the scene are reflected in captions, but actions are also linked to social aspects such as intentions, effects, and attributes that describe the agent. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate captions from videos that describe latent aspects of the human agent's actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to describe latent aspects of human actions in video clips and answer questions about videos. |
Dynamic Gazetteer Integration in Multilingual Models for Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) models trained on CoNLL do not transfer well to other domains, even within the same language. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level gating layer to augment pre-trained multilingual transformers with gazetteers containing named entities (NE) from a target language or domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on cross-lingual transfer with an F1 score of 92.92 for English and an average of 89.43 across all languages in CoNLL. |
Dual Adversarial Neural Transfer for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is an important step in most natural language processing (NLP) applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-adversarial neural transfer method for addressing low-resource Named Entity Recognition (NER) they propose 'Generalized Resource-Adversarial Discriminator' and 'accidental training' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on low-resource Named Entity Recognition (NER) with two variants, i.e., DATNet-F and DATNET-P, and adversarial training is adopted to boost model generalization. |
Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rewrite context-dependent queries lack sufficient information for optimal retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models (LLMs) as query rewriters to generate informative queries through well-designed instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on the QReCC dataset compared to human rewrites . |
Reliably Bounding False Positives: A Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus excessively on detection accuracy, neglecting the societal risks posed by high false positive rates (FPRs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Conformal Prediction framework that constrains the upper bound of false positive rates and introduces a real-time detection framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false positive rates and improves detection performance. |
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Zhang, Xu Yang, Xiao Yang, Bowen Xian, Qizheng Li, Shikai Fang, Jingyuan Li, Jian Wang, Minrui Xu, Yuge Zhang, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering rely on tree search to rank candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a limited budget on a single GPU. |
Beyond Single-Shot: Multi-step Tool Retrieval via Query Planning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are evolving from text generation into integration within agentic workflows . tools such as APIs, databases, and software tools are expanding rapidly . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that models retrieval as iterative query planning . instead of single-shot matching, ToolQP decomposes instructions into sub-tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and robustness across retrievers. |
KARPA: A Training-free Method of Adapting Knowledge Graph as References for Large Language Model’s Reasoning Path Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) are limited by step-by-step decision-making on KGs, or require fine-tuning or pre-training on specific KG. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harnesses the global planning abilities of large language models (LLMs) for efficient and accurate KG reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in KGQA tasks, delivering both high efficiency and accuracy. |
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis (2020.tacl-1)
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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 . |
Decoding by Contrasting Knowledge: Enhancing Large Language Model Confidence on Edited Facts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context knowledge editing (ICE) is currently the most effective method for knowledge editing, but it is constrained by the black-box modeling of LLMs and lacks interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decode new knowledge by comparing logits with unedited knowledge to improve the accuracy of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLaMA3-8B-instruct on MQuAKE by up to 219%. |
Language-Codec: Bridging Discrete Codec Representations and Speech Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Jialong Zuo, Ziyue Jiang, Dingdong Wang, Hanting Wang, Hai Huang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing gaps between discrete acoustic codecs and downstream speech language models . initial channel of codebooks contains excessive information, making it difficult to generate tokens from weakly supervised signals such as text. |
| Approach: | They propose a discrete acoustic codec for generating acustic tokens from weakly supervised signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language-codec outperforms competing audio compression algorithms and validates on downstream speech language models. |
An End-to-End Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Language Understanding (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning data representations using contrastive learning perform data augmentation and contrastive training separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs data augmentation and contrastive learning end-to-end . they propose to combine data augmented with text encoders to optimize for contrastive training . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GLUE and Gururangan datasets show the proposed framework is effective in NLP. |
LightningDOT: Pre-training Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Real-Time Image-Text Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| 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. |
DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories (2024.findings-acl)
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Jia Li, Ge Li, Yunfei Zhao, Yongmin Li, Huanyu Liu, Hao Zhu, Lecheng Wang, Kaibo Liu, Zheng Fang, Lanshen Wang, Jiazheng Ding, Xuanming Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Yihong Dong, Zhi Jin, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Gu, Mengfei Yang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level benchmark named DevEval to evaluate LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the LLMs perform better in real-world code repositories than existing benchmarks. |
Generalization in Text-based Games via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
ToxiTrace: Gradient-Aligned Training for Explainable Chinese Toxicity Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing toxic content detection methods focus on sentence-level classification but fail to provide readable and contiguous toxic evidence spans. |
| Approach: | They propose an explainability-oriented method for Chinese toxic content detection methods . they refine saliency cues into fine-grained toxic spans with lightweight LLM guidance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves classification accuracy and toxic span extraction while preserving efficient encoder-based inference and producing more coherent explanations. |
Enhancing Noise Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Adaptive Adversarial Training (2024.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Weakly-Supervised Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Joint Aspect-Sentiment Topic Embedding (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect-based sentiment analysis of review text use only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly-supervised approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis which uses only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates quality joint topics and outperforms baselines significantly on benchmark datasets. |
DOSE: Data Selection for Multi-Modal LLMs via Off-the-Shelf Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| 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)
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Shipeng Li, Zhiqin Yang, Shikun Li, Xiaobo Xia, Hengyu Liu, Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Dong Fang, Ying Tai, Zhe Peng
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a key technique for enhancing LLMs’ reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-alignment-based method which intelligently selects the learnable and representative training reasoning data for RLVR post-training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly reduces training data requirements while improving performance. |
A Semi-supervised Scalable Unified Framework for E-commerce Query Classification (2025.acl-industry)
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Chunyuan Yuan, Chong Zhang, Zhen Fang, Ming Pang, Xue Jiang, Changping Peng, Zhangang Lin, Ching Law
| Challenge: | Existing query classification methods rely on posterior click behavior to construct training samples, resulting in insufficient prior information for modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised scaleable unified framework that integrates enhanced modules to unify query classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in offline and online A/B experiments. |
Cluster-Former: Clustering-based Sparse Transformer for Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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| 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)
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| 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 . |
StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Cheng Jiayang, Lin Qiu, Tsz Chan, Tianqing Fang, Weiqi Wang, Chunkit Chan, Dongyu Ru, Qipeng Guo, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning . despite its importance, there has been limited research on story analogies . |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale story-level analogy corpus with 24K story pairs . they find that the tasks are incredibly difficult for large language models such as ChatGPT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory. |
Exploring Multimodal Relation Extraction of Hierarchical Tabular Data with Multi-task Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies overlook the need of mining relations among multiple columns rather than just the semantic relation between two specific columns in real-world practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Thought distillation framework with self-correction mechanism to enhance MLLMs’ reasoning capabilities without increasing parameter scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines on wide datasets. |
A Top-down Neural Architecture towards Text-level Parsing of Discourse Rhetorical Structure (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Text-level discourse parsing of discourse rhetorical structure (DRS) is a fundamental research topic in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-down neural architecture for text-level discourse parsing . they cast the parser as a recursive split point ranking task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed top-down approach is more suitable for text-level discourse parsing. |
TABGEN-ICL: Residual-Aware In-Context Example Selection for Tabular Data Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tabular data generation require fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a new in-context learning framework to prompt a fixed LLM with in-constitut examples to enhance the in-text learning ability of LLMs for tabular data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms random selection strategies on five real-world tabular datasets and reduces error rate by 42.2% on fidelity metric. |
C-World: A Computer Use Agent Environment Creator (2026.acl-long)
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Ziqiao Xi, Shuang Liang, Qi Liu, Jiaqing Zhang, Letian Peng, Fang Nan, Meshal Nayim, Tianhui Zhang, Rishika Mundada, Lianhui Qin, Biwei Huang, Kun Zhou
| Challenge: | C-World enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on 119k samples and achieves Spearman = 0.883 ranking correlation with real execution. |
SpatialWebAgent: Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Spatial Information Extraction and Map Grounding (2025.acl-demo)
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| 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. |
A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for conversational understanding rely on static ontologies, limiting their ability to handle new and unforeseen user needs. |
| Approach: | They propose to review the state-of-the-art techniques in OnExp for conversational understanding and highlight emerging frontiers . they categorize existing literature into three main areas: (1) New Intent Discovery, (2) New Slot-Value Discovery, and (3) Joint OnExp. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods highlight several emerging frontiers in OnExp to improve agent performance in real-world scenarios and discuss their corresponding challenges. |
Arbitrary Time Information Modeling via Polynomial Approximation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs lack rich inference patterns and the limited ability to model arbitrary timestamps continuously. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph-based temporal representation method that decomposes time information by polynomials and then enhances the model's capability to represent arbitrary timestamps flexibly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can encode arbitrary time information or even unseen timestamps while capturing rich inference patterns and higher-arity relations of the knowledge base. |
Attack as Defense: Safeguarding Large Vision-Language Models from Jailbreaking by Adversarial Attacks (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | adversarial vulnerabilities in vision-language systems pose a challenge to reliability of large systems . typographic manipulations and adversarial perturbations can bypass language model defenses . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that embeds perturbations in vision to disrupt attacks . they use cross-modal interactions to enhance adversarial robustness through perturbations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces attack success rates for typographic attacks and adversarial perturbations by integrating visual defenses into the model. |
Noise-powered Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Representation Framework (2025.coling-main)
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| 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. |
Revealing and Enhancing Core Visual Regions: Harnessing Internal Attention Dynamics for Hallucination Mitigation in LVLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods are vulnerable to the attention sink phenomenon . Existing methods include contrastive decoding and auxiliary expert models . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free attention intervention that constructs a PAD map to identify semantically core visual regions and applies per-head Median Absolute Deviation Scaling to adaptively control the intervention strength. |
| Outcome: | The proposed intervention improves visual grounding and reduces hallucinations on multiple LVLMs and benchmarks. |
What does it take to bake a cake? The RecipeRef corpus and anaphora resolution in procedural text (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current research on anaphora resolution is mostly based on declarative text, such as chemical patents or instruction manuals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for anaphora annotation for the chemical domain for modeling anamorphic phenomena in recipes and chemical patents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves resolution of anaphora in recipes, suggesting transferability of general procedural knowledge. |
Chinese Paragraph-level Discourse Parsing with Global Backward and Local Reverse Reading (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods on discourse parsing in English suffer from long discourse units and fewer explicit connectives. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two reading modes to construct Chinese paragraph level discourse trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on Chinese discourse trees. |
TRACE the Evidence: Constructing Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning Chains for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrievers are not perfect and often include irrelevant documents in the retrieved set. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct knowledge-grounded reasoning chains from retrieved documents to integrate supporting evidence into RAG models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average performance improvement of 14.03% on three multi-hop QA datasets. |
CKnowEdit: A New Chinese Knowledge Editing Dataset for Linguistics, Facts, and Logic Error Correction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
If an LLM Were a Character, Would It Know Its Own Story? Evaluating Lifelong Learning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Siqi Fan, Xiusheng Huang, Yiqun Yao, Xuezhi Fang, Kang Liu, Peng Han, Shuo Shang, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) fail to capture these dynamics, focusing on static, open-ended evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess lifelong learning in large language models . they use two episodic datasets rich in narrative structure and character interactions . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLMs show that non-parametric methods outperform parametric ones in managing stateful learning. |
Language-to-Code Translation with a Single Labeled Example (2024.emnlp-main)
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Kaj Bostrom, Harsh Jhamtani, Hao Fang, Sam Thomson, Richard Shin, Patrick Xia, Benjamin Van Durme, Jason Eisner, Jacob Andreas
| Challenge: | In-Context Inverse Programming (ICIP) bootstraps a language-to-code system using mostly unlabeled programs written using a potentially unfamiliar library or API. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for bootstrapping a language-to-code system using mostly unlabeled programs written using a potentially unfamiliar library or API. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines across nine domains and 100 examples in a “nearly unsupervised” setting. |
Enhancing Entity Boundary Detection for Better Chinese Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-short)
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| 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. |
3DS: Medical Domain Adaptation of LLMs via Decomposed Difficulty-based Data Selection (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hongxin Ding, Yue Fang, Runchuan Zhu, Xinke Jiang, Jinyang Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Weibin Liao, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Effective domain adaptation typically involves supervised fine-tuning on carefully selected instruction-tuned data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-centric data selection framework that aligns data selection with the model’s knowledge distribution to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by up to 2.97% accuracy in the healthcare domain. |
Adversarial Learning for Discourse Rhetorical Structure Parsing (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing top-down discourse rhetorical structure parsers make local decisions and ignore global parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transform gold standard and predicted constituency trees into tree diagrams with two color channels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on RST-DT and CDTB corpora and can leverage global context. |
On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Haochen Shi, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Liyu Zhang, Wei Fan, Jiaxin Bai, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Conceptualization is a fundamental element of human cognition and plays a pivotal role in generalizable reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized. |
| Outcome: | The proposed categorization of different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized . |
TLSA: LLM-Guided Text-Label Space Alignment with Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Enhancing Reasoning Abilities of Small LLMs with Cognitive Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to distill chain-of-thought (CoT) results from large language reasoning models (LRMs) to small models are ineffective and require substantial amount of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Critique-Rethink-Verify system for training small language reasoning models that can be critiquized according to the cognitive capabilities of smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms other methods on challenging reasoning benchmarks. |
Evaluating Fairness in Large Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Demographic Attributes and Prompts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in open-world visual understanding, but it is not clear how they address demographic biases in real life. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assess visual fairness in LVLMs by question-answering/classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves transparency and offers a scalable solution for fairness mitigation. |
DVI-DTM: Dual-View Representation Learning for Interpretable Short Text Dynamic Topic Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dynamic topic modeling methods face semantic ambiguity and interpretation ambiguities when applied to short texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-View representation learning-based Interpretable short text Dynamic Topic Model to address semantic ambiguity and interpretation ambiguities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in topic alignment and dynamic topic quality metrics while producing highly interpretable topic descriptions. |
Modeling Adversarial Attack on Pre-trained Language Models as Sequential Decision Making (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown strong potential in various downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to model adversarial attack task as a sequential decision-making problem where the whole attack process is sequential with two decision- making problems, i.e., word finder and word substitution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the highest attack success rate with a comparable modification rate and semantic similarity to attack fine-tuned BERT. |
LEGO-ABSA: A Prompt-based Task Assemblable Unified Generative Framework for Multi-task Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative methods focus on a single task at a time. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified generative multi-task framework that can solve multiple ABSA tasks . they propose to control the type of task prompts consisting of multiple element prompts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results in almost all ABSA tasks and competitive results in task transfer scenarios. |
A Mixed-Language Multi-Document News Summarization Dataset and a Graphs-Based Extract-Generate Model (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on news summarization focuses on single-language single-document (SLSD), single-linguistic multi-document or cross-language multi-doc (CLSD) however, in real-world scenarios, news articles often involve multiple documents in different languages, i.e., mixed-language MLMD. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-language multi-document news summarization dataset with four different languages and 10,992 source document cluster and target summary pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains four different languages and 10,992 source document cluster and target summary pairs. |
NER-guided Comprehensive Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging task in natural language processing due to its complex taxonomic label hierarchy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompts to model hierarchical text classification (HTC) they propose to introduce conditional random fields and Global Pointer to establish hierarchic dependencies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on three public datasets. |
Two-Stage Regularization-Based Structured Pruning for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Mingkuan Feng, Jinyang Wu, Siyuan Liu, Shuai Zhang, Hongjian Fang, Ruihan Jin, Feihu Che, Pengpeng Shao, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao
| Challenge: | Structural pruning is a promising solution for large language models . prior structured pruning methods remove unimportant parameters based on certain metrics . |
| Approach: | They propose a structural pruning method that iteratively learns the weights of transformer layers by adding their l1-norm to the loss function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning method outperforms strong layer-wise pruning methods without requiring retraining. |
EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary (2025.acl-industry)
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Yaozhen Liang, Xiao Liu, Jiajun Yu, Zhouhua Fang, Qunsheng Zou, Linghan Zheng, Yong Li, Zhiwei Liu, Haishuai Wang
| Challenge: | Existing document question answering methods reduce inference costs and input tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context question answering (LC) methods achieve higher accuracy by processing entire documents, but at the cost of increased computational Corresponding authors. |
EDTC: A Corpus for Discourse-Level Topic Chain Parsing (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Discourse analysis is a fundamental part of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-level topic chain parsing system which can be automated . they propose lexical cohesion modeling instead of lexically measuring topic structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is robust and reliable, and can provide high reliability and low confidence scores. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Faithful and Controllable Dialogue Response Generation with Dataflow Transduction and Constrained Decoding (2023.findings-acl)
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Hao Fang, Anusha Balakrishnan, Harsh Jhamtani, John Bufe, Jean Crawford, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Adam Pauls, Jason Eisner, Jacob Andreas, Dan Klein
| Challenge: | In a task-oriented dialogue system, response generation is a conditional language model, but effective dialogue agents must balance fluent generation with stricter constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-based content selection model that transduces a dialogue agent’s actions and their results into context-free grammars representing the space of contextually acceptable responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms both rule-based and learned approaches in human evaluations of fluency, relevance, and truthfulness. |
Convolutional Neural Network for Universal Sentence Embeddings (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that averaging word embeddings is effective for NLP but these models represent a sentence only in terms of features of words or uni-grams. |
| Approach: | They propose a CNN-based model that uses both features of words and n-grams to encode sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models in transfer learning setting and exceeds state of the art in supervised learning setting by initializing the parameters with the pre-trained sentence embeddings. |
Infinity-Parser: Layout-Aware Reinforcement Learning with High-quality Document Parsing Dataset (2026.findings-acl)
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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)
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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)
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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. |
DiVISe: Direct Visual-Input Speech Synthesis Preserving Speaker Characteristics And Intelligibility (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Video-to-speech (V2S) synthesis requires acoustic hints to accurately reconstruct both speech content and speaker characteristics from video clips alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a video-to-speech (V2S) model that predicts Mel-spectrograms directly from video frames. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in acoustic intelligibility and preserves speaker-specific characteristics. |
Watermarking Large Language Models: An Unbiased and Low-risk Method (2025.acl-long)
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| 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. |
WebRollback: Enhancing Web Agents with Explicit Rollback Mechanisms (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have adopted a greedy one-way search strategy to deal with dynamic web environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a rollback mechanism into web agents to allow them to revert back to a previous state in navigation trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to revert back to a previous state in its navigation trajectory, allowing the models to directly control the search process. |
Learning Auxiliary Tasks Improves Reference-Free Hallucination Detection in Open-Domain Long-Form Generation (2025.acl-short)
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Chengwei Qin, Wenxuan Zhou, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Nanshu Wang, Tengyu Xu, Alexander Radovic, Eryk Helenowski, Arya Talebzadeh, Aditya Tayade, Sinong Wang, Shafiq Joty, Han Fang, Hao Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucination in long-form tasks focus on limited domains or rely heavily on external fact-checking tools, which may not always be available. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that augments fine-tuning with an auxiliary task for the model to jointly learn with the main task of hallucination detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for detecting hallucination in open-domain long-form generation and is more accurate than random guessing. |
Does Reasoning Introduce Bias? A Study of Social Bias Evaluation and Mitigation in LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have enabled automatic generation of chain-of-thought reasoning . however, when reasoning steps reflect social stereotypes, they can reinforce harmful associations and lead to misleading conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects how model predictions change across incremental reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a stereotype-free baseline and improves accuracy. |
Exons-Detect: Identifying and Amplifying Exonic Tokens via Hidden-State Discrepancy for Robust AI-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated text detection assume uniform token contributions, making them less robust under short sequences or localized token modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method for AI-generated text detection based on an exon-aware token reweighting perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and robustness to adversarial attacks and varying input lengths. |
Retrievals Can Be Detrimental: Unveiling the Backdoor Vulnerability of Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Compositional Generalization for Neural Semantic Parsing via Span-level Supervised Attention (2021.naacl-main)
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Pengcheng Yin, Hao Fang, Graham Neubig, Adam Pauls, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Yu Su, Sam Thomson, Jacob Andreas
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to compositional generalization in semantic parsers focus on word-level alignments, but they focus on spans. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-level supervised attention loss that improves compositional generalization in semantic parsers by focusing on spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three benchmarks of compositional generalization. |
AudioVSR: Enhancing Video Speech Recognition with Audio Data (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiaoda Yang, Xize Cheng, Jiaqi Duan, Hongshun Qiu, Minjie Hong, Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Zhiqing Hong, Zhimeng Zhang, Tao Jin
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown poor performance with non-Indo-European languages . previous work primarily utilizes video information to build VSR models . |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model for data inflation that integrates synthetic data with authentic visual data to enhance the VSR model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the audio-visual alignment problem in audio-video tasks. |
CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapy (2025.naacl-long)
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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)
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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. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing direct speech-to-speech translation models require text supervision during training, which is not feasible for numerous unwritten languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive (NAR) model that generates discrete units from the source speech and employs a unit-based vocoder to synthesize the target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves translation quality comparable to the autoregressive model while preserving up to 26.81 decoding speedup. |
KELE: Residual Knowledge Erasure for Enhanced Multi-hop Reasoning in Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| 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)
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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)
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| 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. |
Aspect-to-Scope Oriented Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) focus on mining syntactic or semantic information, which suffers from noisy interference when multiple aspects exist in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a scope-assisted multi-view graph contrastive learning framework that captures correlation and difference between aspect and syntactic/semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five benchmark datasets and verifies its effectiveness and robustness. |
TASA: Deceiving Question Answering Models by Twin Answer Sentences Attack (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial models rely on keyword matching and ignore relevant contextual relations for answer prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use keyword matching to attack model with two biases that rely on a perturbed answer sentence and a distracting answer sentence to misguide model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. |
Revisiting Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Model Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) compromises the effectiveness of large language models during fine-tuning, yet the underlying causes of CF remain largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to flatten the model loss landscape to mitigate CF by flattening the loss landscape. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method complements existing anti-forgetting strategies, further enhancing the resistance of LLMs to CF. |
Data-Efficient Concept Extraction from Pre-trained Language Models for Commonsense Explanation Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract concepts from pre-trained language models are not suitable for commonsense explanation generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract the key explanation concept from pre-trained language models by fine-tuning it with 20% training data and using a metric to evaluate the retrieved concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves evaluation metrics over pre-trained language models and the existing models. |
HyKGE: A Hypothesis Knowledge Graph Enhanced RAG Framework for Accurate and Reliable Medical LLMs Responses (2025.acl-long)
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Xinke Jiang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Rihong Qiu, Yue Fang, Zhiyuan Wang, Jinyi Tang, Hongxin Ding, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Recent approaches suffer from insufficient and repetitive knowledge retrieval, tedious and time-consuming query parsing, and monotonous knowledge utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework which leverages LLMs’ powerful reasoning capacity to compensate for the incompleteness of user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining the rich knowledge of LLMs with Hypothesis Outputs. |
Placing Puzzle Pieces Where They Matter: A Question Augmentation Framework for Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) training on easy problems can cause overfitting and pass@k degradation, while training on hard problems yields sparse reward signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a hint injection framework that strategically identifies and provides critical reasoning steps during training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on six mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed framework achieves comparable average performance to 32B baselines while preserving pass@k diversity across all k values. |
Efficient Training for Cross-lingual Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Currently, large language models (LLMs) focus on the text modality, making speech modeling difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual speech language model that trains on discrete speech tokens to achieve cross-modal and cross-linguistic alignment through continual pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment through continual pre-training. |
Neural Extractive Summarization with Hierarchical Attentive Heterogeneous Graph Network (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive summarization methods focus on balancing salience and redundancy between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical attentive heterogeneous graph for text summarization that models sentences . they propose to iteratively refine the sentence representations and deliver the labels by message passing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing extractive summarization methods on large corpus. |
A Distance-Aware Multi-Task Framework for Conversational Discourse Parsing (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on graph-based and transition-based discourse parsing, but no study has investigated the advantages of both paradigms for conversational discourse paring. |
| Approach: | They propose a distance-aware multi-task framework that incorporates the strengths of transition-based paradigms to facilitate conversational discourse parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the graph-based paradigm on long-distance dependency links. |
D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, WenJie Lu, Yuqi Wang, Jinyuan Li, Song Cao, He Cui, Tengfei Tian, Xuelin Zhang, Haotian Luo, Di Sun, Jun Fang, Hua Chai, Naiqiang Tan, Gang Pan
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative framework that leverages a fine-grained tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves SOTA among open-source general models on AndroidWorld and ScreenSpot-V2 . it leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process . |
DualGuard: Dual-stream Large Language Model Watermarking Defense against Paraphrase and Spoofing Attack (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking algorithms focus on defending against paraphrase and piggyback spoofing attacks, which can inject harmful content, compromise reliability, and undermine trust in attribution. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm capable of defending against paraphrase and spoofing attacks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models and language models show that DualGuard is the first watermarking algorithm capable of defending against both paraphrase and spoofing attacks. |
Do LLMs Know Tool Irrelevance? Demystifying Structural Alignment Bias in Tool Invocations (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools, but in practice, they are often exposed to tools that are irrelevant to the user’s query, in which case the desired behavior is to refrain from invocations. |
| Approach: | They propose a new dataset that decouples structural alignment from semantic relevance and propose rebalancing strategies that effectively mitigates structural alignment bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach effectively mitigates structural alignment bias without degrading general tool-use capabilities. |
Contrastive Distillation on Intermediate Representations for Language Model Compression (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress language models use a simple L_2 loss to distill knowledge in the intermediate representations of a large BERT model to a smaller one. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses knowledge distillation to distill knowledge through intermediate layers of the teacher via a contrastive objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the GLUE benchmark. |
VocabTailor: Dynamic Vocabulary Selection for Downstream Tasks in Small Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing static vocabulary pruning designs that reduce memory usage suffer from rigid, one-size-fits-all designs that cause information loss during the prefill stage and lack flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled dynamic vocabulary selection framework that addresses memory constraints through offloading embedding and implements a hybrid static-dynamic vocabulary selection strategy for LM Head. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces memory usage by 99% with minimal or no degradation in performance. |
Listening Like Humans: Semantics-Guided Noise-Robust Multimodal Speech Recognition (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principles (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for improving LLMs in simulations are limited due to privacy concerns and limited domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that elicits qualitative feedback from a domain-expert and transforms it into a set of principles that govern an LLM-prompted roleplay. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline shows a 30% improvement in response quality and principle following for the downstream task. |
GenPilot: A Multi-Agent System for Test-Time Prompt Optimization in Image Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Wen Ye, Zhaocheng Liu, Gui Yuwei, Tingyu Yuan, Yunyue Su, Bowen Fang, Chaoyang Zhao, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-to-image synthesis lack systematic error analysis and refinement strategies, resulting in limited reliability and effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play multi-agent system called GenPilot that integrates error analysis, clustering-based adaptive exploration, fine-grained verification and a memory module for iterative optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves text consistency and structural coherence on images with a plug-and-play system. |
CESRec: Constructing Pseudo Interactions for Sequential Recommendation via Conversational Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS) rely on collaborative filtering signals and fail to capture real-time user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates the long-term preference modeling of SRS with the real-time preference elicitation of CRS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the long-term preference modeling of SRS with the real-time preference elicitation of CRS. |
ChatHLS: Towards Systematic Design Automation and Optimization for High-Level Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a hardware design tool that can be used to design hardware from C-like languages, but its widespread adoption is limited by strict coding constraints and design-specific optimizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent HLS design framework that leverages specialized LLMs for automated debugging and directive tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-3-pro in debugging and speedups across various HLS kernels and neural network accelerators. |
DARA: Decomposition-Alignment-Reasoning Autonomous Language Agent for Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer questions over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) are not available for KGQA. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve the neural-symbolic reasoning capabilities of language agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) they show that DARA can be efficiently trained with a small number of high-quality reasoning trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms in-context learning-based agents with GPT-4 and alternative fine-tuned agents across different benchmarks. |
Rethinking LLM Watermark Detection in Black-Box Settings: A Non-Intrusive Third-Party Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing secret-key schemes tightly couple detection with injection . this dependency creates a fundamental barrier for real-world governance . |
| Approach: | et al. introduce a black-box framework for non-intrusive, third-party watermark verification . they propose a proxy model to amplify watermark-relevant signals and complementary relative measurements . |
| Outcome: | a new framework decouples detection from injection and assesses alignment of query text with watermark distributions. |
Beyond Coarse Labels: Fine-Grained Problem Augmentation and Multi-Dimensional Feedback for Emotional Support Conversation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing ESC datasets often use coarse-grained problem categories, limiting models’ ability to address users’ complex, overlapping challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable fine-grained problem enhancement method that augments problem types, user scenarios, and profiles, enabling the construction of richer and more diverse ESC corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both automatic and human evaluation metrics across different models. |
How Do Large Language Models Capture the Ever-changing World Knowledge? A Review of Recent Advances (2023.emnlp-main)
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| 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)
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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. |
CoT-RAG: Integrating Chain of Thought and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Feiyang Li, Peng Fang, Zhan Shi, Arijit Khan, Fang Wang, Weihao Wang, null Zhangxin-hw, Cui Yongjian
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought reasoning has two key limitations: lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and interference from natural language reasoning steps with the models’ inference logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought reasoning framework with three key designs to address these issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of large language models on complex tasks by incorporating knowledge graphs and learnable knowledge case-aware RAG. |
OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Zhenzhong Lan, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself after each iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets. |
MaskTab: Scalable Masked Tabular Pretraining with Scaling Laws and Distillation for Industrial Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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| 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 . |
Weakly Supervised Text Classification using Supervision Signals from a Language Model (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing weakly supervised text classification methods require a large number of annotated data and human annotations are expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to query a masked language model with cloze style prompts to obtain supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets by 2%, 4%, and 3%. |
AIDE: Attribute-Guided MultI-Hop Data Expansion for Data Scarcity in Task-Specific Fine-tuning (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models for specific tasks require extensive seed datasets or struggle to balance task relevance and data diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis framework that uses a multi-hop process to expand very few seed data points while ensuring data diversity and task relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in task-specific fine-tuning by over 30%. |
Silencing the Guardrails: Inference-Time Jailbreaking via Dynamic Contextual Representation Ablation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing strategies to circumvent safety constraints face significant trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows to infer model refusal behaviors without expensive parameter updates or training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in multiple safety-aligned open-source LLMs. |
MultiCoNER: A Large-scale Multilingual Dataset for Complex Named Entity Recognition (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a core task in Natural Language Processing. |
| Approach: | They present a large multilingual dataset for Named Entity Recognition that covers 3 domains across 11 languages and multilingual and code-mixing subsets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is large and multilingual, covering 11 languages and subsets. |
MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Junfeng Fang, Shuai Zhang, Chang Wu, Zhengyi Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Sihang Li, Kun Wang, Wenjie Du, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
GROLE: Instance-Level Group Relative Optimization for LoRA Experts in Incremental Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yongyi Liao, Wencan Lai, Jun Fang, Jinjin Guo, Xiaohui Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Chao Liu, Pengzhang Liu, Qixia Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models demonstrate remarkable zero-shot generalization, but adapting to downstream tasks requires continual fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incrementally constructs a pool of frozen, task-specific LoRA experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in task-free and blurred-boundary settings. |
GASE: Graph-Aware Semantic Embedding Learning with Frozen LLMs for Text-Attributed Graphs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for text-attributed graph (TAG) learning, yet effectively integrating LLM semantics with graph structural information remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for learning Graph-Aware Semantic Embeddings using frozen LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on node classification and achieves a 5 speedup over fine-tuning-based methods. |
iComposer: An Automatic Songwriting System for Chinese Popular Music (N19-4)
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| Challenge: | iComposer is an interactive web-based songwriting system designed to assist human creators by greatly simplifying music production. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-based songwriting system that automatically generates melody from text . they use sequence-to-sequence models to predict melody, rhythm, and lyrics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can write pleasing melodies and meaningful lyrics similar to humans. |
CHBias: Bias Evaluation and Mitigation of Chinese Conversational Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
Beyond Topology: Generative Node Importance Estimation via Structure-Guided Semantic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating node importance are limited and rely on topological aggregation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative reasoning framework that leverages Large Language Models to generate precise importance scores for entities in Knowledge Graphs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods and is generalized across domains. |
Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for Heterophilic Graphs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for heterophilic graphs overlook rich textual data associated with nodes, which could unlock deeper insights into their heterophilistic contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework to enhance node classification on heterophilic graphs by leveraging open-world knowledge encoded by large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to better characterize heterophilic graphs, where neighboring nodes often exhibit different labels. |
ProtoInfoMax: Prototypical Networks with Mutual Information Maximization for Out-of-Domain Detection (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect out-of-domain (OOD) inputs are limited and lack data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture that extends Prototypical Networks to process in-domain and OOD sentences via Mutual Information Maximization objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance up to 20% for OOD detection in low resource settings of text classification. |
Structural Bias for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| 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. |
TWT: Table with Written Text for Controlled Data-to-Text Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods output hallucinated text that is not faithful on TWT. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate text conditioned on the structured data and a prefix by leveraging pre-trained neural models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods under automatic and human evaluation metrics. |
On Text-based Personality Computing: Challenges and Future Directions (2023.findings-acl)
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Qixiang Fang, Anastasia Giachanou, Ayoub Bagheri, Laura Boeschoten, Erik-Jan van Kesteren, Mahdi Shafiee Kamalabad, Daniel Oberski
| Challenge: | Text-based personality computing (TPC) is a popular alternative to self-report questionnaires. |
| Approach: | They propose 15 challenges that are relevant to NLP research . they propose to combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on text-based personality computing (TPC) the proposed approach can be used to improve the quality of personality-based research. |
Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Reward Models for Subjective Ambiguity (2026.acl-long)
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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)
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| 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)
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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. |
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) however, current QA synthesis protocols introduce noise from the CSKB and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts and mislabeled or false-negative options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches while using only 33% of the synthetic data. |
RAAMove: A Corpus for Analyzing Moves in Research Article Abstracts (2024.lrec-main)
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Hongzheng Li, Ruojin Wang, Ge Shi, Xing Lv, Lei Lei, Chong Feng, Fang Liu, Jinkun Lin, Yangguang Mei, Linnan Xu
| Challenge: | RAAMove is a comprehensive multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in Research Article (RA) abstracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in RA abstracts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a human-annotated dataset and a BERT-based model to verify its effectiveness. |
SrDetection: A Self-Referential Framework for Data Leakage Detection in Code Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuaimin Li, Liyang Fan, Zeyang li, Zhuoyue Wan, Yufang Lin, Shiwen Ni, Feiteng Fang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Yuanfeng Song, Kun Jing, Chen Jason Zhang, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating code large language models assume access to proprietary training corpora or use external reference sets with manually tuned, non-generalizable thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-referential leakage detection for gray-box and black-box settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves average F1 by 21.52 points in the gray-box setting and 14.46 points in black-box settings over strong baselines. |
AutoAct: Automatic Agent Learning from Scratch for QA via Self-Planning (2024.acl-long)
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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. |
