Papers by Fang Zhang
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 . |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 . |
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 . |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 . |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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%. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 . |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 . |
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. |
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 . |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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%. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |