Papers by Fei Li
Rule-Guided Extraction: A Hierarchical Rule Optimization Framework for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event argument extraction (EAE) is a critical task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven HiErarchical Rule Optimization framework that iteratively generates and selects optimal hierarchical rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms few-shot supervised methods and outperformed state-of-the-art prompting baselines. |
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haowei Liu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Yaya Shi, Chaoya Jiang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
Probing Structured Pruning on Multilingual Pre-trained Models: Settings, Algorithms, and Efficiency (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured pruning has been extensively studied on monolingual pre-trained models . but little attention has been paid to evaluating the effectiveness of structured pruning on multilingual models. |
| Approach: | They investigate settings, algorithms, and efficiency of structured pruning on multilingual models . authors propose a simple approach that allows training the model once and adapting to different model sizes at inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach allows training the model once and adapting to different model sizes at inference. |
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. |
Exploring Large Language Models for Multi-Modal Out-of-Distribution Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for reliable and trustworthy machine learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply world knowledge to enhance OOD detection performance through selective generation from large language models (LLMs) they propose to extract visual objects from each image to fully capitalize on the aforementioned world knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on visual OOD detection on in-distribution (ID) samples. |
Deceptive Semantic Shortcuts on Reasoning Chains: How Far Can Models Go without Hallucination? (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and unfaithful reasoning due to keyword/entity biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a new probing method and benchmark to quantify this phenomenon by using a keyword/entity biases-based probing technique called EUREQA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 62% accuracy on multi-hop and complex QA benchmarks. |
Too Long, Do Re-weighting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Zhong-Zhi Li, Xiao Liang, Zihao Tang, Lei Ji, Peijie Wang, Haotian Xu, Xing W, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Yeyun Gong, Zhijiang Guo, Xiao Liu, Fei Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks by leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses Extended Chain-of-Thought (EFT) to reduce the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
Denoising Enhanced Distantly Supervised Ultrafine Entity Typing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on distantly supervised (DS) ultra-fine entity typing has received significant attention . however, DS data is noisy and often suffers from missing or wrong labeling issues resulting in low precision and low recall. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise model to estimate unknown labeling noise distribution over input contexts and noisy type labels and a model to train on denoised data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on the Ultra-Fine entity typing dataset and OntoNotes dataset. |
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. |
MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on 1D text-related tasks, but lack 2D graph perception, a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules’ topological structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a cross-modal projector and a uni-modal adapter to enable an LM to understand both text- and graph-based molecular contents via a Q-Former. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baselines on tasks such as molecule captioning, IUPAC name prediction, and molecule-text retrieval. |
Mixture-of-Supernets: Improving Weight-Sharing Supernet Training with Architecture-Routed Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-acl)
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Ganesh Jawahar, Haichuan Yang, Yunyang Xiong, Zechun Liu, Dilin Wang, Fei Sun, Meng Li, Aasish Pappu, Barlas Oguz, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Neural architecture search (NAS) uses weight-sharing supernets to generate diverse subnetworks without retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a weight-sharing supernet that leverages mixture-of-experts to enhance supernet model expressiveness with minimal training overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in NAS for fast machine translation models, surpassing NAS-BERT and AutoDistil across various model sizes. |
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. |
Format-Adapter: Improving Reasoning Capability of LLMs by Adapting Suitable Format (2026.findings-acl)
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Dingzirui Wang, Xuanliang Zhang, Rongyu Cao, Longxu Dou, Xianzhen Luo, Yingwei MA, Qingfu Zhu, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Prior work showed that multiple reasoning formats outperform a single format when generating multiple answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to measure reasoning error when generating multiple answers . they propose 'formatadapter' which generates and selects suitable reasoning formats . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 4.3% performance improvement over previous works on math and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid malicious user inputs. |
| Approach: | They employ weak classifiers to explain LLM safety through the intermediate hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can identify malicious and normal inputs and detect malicious ones without jailbreak. |
A Unified Span-Based Approach for Opinion Mining with Syntactic Constituents (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained opinion mining (OM) are based on span-based annotations, but they are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified span-based approach for the end-to-end OM setting using syntactic constituents and multi-task learning to integrate them into the proposed model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over previous work on the MPQA 2.0 dataset and reduces the number of wrongly-predicted opinion expressions and roles. |
STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxiang Guo, Yu Zhang, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, ZheTao Chen, Wenhao Xu, Fei Wu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing automated singing annotation (ASA) methods tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that addresses transcription, alignment, and refined style annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace. |
Balanced Data Sampling for Language Model Training with Clustering (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a fundamental part of the training process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use clustering to balance the text distribution of training data for better model training. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ClusterClip Sampling under various training datasets and large language models. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models. |
LMTurk: Few-Shot Learners as Crowdsourcing Workers in a Language-Model-as-a-Service Framework (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs) are effective few-shot learners. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that treats few-shotlearners as crowdsourcing workers . they propose to use these workers to train models that solve a task well . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach treats few-shotlearners as crowdsourcing workers . the resulting annotations can be utilized to train models that solve the task well . |
IOPO: Empowering LLMs with Complex Instruction Following via Input-Output Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms to improve the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to improve the ability to follow complex instructions by using a IOPO alignment method to take input and output preference into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm shows 8.15%, 2.18% improvements on in-domain data and 5.91%, 2.83% on out-of-domain datasets compared to SFT and DPO respectively. |
End-to-End Modeling via Information Tree for One-Shot Natural Language Spatial Video Grounding (2022.acl-long)
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Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Haoyu Zhang, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Wenming Tan, Jin Wang, Peng Wang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for grounding video frames with dense annotations require enormous amount of human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to ground natural language in video frames with only one frame labeled . they propose an end-to-end model that eliminates interference of irrelevant frames . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can ground natural language in all video frames with only one frame labeled . the proposed model eliminates interference of irrelevant frames based on branch search and cropping techniques . |
Budget-Constrained Tool Learning with Planning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for budget-constrained tool learning have been overlooked . et al., 2023b) compared tool learning with other methods to improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for budget-constrained tool learning by creating a preferable plan under the budget constraint before utilizing the tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the cost of tool learning and reaches competitive Pass Rate. |
Exploring Key Point Analysis with Pairwise Generation and Graph Partitioning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for key point analysis rely on semantic similarity instead of measuring the existence of shared key points . |
| Approach: | They propose a key point analysis approach with pairwise generation and graph partitioning to summarize arguments into a concise set of key points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses existing models on ArgKP and QAM datasets. |
Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Prediction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dependency parsing address the issue that edges should be constructed at the text span/subtree level rather than word level. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs dependency trees by directly modeling span-span relations by modeling subtree-subtree relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method constructs dependency trees by modeling span-span relations . it can retrieve missing spans in the span proposal stage, which leads to higher recall . |
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)
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Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Gao Xing, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on role-playing agents have focused on enhancing their conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style, but there has been a gap in assessing their social intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. |
Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on neurons focus on emotion and rhetoric, neglecting their intrinsic connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric in large language models . they propose 'neuro-based' masking method that integrates multi-dimensional screening . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. |
OptiCo: Adaptive Distributed Training Optimization via Collaborative Agent Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing distributed training frameworks are plagued by over-reliance on prior profiling and poor generalization across models/hardware. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-driven multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models to enable automatic and explainable distributed training strategy configuration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms expert-designed training strategies within 20 iterations. |
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. |
LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting (2022.coling-1)
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Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Changliang Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting . they construct a learnable verbalizer of entity categories without any label-specific classifiers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and class transfer models in low-resource scenarios. |
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Wen Xie, Ziqi Dai, Jialong Tang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Meishan Zhang, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
CWSeg: An Efficient and General Approach to Chinese Word Segmentation (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Chinese word segmentation have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but they pose challenges in the deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment PLM-based Chinese word segmentation schemes by developing cohort training and versatile decoding strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to augment existing PLM-based models and improve their performance on Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca datasets. |
T2I-FactualBench: Benchmarking the Factuality of Text-to-Image Models with Knowledge-Intensive Concepts (2025.acl-long)
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Ziwei Huang, Wanggui He, Quanyu Long, Yandi Wang, Haoyuan Li, Zhelun Yu, Fangxun Shu, Weilong Dai, Hao Jiang, Fei Wu, Leilei Gan
| Challenge: | Existing studies on text-to-image (T2I) models focus on text alignment, image quality, and object composition capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a T2I-FactualBench benchmark to evaluate the factuality of knowledge-intensive concept generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the factuality of knowledge-intensive concept generation tasks. |
Good Visual Guidance Make A Better Extractor: Hierarchical Visual Prefix for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li, Yunzhi Yao, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for named entity recognition and relation extraction suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images are incorporated in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical visual prefix fusion NeTwork for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction using pluggable visual prefixed visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
ToolRM: Towards Agentic Tool-Use Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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Renhao Li, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Yantao Liu, Fei Huang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Derek F. Wong, Junyang Lin, Min Yang
| Challenge: | lack of reliable reward models for tool-use tasks has limited progress toward agentic AI . recent advances in agentic artificial intelligence are driven by tool-using capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that constructs pairwise preference data using rule-based scoring and multidimensional sampling to build lightweight reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on tool calling tasks with higher accuracy. |
Extrapolating Multilingual Understanding Models as Multilingual Generators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual understanding models are not capable of generating high-quality text compared with decoder-based causal language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adapt a multilingual encoder to a language generator with a small number of additional parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms initialization-based methods with 9.4 BLEU on machine translation, 8.1 Rouge-L on question generation, and 5.5 METEOR on story generation. |
M2DF: Multi-grained Multi-curriculum Denoising Framework for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work mainly utilizes image information to improve the performance of MABSA task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis task that uses image information to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art work on three sub-tasks of MABSA. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
Zero-Shot Conversational Stance Detection: Dataset and Approaches (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing stance detection datasets are limited to a limited set of specific targets . current models are limited in their ability to detect large numbers of unseen targets based on a large number of unidentified targets. |
| Approach: | They propose a speaker interaction and target-aware prototypical contrastive learning model that can detect public opinion towards specific targets using social media data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in zero-shot conversational stance detection with only an F1-macro score of 43.81%. |
Enhancing Hyperbole and Metaphor Detection with Their Bidirectional Dynamic Interaction and Emotion Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hyperbole and metaphor detection focus on superficial text features, ignoring the associations of hyperbola and metaphor . Existing frameworks focus on identifying superficial text, focusing on superficial features . |
| Approach: | They propose an emotion-guided hyperbole and metaphor detection framework based on bidirectional dynamic interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on four datasets. |
MRN: A Locally and Globally Mention-Based Reasoning Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on document-level relation extraction focus on sentencelevel RE, but recent studies reveal that a large number of relations can actually be expressed through multiple sentences, which necessitates document- level RE. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that captures local and global contextual information as well as close and distant mention interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three widely used datasets, namely DocRED, CDR, and GDA. |
Multi-level Distillation of Semantic Knowledge for Pre-training Multilingual Language Model (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for improving multilingual models did not focus on learning the semantic structure of representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve multilingual language models by aligning parallel sentences . they propose token-, word-, sentence- and structure-level alignment objectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on XNLI, PAWS-X, and XQuAD . it obtains comparable performance on low-resource languages, the authors show . |
FLEEK: Factual Error Detection and Correction with Evidence Retrieved from External Knowledge (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Farima Fatahi Bayat, Kun Qian, Benjamin Han, Yisi Sang, Anton Belyy, Samira Khorshidi, Fei Wu, Ihab Ilyas, Yunyao Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) have a tendency to hallucinate and provide creative and fluent responses that are not factually accurate. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool that automatically extracts factual claims from text, gathers evidence from external knowledge sources, evaluates the factuality of each claim, and suggests revisions for identified errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool detects errors in text and evaluates their factuality and suggests revisions based on the collected evidence. |
DALR: Dual-level Alignment Learning for Multimodal Sentence Representation Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal sentence representation learning methods focus on aligning images and text at a coarse level, resulting in cross-modal misalignment bias and intra-modal semantic divergence. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-level alignment learning framework for multimodal sentence representation learning that promotes cross-modal and intra-modal alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on semantic textual similarity and transfer tasks on semantic similarity, ranking distillation and global intra-modal alignment learning. |
Better Highlighting: Creating Sub-Sentence Summary Highlights (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarizations are considered to be less reliable because they distort the original meaning and can be confusing for readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate summary highlights that are understandable on their own to avoid confusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows summaries to be understood in context and avoids misdirecting readers to false conclusions. |
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated increasing power, but they also have vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack that targets the cognitive structure and processes of large language models (LLMs) they propose defending cognitive overload attacks from three perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is a black-box attack with no need for knowledge of model architecture or access to model weights. |
Tailoring Diagnostic Modeling to Individual Learners: Personalized Distractor Generation via MCTS-Guided Reasoning Reconstruction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current distractor generation methods produce shared distractors for all students, ignoring individual variations in reasoning, which limits their diagnostic effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which tailors distractors to each student’s specific cognitive flaws, inferred from their past question-answering (QA) history. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in generating plausible distractors and adapts to group-level settings. |
HELENE: Hessian Layer-wise Clipping and Gradient Annealing for Accelerating Fine-tuning LLM with Zeroth-order Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face memory challenges due to the high cost of backpropagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a zeroth-order (ZO) optimization that matches memory usage to inference . they propose scalable and memory-efficient zeroth order (ZE) optimizer that integrates annealed A-GNB gradients with diagonal Hessian estimation and layer-wise clipping as a second-order pre-conditioner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an average speedup of 20 over MeZO on RoBERTa-large and OPT-1.3B. |
Robustness via Referencing: Defending against Prompt Injection Attacks by Referencing the Executed Instruction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yulin Chen, Haoran Li, Yuan Sui, Yue Liu, Yufei He, Xiaoling Bai, Chi Fei, Li Yabo, Haozhe Ma, Yangqiu Song, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Prompt injection attacks manipulate large language models (LLMs) by misleading them to deviate from the original input instructions and execute maliciously injected instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt injection defense method that suppresses the model's instruction-following tendencies rather than suppressing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms prompt-engineering-based approaches and fine-tuning methods and reduces the ASR to nearly 0% in some scenarios. |
Self-Error-Instruct: Generalizing from Errors for LLMs Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Qi Zhu, Boyang Xue, Minghui Xu, Baojun Wang, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes more generalized training data from isolated bad cases by extrapolating from isolated cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes more generalized training data to address these model weaknesses. |
PairCoder: Pair Programming-Inspired Two-Agent Collaboration for Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi agent frameworks for large language models are brittle on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that brings pair programming to autonomous LLM collaboration. |
| Outcome: | Using PairCoder, large language models achieve better results on code generation tasks and reduce token usage by 40% to 70% on eight representative backbones. |
Modeling Local Contexts for Joint Dialogue Act Recognition and Sentiment Classification with Bi-channel Dynamic Convolutions (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel context-aware dynamic convolution network is proposed to better leverage the local contexts when dynamically generating convolution kernels. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic convolution network to leverage local contexts when generating convolution kernels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets. |
LJPCheck: Functional Tests for Legal Judgment Prediction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LJP models fail to evaluate specific aspects of their performance, such as legal fairness and judicial fairness. |
| Approach: | They propose a suite of functional tests for LJP models to comprehend LJp models’ behaviors and offer diagnostic insights. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests reveal weaknesses in LJP models and provide diagnostic insights. |
Writing-RL: Advancing Long-form Writing via Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Xuanyu Lei, Chenliang Li, Yuning Wu, Kaiming Liu, Weizhou Shen, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Fei Huang, Ya-Qin Zhang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled strong performance in long-form writing, but current training paradigms remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework to advance long-form writing capabilities beyond SFT. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 7B-scale writer models show that Writing-RL improves long-form writing performance over strong SFT baselines. |