Controlled Text Generation Using Dictionary Prior in Variational Autoencoders (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely applied in text generation tasks, but they suffer from insufficient representation capacity and poor controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven prior that has expressivity and controllability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prior enjoys expressivity and controllability and can be used in language modeling and controlled text generation. |
Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memory (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
TCPO: Thought-Centric Preference Optimization for Effective Embodied Decision-making (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kechen Jiao, Zhirui Fang, Jiahao Liu, Bei Li, Qifan Wang, Xinyu Liu, Junhao Ruan, Zhongjian Qiao, Yifan Zhu, Yaxin Xu, Jingang Wang, Xiu Li
| Challenge: | Existing post-SFT methods for embodied AI are constrained by sparse rewards and action-only optimization, resulting in low sample efficiency, poor consistency, and model degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Thought-Centric Preference Optimization (TCPO) into embodied decision-making by transforming sparse reward signals into richer step sample pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an average success rate of 26.67% in the ALFWorld environment, and a 6% improvement over RL4VLM. |
SynC-LLM: Generation of Large-Scale Synthetic Circuit Code with Hierarchical Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years, AI-assisted integrated circuit design methods have shown great potential in boosting IC design efficiency. however, this emerging technique is limited by the serious scarcity of publicly accessible large-scale circuit design data, which are mostly private IPs owned by semiconductor companies. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical framework that exploits LLM's ability to generate new large-scale synthetic digital circuits by learning sequential logic skeletons and annotating function descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates large-scale synthetic circuits that are valid and fully functional, and can significantly improve AI models’ performance in multiple IC design tasks. |
Where to Attack: A Dynamic Locator Model for Backdoor Attack in Text Classifications (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | BackDoor Attack (BDA) study aims to train a poisoned model with clean data and some trigger-embedded instances to perform normally on normal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a poisoned model with clean and poisonest inputs . they propose to use triggers to predict those poisonets as target labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict P2P dynamically without human intervention. |
Learning to Pronounce Chinese Without a Pronunciation Dictionary (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | EM method achieves a test-set accuracy of 71%, vector-based method achieve 81%. |
| Approach: | They propose a program that learns to pronounce Chinese text in Mandarin without a pronunciation dictionary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed program deciphers Chinese text in Mandarin without a pronunciation dictionary. |
Human-in-the-loop Robotic Grasping Using BERT Scene Representation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes are expensive and lack structure information. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop framework for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes . they substitute scene-graph representation with a text representation of the scene using BERT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms object-agnostic and scene-graph based methods on robots and physical robots. |
Unifying Language Agent Algorithms with Graph-based Orchestration Engine for Reproducible Agent Research (2025.acl-demo)
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Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Heting Ying, Yibo Ma, Haozhan Shen, Jingcheng Li, Peng Liu, Lu Zhang, Chunxin Fang, Kyusong Lee, Ruochen Xu, Tiancheng Zhao
| Challenge: | Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible framework that addresses engineering overhead and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simplifies language agent development and establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research. |
Task-Aware Specialization for Efficient and Robust Dense Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval models are parameter-inefficient and underperform sparse counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware specialization for dEnse Retrieval architecture that enables parameter sharing by interleaving shared and specialized blocks in a single encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture surpasses BM25 on questions and passages using 60% of the parameters as bi-encoder dense retrievers. |
Neural Multi-Task Learning for Stance Prediction (D19-66)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for fact checking are limited in size due to limited data available . stance detection is a key component of fact checking for journalists and news agencies . |
| Approach: | They propose to use textual information from existing datasets to improve stance prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art systems on a public benchmark dataset by 6.0 and 14.4 points in weighting. |
Counterfactual Debating with Preset Stances for Hallucination Elimination of LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to alleviate hallucination have considered utilizing LLMs’ inherent reasoning abilities to alleviating hallucinism, such as self-correction and diverse sampling methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual multi-agent debate framework that predetermines LLMs' stances to override their inherent biases for answer inspection. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four datasets of three tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over existing methods. |
CaKE: Circuit-aware Editing Enables Generalizable Knowledge Learners (2025.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
Understanding Faithfulness and Reasoning of Large Language Models on Plain Biomedical Summaries (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generating plain biomedical summaries with Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance access to biomedically knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset with expert-annotated Faithfulness and Reasoning on plain biomedical summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that LLMs perform poorly in generating faithful biomedical summaries and that abstractiveness and faithfulness are negatively correlated. |
A Simple and Effective Method to Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning (2022.coling-1)
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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)
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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)
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| 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. |
On-the-fly Cross-lingual Masking for Multilingual Pre-training (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In multilingual pre-training, multilingual models only learn cross-linguality implicitly from isomorphic spaces formed by overlapping different language spaces due to the lack of explicit cross-linguistic forward pass. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic token-wise masking scheme for multilingual pre-training that uses a special token [C]x to replace a random token in the input sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of UNMT models on De, Ro, Ne En. |
Forget the Token and Pixel: Rethinking Gradient Ascent for Concept Unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
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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. |
DAGN: Discourse-Aware Graph Network for Logical Reasoning (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent QA with logical reasoning questions requires passage-level relations among the sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-aware graph network that aggregates passage-level clues for QA by using discourse-based information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results on two logical reasoning QA datasets. |
Rethinking the Role of Prompting Strategies in LLM Test-Time Scaling: A Perspective of Probability Theory (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that scaling test-time compute can also effectively improve reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic method to efficiently predict scaling performance and identify the best prompting strategy under large sampling times. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the scaling performance of majority voting on large language models. |
Backdooring Neural Code Search (2023.acl-long)
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| 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)
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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)
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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. |
End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new task is proposed to learn knowledge retrieval with multimodal queries . a vision-language model can retrieve knowledge using images and text inputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a task for vision-language models to retrieve knowledge with multi-modal queries . they propose reViz, a model that integrates content from both text and image queries based on a multimodal query task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task performs better under zero-shot settings than previous work on cross-modal retrieval. |
EA-Agent: A Structured Multi-Step Reasoning Agent for Entity Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to integrate semantic knowledge into EA to identify entities across different knowledge graphs that refer to the same object. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets. |
Enhancing Input-Label Mapping in In-Context Learning with Contrastive Decoding (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Prior research has found that large language models overlook input-label mapping information in ICL, relying more on their pre-trained knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method that contrasts input-label mappings between positive and negative in-context examples to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on 7 natural language understanding tasks without additional training. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Weilin Zhao, Yuxiang Huang, Xu Han, Wang Xu, Chaojun Xiao, Xinrong Zhang, Yewei Fang, Kaihuo Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) drafting efficiency has become a bottleneck in the final speedup of speculative drafting, therefore generating longer drafts at less cost can lead to better speedup. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses existing model to drafting and target LLM to verify draft in a low-cost parallel manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve speedups of up to 2.4 over speculative decoding and 3.9 over vanilla decoding without fine-tuning draft and target models. |
Beyond Hard Masks: Progressive Token Evolution for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
MPL: Multiple Programming Languages with Large Language Models for Information Extraction (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on Python for code-style simulation, overlooking the potential of other widely-used PLs during the supervised fine-tuning phase. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates programming languages into IE tasks . they introduce function-prompt with virtual running to simulate code-style inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits the potential of different programming languages during the supervised fine-tuning phase. |
SciExplore: Evaluating Autonomous Agents from Scientific Navigation to Information Integration (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Dynamic Prefix as Instructor for Incremental Named Entity Recognition: A Unified Seq2Seq Generation Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental problem in information extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient method for Incremental Named Entity Recognition (INER) task aimed at updating a model to extract entities from an expanding set of entity type candidates by employing a dynamic prefix as a task instructor to guide the generative model. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method preserves task-invariant knowledge while adapting to new entities with minimal parameter updates. |
Scalable-DSC: A Structural Template Prompt Approach to Scalable Dialogue State Correction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to correct wrong slot values in dialogue state tracking are intertwined with specific DST models, limiting their applicability to other DSTs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Scalable Dialogue State Correction model that corrects wrong slot values in predicted dialogue states by using a structural template prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4. |
Adaptive Text2GQL: Integrating Structural Twig Linking and Evolutionary In-Context Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches struggle with structural hallucinations and lack adaptability in cold-start scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified, training-free framework for translating natural language into Graph Query Languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and executability over baselines in Graph2GQLs. |
Transformers with Learnable Activation Functions (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Activation functions can reduce the topological complexity of input data and improve model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to consider data as a topology with its own shape to simplify its complexity and make it linearly separable in the output space. |
| Outcome: | The RAF-based Transformer model outperforms its FAF-based counterpart on the GLUE benchmark by 5.71 points and 2.05 points on SQuAD with all available data. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Pretrained Language Models for Dialogue Generation with Multiple Input Sources (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pretrained language models have achieved outstanding performance on natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse attention information from multiple input sources to achieve better relevance with dialogue history than simple fusion baselines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models deliver higher relevance with dialogue history than baselines. |
Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interaction (2026.acl-long)
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Advait Gosai, Tyler Vuong, Utkarsh Tyagi, Steven Li, Wenjia You, Miheer Bavare, Arda Uçar, Zhongwang Fang, Brian Jang, Bing Liu, Yunzhong He
| Challenge: | End-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems are replacing cascaded pipelines for voice-based human-AI interaction. Existing benchmarks evaluate these systems on synthetic speech and single-turn tasks, leaving multi-turn conversational ability underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source benchmark to evaluate spoken dialogue systems under natural multi-turn interaction patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails on the highest-performing model with 54.65% pass rate. |
KCTS: Knowledge-Constrained Tree Search Decoding with Token-Level Hallucination Detection (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies indicate that language models generate non-factual information that is not supported by evidence with a high level of confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-constrained decoding method that guides a frozen LLM to generate text aligned with the reference knowledge at each decoding step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the risk of misinformation generated by LLMs by reducing training costs and catastrophic forgetting for multi-tasking models. |
Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense Persona (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that clusters dense persona descriptions into sparse categories and generates personalized responses from dialogue histories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese and English datasets. |
AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhaowei Wang, Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing language models only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an entailment graph that collects abstract knowledge for 3 components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks. |
Born Differently Makes a Difference: Counterfactual Study of Bias in Biography Generation from a Data-to-Text Perspective (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Current research shows that biographies reflect bias from society such as gender and religions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that manipulates the personal attributes of interest while keeping the co-occurring attributes unchanged. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method expands the analysis of gender-centered bias in text generation. |
Analyzing the Intensity of Complaints on Social Media (2022.findings-naacl)
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| 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. |
REANO: Optimising Retrieval-Augmented Reader Models through Knowledge Graph Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness and lack information critical for answering given questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance the open domain question answering model with a knowledge graph generation module that generates KGs from the passages and an answer predictor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the exact match score by 2.7% on the EntityQuestion dataset, with an average improvement of 1.8% across all the datasets. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
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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. |
Does RAG Introduce Unfairness in LLMs? Evaluating Fairness in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models address fairness concerns with respect to sensitive attributes such as gender, geographic location, and other demographic factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate fairness in RAG using scenario-based questions and analyzing disparities across demographic attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes disparities across demographic attributes and identifies fairness issues in retrieval and generation stages. |
When Efficiency Meets Safety: A Benchmark Security Analysis of KV Cache Compression in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
NLG Evaluation Metrics Beyond Correlation Analysis: An Empirical Metric Preference Checklist (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a systematic review of automatic evaluation metrics for Natural Language Generation (NLG) shows that task-agnostic metrics have a weak correlation with human . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess the effectiveness of automatic metrics in three NLG tasks . they propose task-agnostic and human-aligned metrics to be used for evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides access to the evaluation tools for three NLG tasks. |
MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Weikang Shi, Aldrich Yu, Rongyao Fang, Houxing Ren, Ke Wang, Aojun Zhou, Changyao Tian, Xinyu Fu, Yuxuan Hu, Zimu Lu, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual chain-of-thought are limited by external tools or fail to generate high-fidelity diagrams. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable large multimodal models with VCoT capabilities . they pre-train a model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and teach it how to leverage visual aids . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks complex, human-like visual reasoning in large language models . it pre-trains the model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and fine-tunes it on MathCanvas-Instruct . |
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang, Zhisong Zhang, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems are retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light . current systems lack compositional reasoning, a key component of deep research . |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator to shift agentic paradigm . they use Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge and Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. |
T2I-ReasonBench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Informed Text-to-Image Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) generative models have demonstrated exceptional capability in synthesizing high-quality images from textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to explore the knowledge-driven reasoning capabilities of T2I models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the knowledge-driven reasoning capabilities of T2I models. |
Fire Burns, Sword Cuts: Commonsense Inductive Bias for Exploration in Text-based Games (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing RL agents are far away from solving text-based games due to their combinatorially large action spaces that hinders efficient exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose an exploration technique that injects external commonsense knowledge, via a pretrained language model, into the agent during training when the agent is the most uncertain about its next action. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits improvement on the collected game scores during the training in four out of nine games from Jericho. |
BAG: Bi-directional Attention Entity Graph Convolutional Network for Multi-hop Reasoning Question Answering (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for question answering and machine comprehension (MC) are limited to a single paragraph, or even part of it. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-directional Attention Entity Graph Convolutional Network (BAG) that leverages relationships between nodes in an entity graph and attention information between a query and the entity graph to generate a prediction. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the QAngaroo WIKIHOP dataset. |
Beyond Accuracy: Unveiling Inefficiency Patterns in Tool-Integrated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
AnchorAttention: Difference-Aware Sparse Attention with Stripe Granularity (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the prefill phase. |
| Approach: | They propose a difference-aware, dynamic sparse attention mechanism that efficiently identifies critical attention regions at a finer stripe granularity while adapting to global contextual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a speedup of 1.44 while maintaining higher recall rates. |
GEMNET: Effective Gated Gazetteer Representations for Recognizing Complex Entities in Low-context Input (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is difficult in real-world settings due to short texts, emerging entities, and complex entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible Gazetteer Representation encoder and a Mixture-of-Experts gating network for gazetteer knowledge integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows large gains (up to +49% F1) in recognizing difficult entities compared to baselines. |
Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs’ hidden states. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space by using Sparse Autoencoders to identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 15% in control effectiveness. |
Position-Aware Depth Decay Decoding (D3): Boosting Large Language Model Inference Efficiency (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent dynamic computation methods show that not all components are required for inference, enabling a training-free pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-position aware layer skipping framework to save 1.5x times operations efficiently while maintaining performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 1.5x speedup on large language models with no retraining and with comparable performance on the GSM8K and BBH benchmarks. |
Knowledgeable Preference Alignment for LLMs in Domain-specific Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Gracefully Filtering Backdoor Samples for Generative Large Language Models without Retraining (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor defense methods are ineffective for generative large language models . generative LLMs output sequences of high-dimensional token logits instead of low-dimensional classification logits . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages sample-wise gradients to identify backdoor samples without retraining LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines significantly in identifying backdoor samples without retraining LLMs. |
TLM: Token-Level Masking for Transformers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| 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). |
TransGEC: Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Translationese (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that data augmentation improves accuracy over strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translationese as input for GEC data augmentation to overcome stylistic discrepancies . they propose to obtain human-translated texts with a more similar style to non-native texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves correction accuracy over strong baselines on four GEC benchmarks. |
HierDiffuse: Progressive Diffusion for Robust Interest Fusion in CTR Prediction (2025.emnlp-industry)
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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. |
Elevating Legal LLM Responses: Harnessing Trainable Logical Structures and Semantic Knowledge with Legal Reasoning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models focus on semantic similarity, neglecting the intricate logical structures and reasoning essential for addressing complex legal issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logical-Semantic Integration Model (LSIM) that bridges semantic and logical coherence and a supervised framework that integrates semantic features with in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy and reliability on a real-world legal QA dataset. |
StreamSpeech: Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Multi-task Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing simultaneous translation methods focus on text-to-text and speech-totext translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Simul-S2ST model that jointly learns translation and simultaneous policy in a unified framework of multi-task learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform offline and simultaneous speech recognition, speech translation and speech synthesis via an "All-in-One" seamless model. |
UniGeM: Unifying Data Selection and Mixing via Geometric Exploration and Mining (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Wang, null Yunfeiyu, Xinhao Yao, Jiaolong Yang, Lu Yu, Junpeng Fang, Chaobo Li, Riccardo Cantoro, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) scaling is limited by data quality and domain mixing and instance selection are two separate problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies mixing and selection without training proxy models or relying on external reference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 2.0 data efficiency over a random baseline and further improves overall performance compared to SOTA methods in reasoning-heavy evaluations and multilingual generalization. |
CHAmbi: A New Benchmark on Chinese Ambiguity Challenges for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Ambiguity is an inherent feature of language, whose management is crucial for effective communication and collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to evaluate LLMs' ability to handle ambiguity in Chinese by using a specialized Chinese multi-label disambiguation dataset formatted in Natural Language Inference. |
| Outcome: | The CHAmbi dataset comprises 4,991 pairs of premises and hypotheses, including 824 examples featuring a wide range of ambiguities. |
FAKTA: An Automatic End-to-End Fact Checking System (N19-4)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have investigated individual components of fact checking process but none offer such a capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates various components of a fact-checking process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates various components of a fact-checking process to predict the factuality of claims and provide evidence at the document and sentence level to explain its predictions. |
XAL: EXplainable Active Learning Makes Classifiers Better Low-resource Learners (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for active learning rely on model uncertainty or disagreement to pick unlabeled data, leading to over-confidence in superficial patterns and lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a bi-directional encoder and a uni-directional decoder to generate and score an explanation for low-resource text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 9 strong baselines on six datasets and can generate explanations for its predictions. |
Assessing Combinational Generalization of Language Models in Biased Scenarios (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on assessing in-domain knowledge, but shedding light on what pre-trained Language Models learn is important. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assess a PLM's generalization capacity in biased scenarios by combining component combinations where it could be easy for the PLMs to learn shortcuts from the training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can overcome distribution shifts in the training corpus and with sufficient data. |
Expand, Rerank, and Retrieve: Query Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points . dense retrievers are limited by their inability to perform semantic matching for relevant passages that have low lexical overlap with the query. |
| Approach: | They propose a query expansion and reranking approach for improving passage retrieval with the application to open-domain question answering. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points when compared to a vanilla query expansion model and a dense retrieval model. |
PATIENT-𝜓: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionals (2024.emnlp-main)
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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)
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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. |
CascadeFix: Multi-Location Program Repair via Cascading Planning and Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating program repair face insufficient bug dependency modeling and inadequate global repair planning when addressing semantically complex multi-location bugs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-location automatic repair method via cascading planning and generation . they propose to model dependencies among bugs and cluster them to ensure rationality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method resolves 84 multi-location bugs, achieving a 31% improvement over current methods. |
d-TreeRPO: Towards More Reliable Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang, Minghua He, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
| Challenge: | Existing RL methods suffer from reliability bottlenecks due to reward sparsity and intractable computations . d-TreeRPO provides fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable reinforcement learning framework for diffusion large language models that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and achieves significant improvements across reasoning benchmarks. |
A Novel Three-stage Framework for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) rely on labeled data, but data scarcity is a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition that can learn from limited labeled data and generalize to new domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing methods on several benchmarks. |
FocusLLM: Precise Understanding of Long Context by Dynamic Condensing (2025.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Li, Yike Zhang, Tengyu Pan, Yutao Sun, Zhichao Duan, Junjie Fang, Rong Han, Zixuan Wang, Jianyong Wang
| Challenge: | Existing context condensing methods cannot accurately understand the full context, as there is a considerable amount of information loss in the condensed process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extend the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM by distilling crucial information from long sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extends the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM, allowing it to focus on relevant information from very long sequences. |
PLAY2PROMPT: Zero-shot Tool Instruction Optimization for LLM Agents via Tool Play (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for large language models rely on manual rewriting or labeled data for validation . Existing approaches rely only on comprehensive tool documentation and in-context demonstrations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that "plays" with each tool to explore its input-output behaviors. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PLAY2PROMPT improves zero-shot tool performance across open and closed models. |
HCL-TAT: A Hybrid Contrastive Learning Method for Few-shot Event Detection with Task-Adaptive Threshold (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| 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)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
MASPO: Unifying Gradient Utilization, Probability Mass, and Signal Reliability for Robust and Sample-Efficient LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaoliang Fu, Jiaye Lin, Yangyi Fang, Binbin Zheng, Chaowen Hu, Zekai Shao, Cong Qin, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing RLVR algorithms rely on rigid, uniform, and symmetric trust region mechanisms . current algorithms lack robustness, asymmetric signal reliability and inefficient gradient utilization . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to harmonize three dimensions of RLVR algorithms, a paper argues . a binary cutoff is used to discard valuable reinforcement signals, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in evaluating a robust RLVR solution. |
KELE: A Multi-Agent Framework for Structured Socratic Teaching with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Socratic teaching places high demands on teachers’ expertise and real-time feedback capabilities, making it difficult to scale in large educational settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for structured Socratic teaching with LLMs that integrates a structured SocRule and a consultant-teacher collaborative teaching mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in natural language generation and dialogue comprehension in the classroom. |
AutoBreach: Universal and Adaptive Jailbreaking with Efficient Wordplay-Guided Optimization via Multi-LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak research exhibits limitations in universality, validity, and efficiency . Existing methods for jailbreaking LLMs have limited validity and effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box approach that uses wordplay-guided mapping rule sampling to create universal adversarial prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method efficiently identifies security vulnerabilities across various LLMs, achieving an average success rate of over 80% with fewer than 10 queries. |
Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Long Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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Jia Li, Xuyuan Guo, Lei Li, Kechi Zhang, Ge Li, Jia Li, Zhengwei Tao, Fang Liu, Chongyang Tao, Yuqi Zhu, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Currently, long-context language models are limited by the lack of a rigorous evaluation framework for long code understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a long code understanding benchmark LongCodeU to evaluate LCLMs' long code comprehension ability for practical applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that current LCLMs are limited in their long code understanding ability, particularly when the long code length is greater than 32K, falling far short of their claimed 128K to 1M context windows. |
Benchmarking Commonsense Knowledge Base Population with an Effective Evaluation Dataset (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations on the population task are either not accurate (automatic evaluation with randomly sampled negative examples) or of small scale (human annotation). |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning over commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs) that are free-text and have a human annotation set to probe commonsensical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a human-annotated evaluation set and is compared with existing models on the population task. |
RoCBert: Robust Chinese Bert with Multimodal Contrastive Pretraining (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pretrained language models have achieved SOTA results on NLP tasks but are vulnerable to adversarial attacks especially for logographic languages like Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained Chinese Bert that is robust to various forms of adversarial attacks like word perturbation, synonyms, typos, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on 5 Chinese NLU tasks without sacrificing performance on clean testsets. |
From log 𝜋 to 𝜋: Taming Divergence in Soft Clipping via Bilateral Decoupled Decay of Probability Gradient Weight (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaoliang Fu, Jiaye Lin, Yangyi Fang, Chaowen Hu, Cong Qin, Zekai Shao, Binbin Zheng, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng
| Challenge: | Standard algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) enforce stability via "hard clipping" but relying on log-probability gradient yields divergent weights as probabilities vanish, destabilizing LLM training. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled gradient policy optimization that uses a decay mechanism to decouple the probability of a boundary token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms baselines on various mathematical benchmarks. |
Evidence-Aligned Entity Verification for Hallucination Detection in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection depend on internal signals like uncertainty and self-consistency checks to identify unreliable outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method to enhance hallucination detection by addressing information updating challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing methods with strong generalization capabilities. |
Low-resource Neural Machine Translation with Cross-modal Alignment (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation techniques rely on large monolingual corpus, which is costly for some low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method to learn a shared space for all languages by additional visual modality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment with small amount of image-text pairs and achieves significant improvements over the text-only baseline. |
TOAD: Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs with Diverse Response Styles (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for Task-Oriented Dialogs (TOD) lack consideration for adaptive response styles and neglect to simulate interactions with app contexts like calendars or alarms. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate an annotated task-oriented dialog dataset and an automatic pipeline to generate it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a variety of system response styles and provides verbose or non-verbal responses. |
Perceiving the World: Question-guided Reinforcement Learning for Text-based Games (2022.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in many generative NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate retrieval settings from the input and label distribution views . they further augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations sampled from event semantic regions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations . the methods can be used in generative NLP tasks such as dialogue response generation . |
The ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation, Second Edition (2020.lrec-1)
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Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, Emer Gilmartin, Catherine Pelachaud, Alex Fang, Simon Keizer, Laurent Prévot
| Challenge: | ISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation has been used in corpus annotation and in the design of components for spoken and multimodal interactive systems. |
| Approach: | ISO standard 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation is proposed for a second edition . this second edition allows a more accurate annotation of dependence relations and rhetorical relations in dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed second edition of ISO 24617-2 for dialogue act annotation addresses some inaccuracies and undesirable limitations. |
Is Neural Topic Modelling Better than Clustering? An Empirical Study on Clustering with Contextual Embeddings for Topics (2022.naacl-main)
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| 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. |
InsertGNN: A Hierarchical Graph Neural Network for the TOEFL Sentence Insertion Problem (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that focus on sentence arrangement, textual consistency, and question answering have been shown to be inadequate in addressing this issue. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which conceptualizes the problem as a graph and employs a hierarchical Graph Neural Network (GNN) to comprehend the interplay between sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on a TOEFL dataset and on the arXiv dataset. |
MTPChat: A Multimodal Time-Aware Persona Dataset for Conversational Agents (2025.findings-naacl)
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| 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)
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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)
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| 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 . |
Context-Aware Adapter Tuning for Few-Shot Relation Learning in Knowledge Graphs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict instances for missing relations on knowledge graphs are limited by their limited training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware adapter for few-shot relation learning in KGs . they propose tunable relation adaptation and contextual information for each relation . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmark KGs validate the superiority of RelAdapter over state-of-the-art methods. |
Disentangled Learning of Stance and Aspect Topics for Vaccine Attitude Detection in Social Media (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect vaccine attitudes on social media require abundant annotations and pre-defined aspect categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised approach to detect vaccine attitudes on social media . they use an autoencoding architecture to learn from unlabelled data the topical information of the domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing aspect-based models on stance detection and tweet clustering. |
Improving Model Factuality with Fine-grained Critique-based Evaluator (2025.acl-long)
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Yiqing Xie, Wenxuan Zhou, Pradyot Prakash, Di Jin, Yuning Mao, Quintin Fettes, Arya Talebzadeh, Sinong Wang, Han Fang, Carolyn Rose, Daniel Fried, Hejia Zhang
| Challenge: | Factuality evaluation aims to detect factual errors produced by language models and guide the development of more factual models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages FenCE to improve the factuality of LM generators by constructing training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the factuality of LM generators by enhancing their training data. |
A Survey on Natural Language Processing for Programming (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Natural language processing for programming is a field of NLP and software engineering . it is used to assist programming, and is increasingly prevalent for its effectiveness in improving productivity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use NLP techniques to assist programming by obtaining a structure-based representation and a functionality-oriented algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach could relieve developers from laborious work while improving efficiency for non-professional users. |
MedDialog: Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets (2020.emnlp-main)
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Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Zeqian Ju, Yue Yang, Sicheng Wang, Ruisi Zhang, Meng Zhou, Jiaqi Zeng, Xiangyu Dong, Ruoyu Zhang, Hongchao Fang, Penghui Zhu, Shu Chen, Pengtao Xie
| Challenge: | telemedicine is a medical practice that provides patient care remotely using video conferencing tools. |
| Approach: | They build large-scale medical dialogue datasets to facilitate research . they pretrain several models on the Chinese MedDialog dataset and compare their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that models trained on MedDialog can generate doctor-like medical dialogues. |
Deep Differential Amplifier for Extractive Summarization (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract summary from document with a disproportionate ratio of selected and unselected sentences are far from human performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that rebalances sentence-level extractive summarization by amplifying the semantic difference between each sentence and all other sentences and applying the residual unit as the second item of the differential amplifier to deepen the architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs competitively against state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Cross-Thought for Sentence Encoder Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models to pretrain sentence encoders with large unlabeled corpus are lacking in linguistic information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to pre-training sequence encoder using transformers . they propose to train a Transformer-based sequence encoded over a large set of short sequences based on a set of masked words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art encoders on hotpotQA by improving intermediate information retrieval performance. |
CWTM: Leveraging Contextualized Word Embeddings from BERT for Neural Topic Modeling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic models rely on bag-of-words (BOW) representations to capture word order information. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural topic model that integrates contextualized word embeddings from BERT to learn the topic vector of a document without BOW information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more coherent and meaningful topics compared to existing models while accommodating unseen words in newly encountered documents. |
Safety in Large Reasoning Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Cheng Wang, Yue Liu, Baolong Bi, Duzhen Zhang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Yingwei Ma, Yufei He, Shengju Yu, Xinfeng Li, Junfeng Fang, Jiaheng Zhang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have a high level of advanced reasoning capabilities, but they are vulnerable and vulnerable. |
| Approach: | This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of Large Reasoning Models . it explores the new safety risks, attacks, and defense strategies specific to LRMs based on reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed study examines the safety and security risks of large reasoning models. |
Tokenization Falling Short: On Subword Robustness in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose to tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary . they also investigate the challenges and their impact on large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can mitigate tokenization issues, but still suffer from typos and other variations. |
MACSum: Controllable Summarization with Mixed Attributes (2023.tacl-1)
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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 . |
NL2Lean: Translating Natural Language into Lean 4 through Multi-Aspect Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yue Fang, Shaohan Huang, Xin Yu, Haizhen Huang, Zihan Zhang, Weiwei Deng, Furu Wei, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Existing formal proof assistants rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to translate natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 . they use a model with basic translation ability to refine the model's reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks. |
GradSafe: Detecting Jailbreak Prompts for LLMs via Safety-Critical Gradient Analysis (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting jailbreak prompts are primarily online moderation APIs or finetuned LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which scrutinizes the gradients of safety-critical parameters in large LLMs to detect jailbreak prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Llama Guard in detecting jailbreak prompts despite extensive finetuning with a large dataset. |
Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)
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Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Zhe Zhao, Qi Ju, Xuefeng Yang, Rong Tian, Zhu Tao, Haoyan Liu, Han Guo, Xingyu Bai, Weiquan Mao, Yudong Li, Weigang Guo, Taiqiang Wu, Ningyuan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%. |
Joint Inference of Retrieval and Generation for Passage Re-ranking (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for re-ranking documents are sparse and do not require training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that optimizes mutual information between query and passage distributions by integrating cross-encoders and generative models in the re-ranking process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms conventional re-rankers and language model scorers in open-domain QA retrieval settings and diverse retrieval benchmarks under zero-shot settings. |
Danger Depends on the Mind: A Theory-of-Mind Grounded Dataset and Model for Context-Dependent Dangerous Speech (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dangerous speech detection rely on binary labels that ignore who is speaking and in what mental state. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-dependent variant of dangerous speech detection by grounding it in Theory-of-Mind. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms proprietary and open-source models with significantly fewer parameters. |
Probing Toxic Content in Large Pre-Trained Language Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pre-trained language models have shown that they carry harmful biases towards different social groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to probe English, French, and Arabic PTLMs and quantify the potentially harmful content they convey with respect to a set of templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method analyzes PTLMs to predict masked tokens at the end of sentences to assess their toxicity. |
RETAIN: Interactive Tool for Regression Testing Guided LLM Migration (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into diverse applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool specifically designed for regression testing during LLM migrations. |
| Outcome: | RETAIN (REgression Testing guided LLM migrAtIoN) provides a tool specifically designed for regression testing during LLM migrations. |
Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching (2025.acl-long)
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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. |
Type-enriched Hierarchical Contrastive Strategy for Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that fine-grained entity typing (FET) can be used to deduce specific semantic types of entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a type-enriched hierarchical contrastive strategy to model type differences . their method can make type information directly perceptible and improve distinguishability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can model the differences between hierarchical types and distinguish multi-grained similar types at different granularities. |
Knowledge-Guided Cross-Topic Visual Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| 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. |
Leveraging AMR Graph Structure for Better Sequence-to-Sequence AMR Parsing (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on AMR parsing often regard this task as a seq2seq translation problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to translate AMR graphs into AMR token sequences in pre-processing and recover AMR from sequences after decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline and achieves 85.5 0.1 and 84.2 0.2 Smatch scores on AMR 2.0 and AMR 3.0. |
VIMI: Grounding Video Generation through Multi-modal Instruction (2024.emnlp-main)
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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)
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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. |
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)
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Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
Enhancing Transformation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic Using LLMs with Diverse External Knowledge (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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)
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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)
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| 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. |
OMG-QA: Building Open-Domain Multi-Modal Generative Question Answering Systems (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA require multiple modalities and a broad pool of information sources to generate coherent answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a new resource to evaluate the effectiveness of question answering systems that perform retrieval augmented generation in scenarios that demand reasoning on multi-modal, multi-document contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates question answering systems that perform retrieval augmented generation (RAG) in open-domain questions . it requires systems to navigate diverse modalities and a broad pool of information sources, making it uniquely challenging. |
Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains (2026.acl-long)
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Zhonghang Yuan, Zhefan Wang, Fang Hu, Zihong Chen, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jie Ying, Huanjun Kong, Songyang Zhang, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, but their applications on knowledge-intensive domains have not been explored due to the scarcity of high-quality verifiable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extends reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to knowledge-intensive domains through automated verififiability data synthesis while enabling verification of the LLM's reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework enhances the reasoning of large language models in knowledge-intensive domains without significantly compromising the model’s general capabilities. |
DivScene: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation with Large Vision Language Models in Diverse Scenes (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhaowei Wang, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Ye Tian, Yue Yang, Kaixin Ma, Xiaoman Pan, Yangqiu Song, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress in tasks like visual question answering and document understanding. |