Enhancing Court View Generation with Knowledge Injection and Guidance (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of natural language generation (NLG) rely on the extensive parameters of pretrained language models (PLMs) but their effectiveness may be compromised by insufficient domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-injected prompt encoder to incorporate domain knowledge during the training stage, thereby reducing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms established baselines on real-world data in responsivity of claims and in the ability to transfer domain knowledge. |
Automated Fine-Grained Mixture-of-Experts Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures is inadequate for model compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures . they find that expert networks exhibit distinctive channel-wise outlier distributions ." |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the Mixtral-8x7b-v0.1 architecture while maintaining minimal computational overhead. |
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. |
NaSGEC: a Multi-Domain Chinese Grammatical Error Correction Dataset from Native Speaker Texts (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on Chinese grammatical error correction focus on learning essays. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese grammatical error correction dataset that annotates multiple references for 12,500 sentences from three native domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to facilitate research on Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) for native speaker texts from multiple domains. |
Efficient Sequence Learning with Group Recurrent Networks (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recurrent neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results in many artificial intelligence tasks, such as language modeling, neural machine translation and speech recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient architecture to improve the efficiency of such RNN model training by adopting the group strategy for recurrent layers while exploiting the representation rearrangement strategy between layers as well as time steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves comparable or better accuracy compared with baselines, with a much smaller number of parameters and at a lower computational cost. |
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)
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Run Luo, Haonan Zhang, Longze Chen, Ting-En Lin, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Min Yang, Yongbin Li, Minzheng Wang, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen, Yunshui Li, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Xiaobo Xia, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | a new framework for image-text instruction data evolution improves MLLM performance . lack of high-quality instruction data remains a major bottleneck in ML modeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal instruction data evolution framework that iteratively enhances data quality through fine-grained perception, cognitive reasoning, and interaction evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves MLLM performance in nine vision-language tasks while using significantly less data. |
ExploraCoder: Advancing Code Generation for Multiple Unseen APIs via Planning and Chained Exploration (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models face intrinsic limitations in coding with unseen APIs in training corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that empowers LLMs to invoke multiple unseen APIs in code solution by planning a complex problem into several API invocation subtasks and experimenting with correct API usage at intermediate steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance for models lacking prior API knowledge, achieving 11.99% over retrieval-based approaches and 17.28% over pretraining-based methods in pass@10. |
Harvesting Events from Multiple Sources: Towards a Cross-Document Event Extraction Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event extraction aims to extract structured information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-document event extraction pipeline that integrates event information from multiple documents and provides a comprehensive perspective on events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves about 72% F1 in end-to-end cross-document event extraction, setting up a benchmark for future research. |
From Graph to Word Bag: Introducing Domain Knowledge to Confusing Charge Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing charge prediction methods have shown impressive performance, but they face significant challenges when dealing with confusing charges, such as Snatch and Robbery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which introduces domain knowledge regarding constituent elements to guide the model in making judgments on confusing charges, much like a judge’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains exceptional performance in imbalanced label distributions. |
Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via Prior-LLM Context Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) lack understanding of multi-image and interleaved inputs due to the visual features encoded by frozen encoders before being fed into the LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a two phase paradigm to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively. |
Rethinking Depression Prediction from a Fine-Grained Subscore Modeling Perspective via Multi-Task Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for depression assessment rely on standardized ratings, but they are time-consuming and subject to inter-rater variability. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained model for subscore prediction via multi-task learning that can be used to predict depression severity using multiple tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and Qwen3-14B direct scoring on the public E-DAIC dataset and to a large-scale private clinical dataset. |
Doc2Bot: Accessing Heterogeneous Documents via Conversational Bots (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend . user information needs are often underspecified, and the nature of heterogeneous documents poses challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations . their dataset contains over 100,000 turns based on Chinese documents from five domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks are challenging and worthy of further research. |
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Yuhang Zhou, Mingrui Zhang, Ke Li, Mingyi Wang, Qiao Liu, Qifei Wang, Jiayi Liu, Fei Liu, Serena Li, Weiwei LI, Mingze Gao, Abhishek Kumar, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao, Lizhu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on understanding and reasoning over tables, but current approaches remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. |
PALM: Pre-training an Autoencoding&Autoregressive Language Model for Context-conditioned Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for natural language understanding and generation use autoencoding and/or autoregressive objectives to train models. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised pre-training scheme that pre-trains an autoencoding and autoregressive language model on a large unlabeled corpus for generating new text conditioned on context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of language generation benchmarks covering generative question answering, abstractive summarization and conversational response generation. |
Preview, Attend and Review: Schema-Aware Curriculum Learning for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog state tracking models neglect rich structural information in a dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose to use curriculum learning to leverage dialog state tracking data . they propose a model-agnostic framework that pre-trains a DST model with schema information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over a transformer-based and RNN-based model on WOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1. |
PEMV: Improving Spatial Distribution for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Using Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on the analysis of contextual structure in dialogue and the interactions between different emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (PEMVs) based on emotion feature queues to optimize the spatial representation of text features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used benchmark datasets. |
Fine-Tuning Language Models with Reward Learning on Policy (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach to align large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines a reward model using policy samples to keep it on-distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets showing that it can learn robust representations of policy samples. |
Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate factual consistency in text summarization neglect the intrinsic cause of factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship between source document, generated summary, and the language prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric improves correlation with human judgments and convenience of usage on three public abstractive text summarization datasets. |
TNT: Text Normalization based Pre-training of Transformers for Content Moderation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language model pre-training (self-supervised or unsupervised learning) has been widely used in a multitude of language processing tasks such as named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering and content moderation. |
| Approach: | They propose a new language pre-training model TNT for content moderation that uses a combination of masking strategy and text normalization to learn from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on hate speech classification task and is a potential approach to misspelling correction. |
DISC: Plug-and-Play Decoding Intervention with Similarity of Characters for Chinese Spelling Check (2025.acl-long)
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Ziheng Qiao, Houquan Zhou, Yumeng Liu, Zhenghua Li, Min Zhang, Bo Zhang, Chen Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check (CSC) tasks require that incorrect characters are usually similar to the correct ones in either phonetics or glyph. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play decoding intervention with similarity of characters module for Chinese spelling check (CSC) they propose to incorporate phonetic and glyph similarities only during the inference phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves Chinese spelling check models on benchmarks and on benchmark datasets. |
WESR: A Benchmark and Strong Baseline for Word-level Event-Speech Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenchen Yang, Kexin Huang, Liwei Fan, Qian Tu, Botian Jiang, Dong Zhang, Linqi Yin, Shimin Li, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | aaron carroll: the precise localization of non-verbal vocal events remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. carroll says current methods suffer from insufficient task definitions with limited category coverage. carrol: knowing exactly where an event occurred is not enough; knowing exactly what it happened is. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of 21 vocal events with a new categorization into discrete versus continuous types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model disentangles ASR errors from event detection while maintaining ASR quality. |
Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhiyuan Zeng, Qipeng Guo, Zhaoye Fei, Zhangyue Yin, Yunhua Zhou, Linyang Li, Tianxiang Sun, Hang Yan, Dahua Lin, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to unbalanced routing . some experts are overflow, where exceeding tokens are dropped, while others are empty, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k router that is unbalanced and uses a multi-gPU system to handle dropped tokens and padding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the top-1 router by 4.7% in terms of performance . the top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs . |
ConRPG: Paraphrase Generation using Contexts as Regularizer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paraphrase generation lack reliable supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised paradigm for paraphrase generation based on contextual language models, candidate filtering and paraphrase model training based upon the selected candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing paraphrase generation methods in supervised and unsupervised setups. |