| Approach: | They introduce DivScene, a large-scale dataset with 4,614 houses across 81 scene types and 5,707 kinds of target objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a much greater diversity of target objects and scene types than existing datasets, enabling a comprehensive task evaluation. |
Do Large Language Models Rank Fairly? An Empirical Study on the Fairness of LLMs as Rankers (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are more efficient in natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate large language models (LLMs) using a TREC Fair Ranking dataset . they assess fairness from both user and content perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing models in the fair ranking task. |
Small Models, Big Insights: Leveraging Slim Proxy Models To Decide When and What to Retrieve for LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine the knowledge an LLM already possesses and the knowledge that requires the help of a search engine are expensive and require excessive computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a slim proxy model that detects missing knowledge in LLMs with a proxy model and use it to perform retrieval for the missing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach detects missing knowledge in LLMs with a slim proxy model and takes its answers as heuristic answers. |
FactSearch: An Interactive Agentic Fact Search System for Verifying Large Language Model Outputs (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing tool-augmented verification systems depend on opaque search APIs, introducing uncontrolled variability into factuality evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reproducibility-oriented agentic fact search system for claim-level factuality verification built on a locally aggregated open-source search infrastructure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system decomposes model outputs into atomic factual claims, generates targeted search queries, retrieves supporting evidence via a self-hosted meta-search engine, and performs modular verification within a fully configurable pipeline. |
WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Zhenglin Wang, Zekun Xi, Runnan Fang, Linhai Zhang, Yulan He, Deyu Zhou, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal by using an explore-critic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker in real-world scenarios. |
Not All Voices Are Rewarded Equally: Probing and Repairing Reward Models across Human Diversity (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zihao Li, Feihao Fang, Xitong Zhang, Jiaru Zou, Zhining Liu, Wei Xiong, Ziwei Wu, Baoyu Jing, Jingrui He
| Challenge: | Using real-world datasets, we conduct the most comprehensive study to date, auditing various state-of-the-art reward models across nine sensitive attributes, including age, gender, ethnicity, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate group disparities in reward modeling by using real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a population-based dataset with nine demographic attributes, including gender, ethnicity, age, gender, and ethnicity. |
Toolscaler: Scalable Generative Tool Calling via Structure-Aware Semantic Tokenization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yunyue Su, Zhang Jinshuai, Bowen Fang, Wen Ye, Jinghao Zhang, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SGTC across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative tool invocation framework that introduces structure-aware semantic tokenization to encode tools as discrete code sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the size of the representation space and underutilizes collaborative signals among tools in downstream tasks. |
CPO: Addressing Reward Ambiguity in Role-playing Dialogue via Comparative Policy Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Comparative Policy Optimization (CPO) redefines the reward evaluation paradigm by shifting from sample-wise scoring to comparative group-wise score. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize subjective tasks by shifting from sample-wise to comparative group-wise scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shifts from sample-wise scoring to comparative group-wise score . it minimizes contextual bias and enables more robust and fair performance evaluation. |
Mere Contrastive Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-domain sentiment analysis are labor-intensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a modified contrastive objective with in-batch negative samples to allow sentence representations from the same class to be pushed closer while those from the different classes become further apart in the latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art in cross-domain and multi-domain sentiment analysis tasks while transferring knowledge learned in the source domain to the target domain. |
Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
COLA: Contextualized Commonsense Causal Reasoning from the Causal Inference Perspective (2023.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Wang, Quyet V. Do, Hongming Zhang, Jiayao Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to detect commonsense causation from the causal inference perspective are inadequate to seize commonsensical causations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to detect commonsense causation between two events in context . they propose 'contextualized commons sense causal reasoning' framework that uses covariates to remove confounding effects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect commonsense causality more accurately than baselines. |
MuBench: Assessment of Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models Across 61 Languages (2026.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Knowledge Graph-Driven Memory Editing with Directional Interventions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are hampered by inaccuracies and outdated information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs knowledge graphs using available information to guide the direction of knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows consistent, aligned, and stable information during large-scale editing scenarios. |
SubeventWriter: Iterative Sub-event Sequence Generation with Coherence Controller (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we propose a new task of sub-event generation for an unseen process . we use a framework to generate coherent sub-Event sequences for unseened processes . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of sub-event generation for an unseen process to evaluate the understanding of the coherence of subevent actions and objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate coherent sub-event sequences for unseen processes . it can also decode more coherent subevents, demonstrating its effectiveness . |
ATLAS: Agent Tuning via Learning Critical Steps (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
A Generative Model for Joint Natural Language Understanding and Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) have opposite goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model which couples NLU and NLG through a shared latent variable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two dialogue datasets with flat and tree-structured formal representations. |
SPARKLE: A Structured and Plug-and-play Agentic Retrieval Policy for Adaptive RAG Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating external knowledge rely on frozen large language models without explicit supervision or require costly LLM finetuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured and plug-and-play agentic retrieval policy with an additional proxy model to control the retrieval process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three in-domain and four out-of-domain QA benchmarks show that SPARKLE outperforms state-of the-art adaptive RAG models, achieving average improvements of 9.17% and 2.85%, respectively. |
Rethinking Cross-Subject Data Splitting for Brain-to-Text Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have successfully decoded natural language from non-invasive brain signals . current dataset splitting methods suffer from data leakage problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a right cross-subject data splitting criterion without data leakage for decoding fMRI and EEG signal to text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overfits and overestimates brain-to-text decoding models. |
KiRAG: Knowledge-Driven Iterative Retriever for Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Iterative retrieval-augmented generation models are difficult to use for multihop question answering (QA) . their retrieval processes can be disrupted by irrelevant documents or factually inaccurate chain-of-thoughts . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-driven iterative retriever model that decomposes documents into knowledge triples and performs iterativ retrieval with these triples to enable a factually reliable retrieval process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing iRAG models with an average improvement of 9.40% in R@3 and 5.14% in F1 on multi-hop QA datasets. |
Topic Tensor Network for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition in Chinese (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Currently, most studies on implicit discourse relation recognition use sentence-level representations . Chinese is a paratactic language that tends to pro-drop clause connectives . |
| Approach: | They propose a topic tensor network to recognize Chinese implicit discourse relations with both sentence-level and topic-level representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in micro and macro F1 scores on a Chinese discourse corpus. |
Summarization Evaluation in the Absence of Human Model Summaries Using the Compositionality of Word Embeddings (C18-1)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
Mathematical Word Problem Generation from Commonsense Knowledge Graph and Equations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for generating mathematical word problems are lacking in educational assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural model to generate diverse mathematical word problems from commonsense knowledge graph and equations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the SOTA models in terms of evaluation metrics and topic relevance. |
CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Wei et al., 2022) have developed a powerful method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a tuning and inference strategy to control the length of reasoning chains by a parameter space direction to control their length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces reasoning chains on GSM8K from 741 to 225 tokens with a minor performance drop (95.07% to 94.92%) and on AIME from 6827 to 4629 tokens, with only one additional incorrect answer. |
ChEMU-Ref: A Corpus for Modeling Anaphora Resolution in the Chemical Domain (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a novel annotation scheme, we identify anaphoric references in chemical patents and determine the chemical relation between linked entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach to anaphora resolution based on coreference and bridging links in chemical patents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to identify anaphoric references in chemical patents and determine the chemical relation between linked entities. |
EmoRes: Toward Adaptive Psychological Support via User-Agnostic Benchmark and Topic-Mining Agent (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhengwei Zou, Xuanming Jiang, Baoyi An, Dingyu Nie, Zhengxing Fang, Qingyu Liu, Xueming Qian, Guoshuai Zhao, Zhongyu Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models generate fragmented and emotionally inconsistent dialogues lacking the therapeutic structure necessary for reliable assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that boosts psychological reasoning via a Topic-Mining Emotional Agent and a multi-perspective Self-Reflection Agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves topic continuity, emotional coherence, and clinical interpretability over baselines and validated by ablation studies and human evaluations. |
Leveraging Knowledge in Multilingual Commonsense Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Commonsense reasoning is a language-agnostic process, but most comprehensive knowledge sources are limited to a small number of languages, especially English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English as a pivot language to integrate commonsense reasoning into models using a translate-retrieve-translate strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the XCSR benchmarks. |
AELC: Adaptive Entity Linking with LLM-Driven Contextualization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking (EL) focuses on associating ambiguous mentions in text with corresponding entities in a knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | Entity linking (EL) focuses on associating ambiguous mentions in text with corresponding entities in a knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four public benchmark datasets show that AELC achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
CITB: A Benchmark for Continual Instruction Tuning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| 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)
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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. |
WebCoT: Enhancing Web Agent Reasoning by Reconstructing Chain-of-Thought in Reflection, Branching, and Rollback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Tianqing Fang, Jianshu Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Zhisong Zhang, Jingyan Zhou, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Web agents powered by Large Language Models lack the ability to perform in uncertain web environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to reconstruct web agents' reasoning skills into chain-of-thought rationales by fine-tuning their LLM backbone into a web-based model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the agent self-improving benchmark OpenWebVoyager, demonstrating that it can be used to improve the agent's reasoning skills. |
LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization (2025.acl-long)
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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%. |
A User-Centered, Interactive, Human-in-the-Loop Topic Modelling System (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has demonstrated the value of user feedback, but there are still issues to consider, such as the difficulty in tracking changes and comparing different models. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop topic modeling system that integrates users’ knowledge into the modelling process, enabling them to refine the model iteratively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on a series of user studies to assess its performance in progressively more realistic applications. |
Beyond Completion: A Foundation Model for General Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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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. |
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao, Di Yin, Fang Li, Jie Wang, Chen Zeng Xi, Suncong Zheng, Xiaolong Liang, Xing Sun
| Challenge: | Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs. |
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)
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| 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)
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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. |
AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation (2024.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Wang, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Tianqing Fang, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that LLMs are deficient in abstract ability, and how to improve it remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework AbsInstruct to enhance LLMs’ abstract ability through instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can enhance LLMs’ abstraction ability with strong generalization performance while maintaining their general instruction-following abilities. |
SIBO: A Simple Booster for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques allow for adjustments to only a minor fraction of the parameters of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a SImple BOoster to enhance parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques by injecting an initial residual into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on 22 benchmark datasets and can be extended to a range of state-of-the-art techniques. |
WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Co-evolving World Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Agent self-improvement, where agents train their underlying Large Language Model (LLM) on self-sampled trajectories, shows promising results but often stagnates in web environments due to limited exploration and under-utilization of pretrained web knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-evolving Large Language Model (LLM) that predicts the next observation based on current observation and action within the web environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that agents can perform better in real-world web environments without using any distillation from more powerful close-sourced models. |
DEIE: Benchmarking Document-level Event Information Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese News Dataset (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing event-based datasets mainly target sentence-level tasks . current models struggle with "document" annotation, a key feature of the current model . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale document-level event information extraction dataset with over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset has over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments. |
MICO: A Multi-alternative Contrastive Learning Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Representation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to commonsense reasoning include fine-tuning large pre-trained language models or injecting the entire knowledge base for CKGC. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn commonsense knowledge representation by using a multi-alternative contrastive learning framework on COmmonsense Knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework is effective in commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Adaptive Attacks Break Defenses Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM Agents (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) agents use external tools to interact with environments, but they also introduce security risks, such as indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate eight different defenses and bypass all of them using adaptive attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defenses achieve an attack success rate of over 50% and are robust against adaptive attacks. |
STAF: Pushing the Boundaries of Test-Time Adaptation towards Practical Noise Scenarios (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance on NLP tasks . however, when the training domain and testing domain are taken from different distributions, the deployed model often violates this assumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a Stable Test-time Adaptation Framework to stabilize the adaptation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts model robustness to noise distribution shifts while minimizing error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting. |
A Non-autoregressive Generation Framework for End-to-End Simultaneous Speech-to-Any Translation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing translation pipelines require additional cascade components to achieve speech-to-speech translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive generation framework for simultaneous speech translation . it integrates both text-to-text and speech-tospeech tasks into a unified framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in speech-to-text and speech- to-speech tasks. |
Enhancing Multimodal Unified Representations for Cross Modal Generalization (2025.findings-acl)
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Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Shengpeng Ji, Shulei Wang, Hanting Wang, Minghui Fang, Jieming Zhu, Zhenhua Dong, Sashuai Zhou, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing studies on discrete unified representations overlook important distinctions between different dimensions of features. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a codebook to optimize unified representations from pretraining and fine- and coarse-grained disentangling to optimize the representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the interpretability of multimodal unified representations . they use training-free optimization of codebook and fine and coarse cross-modal disentangling . |
Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational auto-encoders have been used for text generation but their representation power is limited due to two reasons. |
| Approach: | They advocate sample-based representations of variational distributions for natural language . they further develop an LVM to directly match the aggregated posterior to the prior . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be viewed as a natural extension of VAEs with a regularization of maximizing mutual information, mitigating the "posterior collapse" issue. |
AscendKernelGen: LLM-Driven Kernel Generation for NPUs (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinzi Cao, Jianyang Zhai, Pengfei Li, Zhiheng Hu, Cen Yan, null Mubingxu, Guanghuan Fang, Bin She, Jiayu Li, Yihan Su, Dongyang Tao, Feidiao Yang, Chang-Dong Wang, Yutong Lu, Weicheng Xue, Bin Zhou, Yonghong Tian
| Challenge: | Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are critical for AI infrastructure, but their development remains a bottleneck due to vendor-specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for NPU kernel development that bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding . compiler success on complex Level-2 kernels improves from 0% to 95.5%, they say . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding, showing a near-zero success rate on complex kernels. |
PIG: Privacy Jailbreak Attack on LLMs via Gradient-based Iterative In-Context Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate privacy leakage in LLMs use memorized prefixes or simple instructions to extract data, which well-aligned models can easily block. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework targeting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that uses in-context learning to build a privacy context and iteratively updates it with three gradient-based strategies to elicit target PII. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) results on four white-box and two black-box LLMs. |
Cognitive Analysis Graph-Guided Multi-Turn Safety Enhancement for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to align large language models with human preferences lack relationship consideration between question and response. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time safety alignment framework that explicitly models the cognitive process of problem solving through a structured cognitive analysis graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables transparent, controllable reasoning while maintaining strong safety guarantees. |
Affective Knowledge Enhanced Multiple-Graph Fusion Networks for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment analysis ignore the roles of syntax dependency relation labels and affective semantic information in determining the sentiment polarity of social media users. |
| Approach: | They propose a new multi-graph fusion network to leverage the richer syntax dependency relation labels and affective semantic information of words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three datasets. |
Hierarchical Graph Network for Multi-hop Question Answering (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-hop question answering models focus on multi-level reasoning across multiple documents or paragraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph network that aggregates clues from scattered texts . they use a set of contextual encoders to initialize nodes on different levels of granularity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing multi-hop QA approaches on the HotpotQA benchmark. |
Vision-Language Introspection: Mitigating Overconfident Hallucinations in MLLMs via Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering (2026.acl-long)
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Shuliang Liu, Songbo Yang, Dong Fang, Sihang Jia, Yuqi Tang, Lingfeng Su, Ruoshui Peng, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to overcome object hallucination are limited . Existing mitigations include costly retraining and a training-free inference framework . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference framework that simulates a metacognitive self-correction process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces object hallucination rates by 12.67% on MMHal-Bench and improves accuracy by 5.8% on POPE. |
AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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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. |
A Model-agnostic Data Manipulation Method for Persona-based Dialogue Generation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for introducing explicit personas are expensive due to their expensive collection costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a data manipulation method which is model-agnostic to be packed with any persona-based dialogue generation model to improve their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is model-agnostic to be packed with any persona-based dialogue generation model to improve their performance. |
Who Can Withstand Chat-Audio Attacks? An Evaluation Benchmark for Large Audio-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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)
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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. |
Extract-Select: A Span Selection Framework for Nested Named Entity Recognition with Generative Adversarial Training (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies treat named entity recognition as a sequential labeling problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a span selection framework for nested named entity recognition . they propose nesting entities with different input categories would be separately extracted . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing models on four benchmark datasets. |
Attention Entropy is a Key Factor: An Analysis of Parallel Context Encoding with Full-attention-based Pre-trained Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang, Xinting Huang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Chenlong Deng, Shuaiyi Li, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks due to their remarkable ability in context modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel context encoding to reduce attention entropy by incorporating attention sinks and selective mechanisms to reduce irregular attention . they also propose to incorporate attention sink mechanisms into the parallel encoded context to reduce the irregular attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lower irregular attention entropy and narrow performance gaps. |
Joint Pre-Encoding Representation and Structure Embedding for Efficient and Low-Resource Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models require longer training and inference times as well as increased memory usage. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode textual descriptions into semantic representations before training and integrate structural embedding with pre-encoded semantic description to improve model's prediction performance on 1-N relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases inference speed by 30x and reduces training memory by approximately 60% on the WN18RR and UMLS datasets. |
Universal Information Extraction with Meta-Pretrained Self-Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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Xin Cong, Bowen Yu, Mengcheng Fang, Tingwen Liu, Haiyang Yu, Zhongkai Hu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for IE are task-specific, resulting in specialized and isolated approaches for different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve task-specific knowledge from pretrained language models to enhance universal IE by using a Meta-Pretraining Algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art on 4 IE tasks, 12 datasets under fully-supervised, low-resource and few-shot scenarios. |
A Split-and-Recombine Approach for Follow-up Query Analysis (D19-1)
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| 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 . |
ConKE: Conceptualization-Augmented Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods face limited knowledge coverage in existing knowledge bases, infeasibility of annotating labels for an overabundance of commonsense knowledge, and strict knowledge formats. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates conceptualization and instantiation into the KE pipeline for LLMs to enhance their commonsense reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework diagnoses implausible commonsense knowledge within an LLM and augments the source knowledge to be edited with conceptualization for stronger generalizability. |
ControlSpeech: Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control (2025.acl-long)
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Shengpeng Ji, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Jialong Zuo, Minghui Fang, Ziyue Jiang, Hai Huang, Zehan Wang, Xize Cheng, Siqi Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior zero-shot TTS models only mimic the speaker’s voice without further control and adjustment capabilities while prior controllable TTS systems cannot perform speaker-specific voice generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a style control module that captures codec representations corresponding to timbre, content, and style in a discrete decoupling codec space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can fully clone the speaker's voice and perform speech-specific adjustment and control functions. |
To See a World in a Spark of Neuron: Disentangling Multi-Task Interference for Training-Free Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zitao Fang, Guodong Du, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yiwei Zhang, Yiyao Cao, Jing Li, Ho-Kin Tang, Sim Kuan Goh
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model merging ignore the fundamental roles of neurons, connectivity and activation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that relies on neuronal mechanisms to mitigate task interference . they decomposed task-specific representations into two complementary subspaces . their results offer new insights into mitigating task interference and improving knowledge fusion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces task interference within neurons and improves knowledge fusion. |
CLIO: Role-interactive Multi-event Head Attention Network for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level event extraction struggle due to two intrinsic challenges: nested arguments and multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-interactive multi-event head attention network to solve two challenges . they map different events to multiple subspaces and then determine whether the current event exists . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two widely used DEE datasets on the Internet. |
UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces (2025.acl-long)
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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. |
AutoDCWorkflow: LLM-based Data Cleaning Workflow Auto-Generation and Benchmark (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Data cleaning is a time-consuming and error-prone manual process even with modern workflow tools like OpenRefine. |
| Approach: | AutoDCWorkflow generates a table with a data analysis purpose and generates an open-refine workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates clean, minimal tables for data analysis tasks. |
Dict-BERT: Enhancing Language Model Pre-training with Dictionary (2022.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Yu, Chenguang Zhu, Yuwei Fang, Donghan Yu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Michael Zeng, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) capture word semantics in different contexts, hence the embeddings of rare words on the tail are poorly optimized. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage definitions of rare words in dictionaries to enhance language model pre-training by leveraging dictionary definitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves understanding of rare words and boosts performance on various NLP downstream tasks. |
Intra-Event and Inter-Event Dependency-Aware Graph Network for Event Argument Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models do not build dependency information among event argument roles . Existing methods do not learn the interactions between different roles based on event structure . |
| Approach: | They propose an intra-event and inter-e event dependency-aware graph network to model dependencies between roles . they use event structure as the fundamental unit to construct role dependencies within events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the ACE05, RAMS, and WikiEvents datasets. |
Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) is often achieved by utilizing source transcripts, but transcripts are only sometimes available since numerous unwritten languages exist worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to synthesize pseudo ST data from monolingual target data to enhance ST without generating source transcripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average boost of 2.3 BLEU on MuST-C En-De, En-Fr, and En-Es datasets. |
Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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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. |
QuASAR: A Question-Driven Structure-Aware Approach for Table-to-Text Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation fail to capture the structure of tabular data or rely on complex attention mechanisms, limiting their applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-driven self-supervised approach to enhance the model’s structural perception and representation capabilities by focusing on structure-related queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves its model's structural perception and representation capabilities by guiding it to capture local and global table structures. |
A Critical Look at Meta-evaluating Summarisation Evaluation Metrics (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Effective summarisation evaluation metrics enable researchers and practitioners to compare different summarization systems efficiently. |
| Approach: | They argue that evaluation metrics are primarily meta-evaluated on news summarisation datasets and that there has been a noticeable shift in research focus towards evaluating the faithfulness of generated summaries. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation metrics are primarily meta-evaluated on news summarisation datasets and there has been a noticeable shift in research focus towards evaluating the faithfulness of generated summaries. |
Forge: Quality-Aware Reinforcement Learning for NP-Hard Optimization in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)
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Zhen Lin, Qiujie Xie, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding, Ke Sun, Fang Guo, Panzhong Lu, Zhiyuan Ning, Yixuan Weng, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
CAFE: Retrieval Head-based Coarse-to-Fine Information Seeking to Enhance Multi-Document QA Capability (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extend context length of Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with retrieval and reasoning in long context inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine method to enhance multi-document question-answering capacities by removing background and distracting documents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAFE outperforms baseline methods on multiple documents. |
Self-imitation Learning for Action Generation in Text-based Games (2023.eacl-main)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
Leveraging Relaxed Equilibrium by Lazy Transition for Sequence Modeling (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using attention-based models, certain tokens are less ambiguous than others, and they require fewer refinements for disambiguation. |
| Approach: | They propose a lazy transition mechanism to adjust the significance of iterative refinements for each token representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on several tasks with the same number of parameters. |
Retrieval as Generation: A Unified Framework with Self-Triggered Information Planning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that ground retrieval on external evidence are limited in their ability to implement retrieval-augmented generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation model that embeds retrieval control directly into generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses strong RAG baselines and uses substantially fewer parameters. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models without Performance Degradation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large vision-language models produce hallucinations that compromise output reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage framework for mitigating hallucinations without performance degradation . they propose semantic-aware component disentanglement and interpretable parameter updates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces hallucinations by 23.4% while maintaining 97.4% of general generative capability. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding requires mapping natural language instructions to precise pixel coordinates due to visually homogeneous elements and dense layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace static consistency strategies with a learnable selection mechanism that selects the optimal target by critiquing its own proposals rendered on the screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves both grounding and critiquing capabilities over 6 benchmarks. |
Can VLMs Actually See and Read? A Survey on Modality Collapse in Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Vision-language models integrate textual and visual information, enabling them to process visual inputs and generate predictions. |
| Approach: | They review work on modality collapse analysis to provide insights into the reason for this unintended behavior and review probing studies for fine-grained vision-language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can achieve competitive performance in vision-language tasks despite relying heavily on textual information and ignoring visual information. |
How Large Language Models Balance Internal Knowledge with User and Document Assertions (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models often need to balance their internal parametric knowledge with external information, such as user beliefs and content from retrieved documents, in real-world scenarios like RAG or chat-based systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-source interaction framework to evaluate 27 large language models from 3 families on 2 datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework systematically evaluates 27 large language models from 3 families on 2 datasets. |
Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for LLM agents fail to exploit real-world zero-day vulnerabilities . prior work has shown that simple agents can hack mock "capture-the-flag" websites . |
| Approach: | They propose a system of agents with a planning agent that can launch subagents to exploit real-world vulnerabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over previous frameworks by up to 4.3 on 14 real-world vulnerabilities. |
MECH: A Cost-Effective Multi-Task Cascade Framework for Classroom Opinion Evolution Recognition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on dialogue act annotation, overlooking the deeper dimension of opinion evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Classroom Opinion Evolution Recognition that translates "Action-Opinion" dualism into a risk-aware routing mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 78.55% while reducing API costs by 44.4%. |
Can We Achieve High-quality Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation without Parallel Speech Data? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing two-pass direct speech-to-speech translation models require parallel speech data to train, which is challenging to collect. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-pass direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) model that decomposes the task into speech- to-text translation (s2TT) and text-tospech (TTS) they propose 'composer' S2ST model that integrates pretrained S2TT and TTS models into a direct S2 ST model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates pretrained S2TT and TTS models into a direct S2ST model without parallel speech data. |
Automated Molecular Concept Generation and Labeling with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Concept-based models lack explainability and need predefined concepts and manual labeling in molecular science. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to generate and label predictive molecular concepts without human input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on several benchmarks while maintaining explainability and allowing easy intervention. |
Reverse Constitutional AI: A Framework for Controllable Toxic Data Generation via Probability-Clamped RLAIF (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to red teaming focus on searching for individual adversarial inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated adversarial data generation that inverts harmless constitution into constitution of toxicity and iteratively refining model outputs through critique–revision pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates diverse, high-quality toxic data without human annotation and significantly improves semantic coherence without sacrificing adversarial strength. |
Improving Dialogue Discourse Parsing via Reply-to Structures of Addressee Recognition (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn dialogue discourse parsing with related tasks require additional annotation, thus limiting their generality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitasking framework that integrates dialogue discourse parsing with addressee recognition to reflect relation-based structure of dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the Molweni and STAC datasets. |
ImplicitAVE: An Open-Source Dataset and Multimodal LLMs Benchmark for Implicit Attribute Value Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Henry Zou, Vinay Samuel, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Zihe Song, Philip Yu, Cornelia Caragea
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for attribute value extraction focus on explicit attribute values while neglecting the implicit ones. |
| Approach: | They present a multimodal dataset for implicit attribute value extraction that includes AVE and multimodality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 68k training and 1.6k testing data across five domains. |
MT-OSC: Path for LLMs that Get Lost in Multi-Turn Conversation (2026.findings-acl)
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Jyotika Singh, Fang Tu, Miguel Ballesteros, Weiyi Sun, Sandip Ghoshal, Michelle Yuan, Yassine Benajiba, Sujith Ravi, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer performance degradation when user instructions and context are distributed over multiple conversational turns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that condenses chat history in the background without disrupting the user experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token counts by up to 72% in 10-turn dialogues while remaining robust to distractors and irrelevant turns. |
How to Allocate, How to Learn? Dynamic Rollout Allocation and Advantage Modulation for Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangyi Fang, Jiaye Lin, Xiaoliang Fu, Cong Qin, Haolin Shi, Chaowen Hu, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards are limited by the complexity of the problem and the complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretically-grounded dual-pronged optimization framework for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards that compensates for gradient attenuation of high-confidence correct actions while utilizing entropy changes as computable indicators to stabilize excessive update magnitudes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compensates for gradient attenuation of high-confidence correct actions while utilizing entropy changes as computable indicators to stabilize excessive update magnitudes. |
CEMT:Controllable Element-Oriented Machine Translation via Structured Linguistic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from paraphrasing errors, omissions, or hallucinations when input contains translation-specific elements that require strict preservation or controlled transformation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Controllable Element-Oriented Machine Translation framework that decomposes the translation process into a linguistically grounded analysis, strategy formulation, and final generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the WMT23/24 Chinese–English benchmarks while significantly reducing element-level constraint violations. |
ChartThinker: A Contextual Chain-of-Thought Approach to Optimized Chart Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
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| 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)
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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. |
Understanding Large Language Model Vulnerabilities to Social Bias Attacks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic capabilities across tasks . however, there is a growing concern about their potential to perpetuate social biases . |
| Approach: | They evaluate LLMs across gender, racial, and religious bias types . they also explore cross-bias and multiple-biases attacks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are more susceptible to gender bias attacks than racial or religious biases. |
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Wenhan Xiong, Jingyu Liu, Igor Molybog, Hejia Zhang, Prajjwal Bhargava, Rui Hou, Louis Martin, Rashi Rungta, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Barlas Oguz, Madian Khabsa, Han Fang, Yashar Mehdad, Sharan Narang, Kshitiz Malik, Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Mike Lewis, Sinong Wang, Hao Ma
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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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. |
MATH-IDN: A Multilingual Mathematical Problem Solving Dataset Featuring Local Languages in Indonesia (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel at mathematical reasoning in English, but their performance in low-resource languages remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark for mathematical problem solving in Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese, and Buginese with English as a reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reveals significant performance gaps in low-resource languages, particularly Buginese, and highlights key limitations in current multilingual reasoning capabilities. |
Getting Sick After Seeing a Doctor? Diagnosing and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Event Temporal Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| 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. |
Empowering Diffusion Models on the Embedding Space for Text Generation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work adapts diffusion models to textual data by diffusing on the embedding space. |
| Approach: | They propose an embedding diffusion model based on Transformer to solve the problem of embeddable space and denoising model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more efficient than previous methods on seminal text generation tasks and is superior to existing models. |
PLUG: Leveraging Pivot Language in Cross-Lingual Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Instruction tuning has advanced large language models (LLMs) but its application in lower-resource languages faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pivot language guided generation approach that utilizes a high-resource language as the pivot to enhance instruction tuning in lower-resourced languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves instruction-following abilities of LLMs by 29% on average compared to directly responding in the target language alone. |
FARSS: Fisher-Optimized Adaptive Low-Rank and Singular-Vector Selection for Knowledge-Preserving Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Doolittle: Benchmarks and Corpora for Academic Writing Formalization (2023.emnlp-main)
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Shizhe Diao, Yongyu Lei, Liangming Pan, Tianqing Fang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Sedrick Keh, Min-Yen Kan, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods of language refinement focus on narrow, specific linguistic features within isolated sentences, such as grammatical errors and improper word use. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to improve the overall quality of academic writing at paragraph level by integrating automatic feedback into the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves the overall quality of formal academic writing at the paragraph level. |
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuan Xiao, Jiaming Wang, Yuchen Chen, Wei Song, Jun Sun, Shiqing Ma, Yanzhou Mu, Juan Zhai, Chunrong Fang, Jin Song Dong, Zhenyu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dataset poisoning require full-dataset poison, which breaks code compilability. |
| Approach: | They propose a functionality-preserving poisoning approach that injects short, compilable weak-use fragments into executed code paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method contaminates 10% of the dataset while maintaining 100% compilability and functional correctness. |
KVFKT: A New Horizon in Knowledge Tracing with Attention-Based Embedding and Forgetting Curve Integration (2025.coling-main)
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| 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. |
Discourse Parsing Enhanced by Discourse Dependence Perception (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Top-down neural models still suffer from the top-down error propagation issue . previous studies gradually switch from feature-based machine learning methods to deep neural models . |
| Approach: | They propose a top-down framework that learns from discourse dependency and constituency parsing through one shared encoder and two independent decoders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns from discourse dependency and constituency parsing through one shared encoder and two independent decoders on a Chinese discourse corpus. |
Why Are We Moral? An LLM-based Agent Simulation Approach to the Study of Moral Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Zhou Ziheng, Huacong Tang, Mingjie Bi, Wanying He, Fang Sun, Yizhou Sun, Ying Nian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Yipeng Kang, Fangwei Zhong
| Challenge: | Existing models of moral evolution must abstract away cognitive processes . et al. (2017): evolution of morality presents a puzzle: natural selection favors selfish . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent simulation framework that manipulates cognitive factors to understand moral evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exploits cognitive realism to explore moral evolution in a hunter-gatherer society. |
Improving Multi-task Stance Detection with Multi-task Interaction Network (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have proposed multi-task learning models that introduce sentiment information to boost stance detection but neglect to capture the fine-grained task-specific interaction between stance and sentiment tasks, thus degrading performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-task interaction network (MTIN) that captures the word-level interaction between tasks, so as to obtain richer task representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two real-world datasets. |
Towards Robust Temporal Activity Localization Learning with Noisy Labels (2024.lrec-main)
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Daizong Liu, Xiaoye Qu, Xiang Fang, Jianfeng Dong, Pan Zhou, Guoshun Nan, Keke Tang, Wanlong Fang, Yu Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal activity localization are expensive and difficult to satisfy due to subjective labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a new TAL setting where a TAL model should be robust to mixed training data with noisy moment boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is significantly more robust to noisy training data than existing methods. |
Disentangling Reasoning Logic to Resolve Explicit Knowledge Conflicts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to resolve explicit knowledge conflicts are based on semantic decoding and auxiliary embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adjudicates conflicts by structuring the underlying logic. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves on existing models. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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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. |
When More Data Hurts: A Troubling Quirk in Developing Broad-Coverage Natural Language Understanding Systems (2022.emnlp-main)
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Elias Stengel-Eskin, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Adam Pauls, Sam Thomson, Hao Fang, Benjamin Van Durme, Jason Eisner, Yu Su
| Challenge: | In natural language understanding systems, users’ evolving needs necessitate the addition of new features over time, indexed by new symbols added to the meaning representation space. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a small set of new symbols to build broad-coverage NLU systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two prototypical NLU tasks: intent recognition and semantic parsing. |
ValueBench: Towards Comprehensively Evaluating Value Orientations and Understanding of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming diverse fields and gaining increasing influence as human proxies. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychometric evaluation pipeline grounded in realistic human-AI interactions to probe value orientations and novel tasks for evaluating value understanding in an open-ended value space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation pipeline is grounded in realistic human-AI interactions and performs tasks that approximate expert conclusions in value-related extraction and generation tasks. |
Infinite Babble: Inflating 3D Vision-Language Model Inference Overhead via Adversarial Geometric Perturbation (2026.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Reasoning with OmniThought: A Large CoT Dataset with Verbosity and Cognitive Difficulty Annotations (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing resources often fail to provide extensive reasoning problems with coherent CoT processes distilled from multiple teacher models. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset featuring 2 million CoT processes generated by multiple powerful LRMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset features 2 million CoT processes and is validated by multiple powerful LRMs. |
Unveiling Multimodal Processing: Exploring Activation Patterns in Multimodal LLMs for Interpretability and Efficiency (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models have remained opaque. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to convert dense MLLMs into fine-grained Mixture-of-Experts architectures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms random expert pruning and sparse activation and model pruning. |
LLMs in the Imaginarium: Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on tool-augmented LLMs focuses on the broad coverage of tools and the flexibility of adding new tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a biologically inspired method for tool-augmented LLMs that orchestrates three key mechanisms for successful tool use behaviors in the biological system: trial and error, imagination, and memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves tool learning for LLMs under both in-context learning and fine-tuning settings, bringing a boost of 46.7% to Mistral-Instruct-7B and outperforms GPT-4. |
Reverse Preference Optimization for Complex Instruction Following (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying and evaluating preference pairs with multiple constraints are noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically reverses constraints to ensure the chosen response is perfect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces noise in preference pairs by reversing constraints to ensure the chosen response is perfect. |
Improving Gradient Trade-offs between Tasks in Multi-task Text Classification (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate task conflict problem are heuristics or gradient-based algorithms to achieve an arbitrary Pareto optimal trade-off among different tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient trade-off approach to mitigate the task conflict problem by using heuristics or gradient-based algorithms to achieve an arbitrary Pareto optimal trade- off among different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve an arbitrary Pareto optimal trade-off among different tasks near the main objective of multi-task text classification (MTC) it is found that training all tasks simultaneously yields degraded performance than learning them independently, leading to poor training. |
Inference-Time Scaling of Verification: Self-Evolving Deep Research Agents via Test-Time Rubric-Guided Verification (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxuan Wan, Tianqing Fang, Zaitang LI, Yintong Huo, Wenxuan Wang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Michael R. Lyu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Deep Research Agents (DRAs) are transforming automated knowledge discovery and problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time scaling of verification wherein an agent self-improves at test time by evaluating its generated answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla agent-as-judge and LLM judge baselines by 12%–48% in meta-evaluation F1 score. |
CycleKQR: Unsupervised Bidirectional Keyword-Question Rewriting (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to query paraphrases are based on encoderdecoder architectures, but they do not support the two important functionalities beyond questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a keyword-question rewriting task to improve query understanding capabilities of NLU systems for all surface forms. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, we show that CycleKQR significantly improves QA performance by rewriting queries into the appropriate form while retaining the original semantic meaning of input queries. |
Collaborative Document Simplification Using Multi-Agent Systems (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Document simplification requires complex factors such as technical terminology, metaphors, and overall coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for document simplification based on large language models that emulates the collaborative process of a human expert team through the roles played by multiple agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework emulates the collaborative process of a human expert team through the roles played by multiple agents, addressing the intricate demands of document simplification. |
Plan-then-Generate: Controlled Data-to-Text Generation via Planning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on producing results that are close to the references, i.e. what to generate and in what order (the output structure) cannot be explicitly controlled by the users. |
| Approach: | They propose a Plan-then-Generate framework to improve the controllability of neural data-to-text models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can control both the intra-sentence and inter-sentent structure of the generated output. |
U-Fold: Dynamic Intent-Aware Context Folding for User-Centric Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing context-folding methods are designed for single-query or single-intent scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic context-folding framework tailored to user-centric tasks that preserves fine-grained information through dynamic context folding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ReAct and previous folding frameworks on long, noisy tasks. |
A Graph-theoretic Summary Evaluation for ROUGE (D18-1)
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| 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. |
FOCUS: Forging Originality through Contrastive Use in Self-Plagiarism for Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate original text using pre-trained language models are problematic as they are trained on corpora constructed by human authors. |
| Approach: | They propose a unique “self-plagiarism” contrastive decoding strategy that modifies prompts in LLMs to develop an amateur model and a professional model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables the development of an amateur model and a professional model while maintaining its standard language model status. |
Unmasking Style Sensitivity: A Causal Analysis of Bias Evaluation Instability in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to assess social biases in natural language processing models show unexpected instability when input texts undergo minor stylistic changes. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of how style transformations impact bias evaluation results . they find formal style transformation significantly affects bias scores . larger models show greater sensitivity to stylistic variations, they find . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fails to detect appearance bias, sexual orientation bias, religious bias and religious bias in large language models. |
GLiM: Integrating Graph Transformer and LLM for Document-Level Biomedical Relation Extraction with Incomplete Labeling (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Fang, Yuejie Zhang, Rui Feng, Yingwen Wang, Qing Wang, Wen He, Xiaobo Zhang, Tao Zhang, Shang Gao
| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) solves problems of document quality . number of entities and entity-pair relations increases, causing incomplete annotations . |
| Approach: | a framework that reduces the problem space using a graph-enhanced Transformer-based model is proposed . GLiM leverages large language models for reasoning to reduce the problem-space . |
| Outcome: | GLiM boosts average recall and F1 scores on biomedical datasets . compared with existing models, GLim outperforms existing models on biomedicine benchmarks compared to existing models . |
Redundancy Principles for MLLMs Benchmarks (2025.acl-long)
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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. |
MANNER: A Variational Memory-Augmented Model for Cross Domain Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental NLP task that aims at classifying mention spans into entity types. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational memory-augmented few-shot named entity recognition model that uses a memory module to store information from source domain and retrieve relevant information from the memory to augment few-shot task in target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can adapt the learned knowledge from source domain to target domain and achieve superior performance on English and Chinese cross domain few-shot NER datasets. |
Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Follow-on Question Suggestion via Voice Hints for Voice Assistants (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Query suggestion is a standard feature of screen-based search experiences, but it is not trivial to implement in voice-based settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of suggesting questions with compact voice hints to allow users to ask follow-up questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on a dataset of 6681 input questions and human written hints and is highly linguistically motivated. |
An Efficient Dialogue Policy Agent with Model-Based Causal Reinforcement Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue policy training consider one-step dialogues, leading to inaccurate simulations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dialogue policy learning that trains an agent to select dialogue actions via deep reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three dialogue datasets . it uses model-based reinforcement learning with automatically constructed causal chains . |
Context-Aware Sentiment Forecasting via LLM-based Multi-Perspective Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| 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)
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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. |
Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on long-term open-domain dialogues focus on evaluating responses within contexts spanning no more than five chat sessions. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine-human pipeline to generate very long-term dialogues by leveraging LLMs and retrieval augmented generation techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates very long-term dialogues using LLMs and RAGs . the generated conversations are verified and edited by human annotators for long-range consistency and grounding to the event graphs. |
ConvLab-2: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Dialogue Systems (2020.acl-demos)
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Qi Zhu, Zheng Zhang, Yan Fang, Xiang Li, Ryuichi Takanobu, Jinchao Li, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaoyan Zhu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | ConvLab-2 inherits Convlab's framework but integrates more powerful dialogue models and supports more datasets. |
| Approach: | They present ConvLab-2, an open-source toolkit that enables researchers to build task-oriented dialogue systems with state-of-the-art models and perform an end-to-end evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The new tool inherits ConvLab's framework and extends it by integrating many recently proposed state-of-the-art dialogue models. |
SLATE: A Sequence Labeling Approach for Task Extraction from Free-form Inked Content (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Apurva Gandhi, Ryan Serrao, Biyi Fang, Gilbert Antonius, Jenna Hong, Tra My Nguyen, Sheng Yi, Ehi Nosakhare, Irene Shaffer, Soundararajan Srinivasan
| Challenge: | SLATE is a sequence labeling approach for extracting tasks from free-form content . past approaches for task extraction from typed content focus on building separate sentence-level task classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence labeling approach for extracting tasks from free-form content . they use a single, low-latency sequence labelling approach to perform sentence segmentation and classification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a baseline model and achieves 84.4% task F1 score and 88.4% boundary similarity score. |
When Slower Isn’t Truer: Inverse Scaling Law of Truthfulness in Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Sitong Fang, Wenjing Cao, Jiahao Li, Xuyao Wang, Chi-Min Chan, Sirui Han, Juntao Dai, Yike Guo, Yaodong Yang, Jiaming Ji
| Challenge: | a study of slow reasoning models for multimodal reasoning finds that they are more prone to fabricating plausible yet false details when confronted with incomplete or misleading visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first systematic study of the inverse scaling law in slow-thinking paradigms for multimodal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The findings suggest that slower reasoning models are more prone to fabricating false details . the study analyzed 5,000-sample hierarchical prompt dataset by 50 participants . |
EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jianfeng Chi, Jiahao Liu, Jingang Wang, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Yi Fang, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product attribute value require multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction approach using lightweight sparse-layer interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. |
User-side Model Consistency Monitoring for Open Source Large Language Models Inference Services (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Open-source large language models have attracted substantial user base by offering quality comparable to closed-source models at a significantly lower cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for model consistency monitoring on the user side that constructs metrics based on logits produced by LLMs to differentiate sequences generated by degraded models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is implementable on consumer-grade devices and demonstrates that it is cost-effective and reliable. |
UCS-SQL: Uniting Content and Structure for Enhanced Semantic Bridging In Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhenhe Wu, Zhongqiu Li, JieZhangChinaTele JieZhangChinaTele, Zhongjiang He, Jian Yang, Yu Zhao, Ruiyu Fang, Bing Wang, Hongyan Xie, Shuangyong Song, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods overlook the challenge of effectively transforming structure information from NL to SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework that unites content and structure pipes to bridge the gap between NL and SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between natural language questions and SQL by combining content and structure pipes. |
Cracking the Code of Hallucination in LVLMs with Vision-aware Head Divergence (2025.acl-long)
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Jinghan He, Kuan Zhu, Haiyun Guo, Junfeng Fang, Zhenglin Hua, Yuheng Jia, Ming Tang, Tat-Seng Chua, Jinqiao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead. |
Steering LVLMs via Sparse Autoencoder for Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address hallucinations in large vision-language models require substantial computational cost and time. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage sparse autoencoders to identify semantic directions closely associated with faithfulness or hallucination, extracting more precise and disentangled hallucinian-related representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing decoding approaches while maintaining transferability across different model architectures with negligible additional time overhead. |
TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| 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)
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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. |
DFAMS: Dynamic-flow guided Federated Alignment based Multi-prototype Search (2026.acl-long)
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Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang, Rihong Qiu, Ruiqing Li, Yihang Zhang, Yue Fang, Yongxin Xu, Hongxin Ding, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ambiguous queries struggle to retrieve high-quality documents . DFAMS outperforms advanced FR methods by 14.37% in knowledge classification accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages dynamic information flow to identify latent query intents and construct semantically aligned knowledge partitions for accurate retrieval across heterogeneous sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in classification accuracy and retrieval recall tests. |
CMOT: Cross-modal Mixup via Optimal Transport for Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to translate speech signals into text are limited by the modality gap between speech and text. |
| Approach: | They propose Cross-modal Mixup via Optimal Transport to overcome the modality gap between speech and text by finding alignment between modalities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the MuST-C ST benchmark show that CMOT achieves an average BLEU of 30.0 in 8 translation directions, outperforming previous methods. |
Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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Yi Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxun Lian, Xinlong Wang, Yanan Cao, Fang Fang, Wen Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks. |
Enhancing Temporal Sensitivity and Reasoning for Time-Sensitive Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in LM-Based TTS Models via Distribution Alignment Using GFlowNets (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing mitigation strategies for Text-to-Speech systems require excessive training resources or inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a GFlOwNet-guided distribution AlignmenT framework that mitigates hallucinations without relying on massive resources or inference latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces over 50% character error rates and lowers uncertainty by up to 58% on challenging test cases. |
Uni-Encoder: A Fast and Accurate Response Selection Paradigm for Generation-Based Dialogue Systems (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to decode a given context-candidate pair are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that keeps full attention over each pair while only encoding the context once. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves new state-of-the-art results on four benchmark datasets with high computational efficiency. |
INT: Establishing Information Transfer for Multilingual Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2025.findings-acl)
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Di Wu, Liting Jiang, Bohui Mao, Hongyan Xie, Haoxiang Su, Zhongjiang He, Ruiyu Fang, Shuangyong Song, Hao Huang, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies struggle to achieve performance comparable to that on high-resource languages due to inherent linguistic diversity of multilingual SLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual information transfer network to solve these challenges . they propose to reformulate SF as a span prediction problem and introduce a slot-matching attention mechanism to achieve slot alignment across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the MASSIVE and MASSIV-UG datasets in overall accuracy across all languages. |
Encoding Sentiment Information into Word Vectors for Sentiment Analysis (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding sentiment knowledge into word vectors are generally trained independently of the downstream task. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode sentiment knowledge into pre-trained word vectors to improve sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves sentiment analysis on four popular sentiment datasets compared to benchmark methods. |
TEBNER: Domain Specific Named Entity Recognition with Type Expanded Boundary-aware Network (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to label data and identify entities require large amounts of manually annotated texts for training supervised models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dictionary extension method which extracts new entities through the type expanded model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art supervised systems on different types of datasets and surpasses supervised models. |
More than Votes? Voting and Language based Partisanship in the US Supreme Court (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | partisanship and ideology have been a key topic in legal studies of the US Supreme Court . most research quantifies partisan behavior based on voting behavior, and oral arguments have not been well studied for this purpose. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for analyzing justices' oral arguments for partisan signals and how they align with voting patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that the affiliated party of justices can be predicted reliably from their oral contributions. |
Sounding Board: A User-Centric and Content-Driven Social Chatbot (N18-5)
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Hao Fang, Hao Cheng, Maarten Sap, Elizabeth Clark, Ari Holtzman, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith, Mari Ostendorf
| Challenge: | Sounding Board is a social chatbot that can hold a coherent conversation with humans . the system is user-centric in that users can control the topic of conversation, while the system adapts to the user's needs. |
| Approach: | They present Sounding Board, a social chatbot that won the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize. |
| Outcome: | The system is user-centric in that users can control the topic of conversation, while the system adapts to the user's needs. |
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero-shot commonsense question answering use incomplete CSKBs . lack of human annotations makes sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that abstracts a commonsense knowledge triple to many higher-level instances, which increases the coverage of the CSKB and expands the ground-truth answer space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAR can generalize to zero-shot commonsense scenarios . lack of human annotations makes sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. |
MARD: Module-Aware Reasoning Distillation for Language Models with Adaptive Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-step reasoning remains challenging for language models with limited capacity . et al., 2025) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a module-aware reasoning distillation framework that explicitly targets key Transformer components for effective reasoning transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework targets key components for effective reasoning transfer . it adopts an offline distillation setting, where a strong teacher model provides reasoning trajectories in advance . |
MedINST: Meta Dataset of Biomedical Instructions (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
GraphICL: Unlocking Graph Learning Potential in LLMs through Structured Prompt Design (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are a powerful tool for understanding complex systems and relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models for graph-structured data using prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms state-of-the-art graph LLMs and graph neural networks on graph learning tasks without training. |
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generalize commonsense reasoning lack instantiated knowledge and require pre-built concept taxonomies and annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. |
Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse Relations (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated ChatGPT's remarkable few-shot, even zero-shot learning abilities when compared to other models. |
| Approach: | They quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. |
MQuinE: a Cure for “Z-paradox” in Knowledge Graph Embedding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models suffer from Z-paradox, a deficiency in expressiveness . Embedding-based models map each entity and relation into a vector or matrix . |
| Approach: | They propose a new knowledge graph embedding model that does not suffer from Z-paradox while preserves strong expressiveness to model various relation patterns with theoretical justification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on link prediction tasks while maintaining strong expressiveness. |
Stable Signer: Hierarchical Sign Language Generative Model (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Sign Language Production (SLP) is the process of converting complex input text into a real video. |
| Approach: | They propose a new sign language generative model that streamlines redundant structure and optimizes the task objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model streamlines redundant structure and optimizes objective . it generates high-quality and multi-style sign language videos with hand gestures . |
When and What to Ask: AskBench and Rubric-Guided RLVR for LLM Clarification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models respond even when prompts omit critical details or include misleading information, leading to hallucinations or reinforced misconceptions. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive benchmark that converts standard QA pairs into multi-turn interactions with explicit checkpoints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves accuracy, rubric adherence, and interaction efficiency with strong generalization to unseen domains. |
STEMM: Self-learning with Speech-text Manifold Mixup for Speech Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn speech representations for end-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) neglect the representation discrepancy across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to calibrate the representation discrepancy between modalities by mixing up the representation sequences of different modality inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the cross-modal representation discrepancy and improves on a strong baseline on eight translation directions. |
LastingBench: Defend Benchmarks Against Knowledge Leakage (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect and safeguard LLMs against knowledge leakage fail to address the long-term challenge of mitigating it. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reinforce and safeguard existing benchmarks against knowledge leakage by perturbation-based detection and counterfactual rewriting to disrupt memorization while preserving original intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memorization effects in long-context QA benchmarks, providing a more accurate assessment of model reasoning and generalization abilities. |
Turn-Level Active Learning for Dialogue State Tracking (2023.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
Phrase-level Textual Adversarial Attack with Label Preservation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks are usually realized through word-level or sentence-level perturbations, which either limit the perturbation space or sacrifice fluency and textual quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level perturbation-based adversarial ATtack that generates adversarials through phrase- level perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of natural language processing models by reducing the need for word-level perturbations and preserving the fluency and grammaticality of the samples. |
Assessing the Reliability of Word Embedding Gender Bias Measures (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Various measures have been proposed to quantify human-like social biases in word embeddings, but they can suffer from measurement error. |
| Approach: | They propose to assess the reliability of word embedding gender bias measures by examining their reliability across different choices of random seeds, scoring rules and words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measures can suffer from measurement error, and the results inform better design of word embedding gender bias measures. |
A Query-Driven Topic Model (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Topic modeling is an unsupervised method for revealing the hidden semantic structure of a corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-driven topic model that allows users to specify a simple query in words or phrases and return query-related topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is particularly attractive when the query has a low occurrence in a text corpus, making it difficult for traditional topic models to identify relevant topics. |
PerSphere: A Comprehensive Framework for Multi-Faceted Perspective Retrieval and Summarization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the main challenge lies in long context and perspective extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to facilitate multi-faceted perspective retrieval and summarization . they propose measurable metrics to evaluate the comprehensiveness of the retrieval pipeline . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system breaks free from information silos by combining two opposing claims . it can be used to extract multiple perspectives and improve performance on the platform . |
SEAG: Structure-Aware Event Causality Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhengwei Tao, Zhi Jin, Xiaoying Bai, Haiyan Zhao, Chengfeng Dou, Yongqiang Zhao, Fang Wang, Chongyang Tao
| Challenge: | Current methods for extracting event causality are limited by the lack of cross-task dependencies and may cause error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for Structure-Aware Event Causality Generation (SEAG) they generate the ECG structure using a pre-trained language model and perform structural discriminative training alongside auto-regressive generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in extracting event causality from text. |
Proximity-Based Multi-Turn Optimization: Practical Credit Assignment for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing group-based policy optimization methods rely on statistical deviation within discrete batches, misallocating credit when task difficulty fluctuates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-turn LLM agents that integrates global context . they propose GRPO, which integrates success-rate-aware modulation and proximity-based soft aggregation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields performance gains over existing baselines with negligible computational cost. |
Large Language Models are Good Relational Learners (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to serialize large language models disregard critical relational structures and creates redundancies. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network encoder to create structured relational prompts for large language models within a retrieval-augmented generation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture preserves relational structure of databases while enabling LLMs to process and reason over complex entity relationships. |
SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuang Sun, Huatong Song, Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Jinhao Jiang, Junjie Zhang, Fei Bai, Jia Deng, Xin Zhao, Zheng Liu, Lei Fang, Zhongyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep search training lack high-quality training trajectories, prohibitive computational costs and lack of high-fidelity training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating real user interactions in live web search environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating user interactions in live web search environments. |
JTPRO: A Joint Tool–Prompt Reflective Optimization Framework for Language Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Sandip Ghoshal, Anshul Mittal, Jyotika Singh, Miguel Ballesteros, Weiyi Sun, Fang Tu, Shailender Singh, Yassine Benajiba, Fahad Shah, Sujeeth Bharadwaj, Sujith Ravi, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Large language model agents struggle with ambiguous tool descriptions and underspecified tool schemas that ignore tool-specific nuances. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for improving tool-calling reliability in trace-supervised settings by rolling out-driven reflection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and reflective prompt optimizers by 5%–20% on OSR. |
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Yiming Liang, Leo Jin, Junting Zhou, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Mingshan Chang, Tianyu Zheng, Xincheng Zhang, Nuo Ma, Zekun Moore Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Haihong Wu, Hongquan Lin, Wenhao Huang, Jiajun Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Jie Fu, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for Chinese instruction tuning are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese instruction tuning datasets to improve instruction fine-tuning for Chinese users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that Chinese models achieve competitive performance in diverse benchmarks. |
Preemptive Detection and Correction of Misaligned Actions in LLM Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized human-AI collaboration by enabling autonomous agents to execute complex, multi-step tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the belief reasoning ability of LLMs to detect misaligned actions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three widely used tasks show that InferAct outperforms other methods on Marco-F1 and emnlp2025. |
MeetDot: Videoconferencing with Live Translation Captions (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Arkady Arkhangorodsky, Christopher Chu, Scot Fang, Yiqi Huang, Denglin Jiang, Ajay Nagesh, Boliang Zhang, Kevin Knight
| Challenge: | MeetDot is a videoconferencing system with live translation captions overlaid on screen . currently, the system supports speech and captions in 4 languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a videoconferencing system with live translation captions overlaid on screen . the system supports speech and captions in 4 languages and combines automatic speech recognition and machine translation in a cascade . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports speech and captions in 4 languages and has very tight latency requirements to have acceptable call quality. |
Benchmarking Large Language Models on Answering and Explaining Challenging Medical Questions (2025.naacl-long)
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| 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. |
A Dynamic Speaker Model for Conversational Interactions (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | a neural model for characterizing individual differences in speakers is shown to be useful in human-computer interaction and dialog act prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for learning a dynamically updated speaker embedding in a conversational context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is used for content ranking and dialog act prediction in human-human conversations. |
i-Code Studio: A Configurable and Composable Framework for Integrative AI (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Yuwei Fang, Mahmoud Khademi, Chenguang Zhu, Ziyi Yang, Reid Pryzant, Yichong Xu, Yao Qian, Takuya Yoshioka, Lu Yuan, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Integrative AI lack flexibility and composability to handle multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a configurable framework for Integrative AI that orchestrates multiple pre-trained models to conduct complex multimodal tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves impressive results on zero-shot multimodal tasks . it can communicate and personalize for users, and it can be used in a multimodal agent . |
CATS: A Pragmatic Chinese Answer-to-Sequence Dataset with Large Scale and High Quality (2023.acl-long)
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Liang Li, Ruiying Geng, Chengyang Fang, Bing Li, Can Ma, Rongyu Cao, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Current datasets bias in the English language while leaving other languages underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset with high quality and large scale . they propose encoding space for two hybrid knowledge resources to convert this task to a graph-totext problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in generating textual descriptions for the Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset. |
Non-Autoregressive Chinese ASR Error Correction with Phonological Training (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct ASR errors focus on fixed-length corrections, but rarely consider variable-length ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive method to correct Chinese ASR errors . they use phonological tokens to extend the source sentence for variable-length correction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves word error rate and speeds up inference by 6.2 times compared with the autoregressive model. |
KG-FiD: Infusing Knowledge Graph in Fusion-in-Decoder for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Donghan Yu, Chenguang Zhu, Yuwei Fang, Wenhao Yu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Xiang Ren, Yiming Yang, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) models typically include a retrieving module and a reading module. |
| Approach: | They propose a new open-domain question-answering framework that uses a knowledge-enhanced version of FiD to improve the approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on ODQA benchmark datasets with less than 40% computation cost. |
SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement (2025.acl-short)
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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. |
Task Compass: Scaling Multi-task Pre-training with Task Prefix (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuosheng Zhang, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Yuwei Fang, Wenhao Yu, Yang Liu, Hai Zhao, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-task learning with large-scale supervised tasks suffers from negative effects across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task prefix guided multi-task pre-training framework to explore the relationships among tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used as a foundation backbone for a wide range of tasks and as augmentation tool for data augmentation with complementary tasks. |
On-the-fly Denoising for Data Augmentation in Natural Language Understanding (2024.findings-eacl)
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| 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. |
LIME: Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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King Zhu, Qianbo Zang, Shian Jia, Siwei Wu, Feiteng Fang, Yizhi Li, Shuyue Guo, Tianyu Zheng, Jiawei Guo, Bo Li, Haoning Wu, Xingwei Qu, Jian Yang, Ruibo Liu, Xiang Yue, Jiaheng Liu, Chenghua Lin, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing MLLM benchmarks and unified evaluation frameworks cannot accurately and efficiently reflect the ability of MLMLs. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automated benchmark curated using a pipeline that filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that require image-based understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77% while it can more effectively distinguish different models’ abilities. |
Exploring the Hidden Reasoning Process of Large Language Models by Misleading Them (2025.findings-emnlp)
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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)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is a burgeoning area of research . a new paradigm has ushered NER into a non-entity type at the current step t . |
| Approach: | They propose a pooled feature distillation loss that skillfully navigates the trade-off between retaining knowledge of old entity types and acquiring new ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on ten CNER settings using three datasets. |
AiraXiv: An AI-Driven Open-Access Platform for Human and AI Scientists (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated the growth of both human-authored and AI-generated research outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-driven open-access platform built on open preprints, AI-augmented analysis and review, and reader feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform supports human scientists through an interactive UI and AI scientists through Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based interactions. |
ProMed: Shapley Information Gain Guided Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Medical LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Hongxin Ding, Baixiang Huang, Yue Fang, Weibin Liao, Xinke Jiang, Jinyang Zhang, Yinghao Zhu, Zheng Li, Liantao Ma, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing medical Large Language Models (LLMs) follow a reactive paradigm, risking diagnostic errors by answering before seeking sufficient details. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that transitions LLMs toward a proactive paradigm, enabling them to ask clinically valuable questions before decision-making. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on partial-information medical benchmarks show that ProMed outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.29% on average and delivers a 54.45% gain over the reactive paradigm. |
Deep Research with Open-Domain Evaluation and Multi-Stage Guardrails for Safety (2026.acl-long)
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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%. |
Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Multimodal Feature Integration (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multimodal GEC models improve over strong baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the Falko-MERLIN test set. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates both speech and text features to enhance GEC by generating audio from text using advanced text-to-speech models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on CoNLL14, BEA19 English, and Falko-MERLIN German datasets. |
Removing RLHF Protections in GPT-4 via Fine-Tuning (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have increased in their capabilities, which increases their potential for dual use. |
| Approach: | They show that fine-tuning can remove RLHFprotections with as few as 340 examples and a 95% success rate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method removes RLHFprotections with as few as 340 examples and a 95% success rate on non-censored outputs. |
From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization (2022.naacl-main)
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| 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. |
Vocabulary-informed Language Encoding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | A Multilingual model relies on language encodings to identify input languages . a method to compute a vocabulary-informed language coding can improve multilingual models . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to compute a vocabulary-informed language encoding as the language representation for a required language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on unsupervised translation and cross-lingual embedding. |
Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Systems with Large Language Models: A Survey of Recent Advances, Resources, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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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)
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| 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)
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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. |
Dynamic Evaluation with Cognitive Reasoning for Multi-turn Safety of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety evaluation methods rely on static assessments that use fixed harmful prompts or predefined prefixes as jailbreak templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic evaluation framework for multi-turn safety assessment of LLMs based on cognitive theories to simulate real chatting process and scenario simulation and strategy decision to guide dynamic generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has been applied to evaluate the safety of widely used LLMs. |
CodeMEM: AST-Guided Adaptive Memory for Repository-Level Iterative Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory management approaches show promise but remain limited by natural language-centric representations. |
| Approach: | They propose an AST-guided dynamic memory management system for repository-level iterative code generation that maintains and updates repository context through AST operations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves instruction following by 12.2% and reduces interaction rounds by 2–3 while maintaining competitive inference latency and token efficiency. |
ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Using long-term memory, large language models can embed social hierarchies into their emotional reasoning. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 15 large language models on validated emotional intelligence tests to examine how user memory affects emotional intelligence. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the models with advantaged profiles receive more accurate emotional interpretations. |
Almost Free Semantic Draft for Neural Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical experiments show that the presented method can achieve competitive performance in common language pairs with a clear advantage in inference efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to sample and consider a semantic draft as global information from semantic space for decoding with almost free of cost. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method can achieve competitive performance in common language pairs with a clear advantage in inference efficiency. |
More than Minorities and Majorities: Understanding Multilateral Bias in Language Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| 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 . |
Training Data is More Valuable than You Think: A Simple and Effective Method by Retrieving from Training Data (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that REtrieving from the traINing datA only can lead to significant gains on multiple NLG and NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve training instances from traINing datA and concatenate them with input to generate output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on XSum, BigPatent, and CommonsenseQA. |
BioT5+: Towards Generalized Biological Understanding with IUPAC Integration and Multi-task Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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Qizhi Pei, Lijun Wu, Kaiyuan Gao, Xiaozhuan Liang, Yin Fang, Jinhua Zhu, Shufang Xie, Tao Qin, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | BioT5+ is an extension of the BioT5, but lacked a nuanced understanding of molecular structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a new bio-entity modeling framework, BioT5+, which integrates IUPAC names and molecule data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between molecular representations and textual descriptions and improves the grounded reasoning of bio-text and bio-sequences. |
The More, The Better? A Critical Study of Multimodal Context in Radiology Report Summarization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Mong Yuan Sim, Wei Emma Zhang, Xiang Dai, Biaoyan Fang, Sarbin Ranjitkar, Arjun Burlakoti, Jamie Taylor, Haojie Zhuang
| Challenge: | Current multimodal summarization models often fail to utilize radiology images in summarizing Findings section. |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough analysis to determine whether current multimodal summarization models can utilize radiology images in summarizing Findings section. |
| Outcome: | The Impression section plays a crucial role in communication between radiologists and physicians. |
Understanding and Bridging the Modality Gap for Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve end-to-end speech translation (ST) use multitask learning, but there is always a modality gap between ST and MT due to the differences between speech and text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to bridge the modality gap between ST and MT by leveraging (text) machine translation data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the modality gap and achieves significant improvements over baseline in all eight directions. |
Concadia: Towards Image-Based Text Generation with a Purpose (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to generate fluent, truthful text, despite excellent results on benchmark datasets . current systems fail to produce texts that are useful in practice, authors argue . |
| Approach: | They propose to distinguish descriptions from captions based on their communicative roles . descriptions focus on visual features and are meant to replace an image . authors characterize commonalities and differences between descriptions and captions in a Wikipedia corpus . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate fluent, truthful texts in a wide range of scenarios . it can also generate captions that are used to make an image accessible to users who can't see them . |
Multilingual Pre-training with Self-supervision from Global Co-occurrence Information (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show multilinguality and crosslinguality emerge from MLM pretraining without supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose to use global co-occurrence information as a source of structural information on multilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies show that MLM-GC pre-training outperforms MLM pre- training for 4 downstream cross-lingual tasks and 1 additional monolingual task. |
Concept-Reversed Winograd Schema Challenge: Evaluating and Improving Robust Reasoning in Large Language Models via Abstraction (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has revealed that Large Language Models (LLMs) often experience issues with hallucinations and unreliable reasoning due to semantic associations and superficial logical chains. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-reversed Winograd Schema Challenge dataset to evaluate the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose Abstraction-of-Thought (AoT) method for recovering adversarial cases to normal cases using conceptual abstraction to improve LLMs’ robustness and consistency in reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs’ robustness and consistency in reasoning under adversarial and long-tail scenarios. |
Knowledge Injection Exists in MoE? Exploring Expert-Aware Contrast Decoding in MoE for Mitigating LLMs’ Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate hallucinations include prompt engineering and model optimization, but lack domain generalization and potential errors in fine-tuning data may exacerbate the hallucism. |
| Approach: | They propose an expert-aware adaptive contrast decoding that uses expert differences in MoE’s higher layers to mitigate hallucinations on QA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on four datasets Large language models (LLMs) show strong performance but suffer from hallucinations, limiting their application. |
UKP-SQuARE v3: A Platform for Multi-Agent QA Research (2023.acl-demo)
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Haritz Puerto, Tim Baumgärtner, Rachneet Sachdeva, Haishuo Fang, Hao Zhang, Sewin Tariverdian, Kexin Wang, Iryna Gurevych
| Challenge: | Current approaches to QA models are multi-dataset models, but combining expert agents can yield large performance gains over multi-agent models. |
| Approach: | They extend an online platform for QA research to support three families of multi-agent systems: agent selection, early-fusion of agents, and late-fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be compared with multi-dataset models and achieve high inference speed and performance. |
OmniAlign-V: Towards Enhanced Alignment of MLLMs with Human Preference (2025.acl-long)
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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. |
PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Population (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Commonsense Knowledge Base (CSKB) Population aims at reasoning over unseen entities and assertions on CSKBs, but it requires out-of-domain generalization ability as the source CSMB for training is of a relatively smaller scale (1M) . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning framework that uses a teacher model to provide pseudo labels on the unlabeled candidate dataset for a student model to learn from. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve the backbone model KG-BERT (RoBERTa-large) by 3.3 points on the overall performance and especially, 5.3 points on out-of-domain performance. |
Adversarial Self-Supervised Data-Free Distillation for Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
Continual Machine Reading Comprehension via Uncertainty-aware Fixed Memory and Adversarial Domain Adaptation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing stationary-trained MRC systems are usually trained with in-domain data but are applied to new domain data. |
| Approach: | They propose a continual machine reading comprehension model with uncertainty-aware fixed memory and adversarial domain adaptation that keeps a stable understanding by learning both memory and new domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior to strong baselines and has a substantial incremental learning ability without catastrophically forgetting under two different continual MRC settings. |
Efficient Table Retrieval and Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is often captured in image form across a wide range of real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables MLLMs to answer queries over large tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by 7.0% in retrieval recall and 6.1% in answer accuracy on a newly constructed dataset with 48,504 unique tables. |
CTAP for Chinese:A Linguistic Complexity Feature Automatic Calculation Platform (2022.lrec-1)
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| 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 . |
Discovering a Shared Logical Subspace: Steering LLM Logical Reasoning via Alignment of Natural-Language and Symbolic Views (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multistep logical reasoning are limited by natural language refinement or external symbolic solvers. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical subspace that captures logical reasoning capabilities in LLMs that are shared across views while remaining independent of surface forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy by 11 percentage points and generalizes well on out-of-domain problems. |
Open-Domain Conversational Question Answering with Historical Answers (2022.findings-aacl)
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| 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. |
Neuron-Level Sequential Editing for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Houcheng Jiang, Junfeng Fang, Tianyu Zhang, Baolong Bi, An Zhang, Ruipeng Wang, Tao Liang, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing model editing methods focus on single-round editing and often face significant challenges in sequential model editing. |
| Approach: | They propose a model editing method that optimizes the target layer’s hidden states using the model’s original weights to prevent model failure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing model editing methods and is available on the open-source platform 4open.science. |
Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning (2025.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Surprisal Predicts Code-Switching in Chinese-English Bilingual Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new study examines the propensity of bilinguals to switch languages . word surprisal and word entropy are important predictors of code-switching . |
| Approach: | They propose high cognitive effort as a reason for code-switching . they use a computational model of surprisal and word entropy to model code-changing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that word surprisal, but not entropy, is a significant predictor . sentence length is also a predictor, which has been related to sentence complexity . |