STAR: SQL Guided Pre-Training for Context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zefeng Cai, Xiangyu Li, Binyuan Hui, Min Yang, Bowen Li, Binhua Li, Zheng Cao, Weijie Li, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show that STAR outperforms previous pre-training methods and ranks first on the leaderboard . text-to-SQL parsing aims to translate natural language (NL) questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing . they propose two objectives that explore context-dependence of NL utterances and SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two downstream benchmarks and ranks first on the leaderboard. |
E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language pre-training methods use a two-step training procedure to learn visual features from image-text pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-trained model for V+L understanding and generation using a unified Transformer framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn visual representation and semantic alignments between image and text on visual-text pairs and on visual processing tasks. |
A Novel Matching Paradigm: Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM with Prompt Compression for Relevance Learning (2026.acl-industry)
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Guoliang Zhao, Zixin Cui, Chao Ye, Dengwu He, Fei Huang, Yubo Liu, Shuanglong Li, Tzungren Kuo, Bin Ding, Shuang Zhang, null KunhongZhu, Zhi Guo, Liu Lin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to matching use Large Language Models as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a matching paradigm that integrates two-tower, single-towing, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance and strong practical value in an industrial search engine. |
Reasoning-Guided Exploration for Online DPO (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has aimed to enhance reasoning capabilities of language models, but these methods are limited to domains with objectively verifiable answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-play framework to improve reasoning on general-domain data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance on general-domain data while maintaining competitive performance on verifiable academic benchmarks. |
InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflection (2026.eacl-long)
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Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Zishu Wei, Congkai Xie, Xueyu Hu, Xinchen Xu, Shengyu Zhang, Xiaotian Han, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing GUI Agents face challenges in multi-step reasoning and reliance on textual annotations, limiting their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose an MLLM-based GUI Agent with a two-stage supervised fine-tuning pipeline that enhances GUI understanding and grounding. |
| Outcome: | InfiGUIAgent achieves competitive performance on several GUI benchmarks, highlighting the impact of native reasoning skills in enhancing GUI interaction for automation tasks. |
Modularized Interaction Network for Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) models focus on word-level information, while segment-based models focus only on word level information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Modularized Interaction Network (MIN) model which utilizes both word-level information and segment-level dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on three NER benchmark datasets. |
A Deep Decomposable Model for Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Representation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in disentanglement work on coarse levels in the disenanglement of closely related properties, such as syntax and semantics in human languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep decomposable model based on VAE to disentangle syntax and semantics by using total correlation penalties on KL divergences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the disentanglement quality between syntactic and semantic representations for semantic similarity tasks and syntaktic similarity task. |
MTLS: Making Texts into Linguistic Symbols (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In linguistics, all languages can be considered as symbolic systems . most work overlooks the properties of languages as symbol systems - aaron et al., 1989). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to make texts into linguistic symbols to improve multilingual capability . they use a pre-training method to replace pre-trained language models with a vocabulary map . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual capabilities on multilingual tasks using BERT and RoBERTa as the backbone. |
Geo-Encoder: A Chunk-Argument Bi-Encoder Framework for Chinese Geographic Re-Ranking (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chinese geographic re-ranking task aims to find the most relevant addresses among retrieved candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate Chinese geographic semantics into re-ranking pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two Chinese benchmark datasets. |
MPTc-Bench: Measuring Cross-market Generative Ability of Vision-Language Models via Movie Poster Transcreation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work adapts textual transcreation to image editing and formulates image transcreations to better match a target audience while preserving meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage planner-editor pipeline in which an VLM planner specifies executable edits and an image editor renders them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can transcreate a visual asset for a different market while preserving its identity while matching market-specific design preferences and multilingual typography. |
Modeling Complex Dialogue Mappings via Sentence Semantic Segmentation Guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to identify and avoid CDM to facilitate dialogue learning failed to solve the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sentence Semantic Segmentation guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder which can model and take advantage of the CDM data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can model and take advantages of the CDM data. |
Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with impressive capabilities, but they lack domain specificity, real-time information and face challenges in solving specialized problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages in tool learning. |
EFUF: Efficient Fine-Grained Unlearning Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to eliminate hallucinations require expensive human annotation . hallucination in multimodal large language models poses unique challenges for current research . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained unlearning framework that performs gradient ascent to eliminate hallucinations without paired data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations while preserving quality with modest computational overhead. |
Out-of-Domain Intent Detection Considering Multi-Turn Dialogue Contexts (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for OOD intent detection are limited to single dialogue turns. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware OOD intent detection framework to model multi-turn contexts in OOD context detection tasks using unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the F1-OOD score by 29% on multi-turn OOD detection tasks compared to the previous best method. |
Improving Question Generation with Multi-level Content Planning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest key phrase selection is essential for question generation, yet it is difficult to connect disjointed phrases into meaningful questions, especially for long context. |
| Approach: | They propose a QG framework that uses multi-level content planning to generate questions from a given context and an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two popular QG datasets. |
HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from**doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources. |
PRDetect: Perturbation-Robust LLM-generated Text Detection Based on Syntax Tree (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods for detecting LLM-generated text have shown impressive performance, but in real-world scenarios, users often introduce perturbations to the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects syntactic trees that are minimally affected by perturbations and exhibit distinct differences between human-written and LLM-generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that it is significantly better against perturbations on the HC3 and GPT-3.5-mixed datasets and also has the shortest time expenditure. |
KBM: Delineating Knowledge Boundary for Adaptive Retrieval in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhen Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Yong Jiang, Zile Qiao, Zhuo Chen, Guangyu Li, Feiteng Mu, Mengting Hu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges . a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) is used to express the known/unknown of a given question . |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Boundary Model to express the known/unknown of a given question . they find that not all questions need to trigger RAG to improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces time and computational costs by retrieving parts of unknown knowledge . the proposed model can express the known/unknown of a given question and determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered . |
Rescue: Ranking LLM Responses with Partial Ordering to Improve Response Generation (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. Obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a task using ranking metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods. |
SHARP: Self-adaptive Harmful Category-aware Prompt Generation for Black-box Jailbreaking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreak ignore the semantic differences between categories of harmful questions, leading to inconsistent success rates and reduced overall attack effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a category-aware jailbreak framework that incorporates the semantic category of harmful questions into prompt generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves attack success rates and category alignment and achieves better cross-category robustness compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
OntoED: Low-resource Event Detection with Ontology Embedding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to ED rely on training instances and ignore correlation of event types. |
| Approach: | They propose a process of event ontology population linking event instances to pre-defined event types in event ontoology and ontological embedding to address these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to new unseen event types by establishing linkages to existing ones. |
Universally Empowering Zeroth-Order Optimization via Adaptive Layer-wise Sampling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models are slow and lack of performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Zeroth-Order optimization framework that uses forward passes to fine-tune Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.7 to 3.0 wall-clock acceleration on LLaMA and OPT models. |
Repulsive Attention: Rethinking Multi-head Attention as Bayesian Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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Bang An, Jie Lyu, Zhenyi Wang, Chunyuan Li, Changwei Hu, Fei Tan, Ruiyi Zhang, Yifan Hu, Changyou Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-head attention is an effective module in deep neural networks, but there are no explicit mechanisms guaranteeing this property. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric approach that explicitly improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and consequently strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
KS-Lottery: Finding Certified Lottery Tickets for Multilingual Transfer in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that a small subset of parameters is highly effective in fine-tuning . prior work shows that there are a few additional parameters corresponding to an intrinsic dimension in a well-trained Large Language Model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify a small subset of LLM parameters highly effective in multilingual fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can find the certified winning tickets in the embedding layer, and fine-tuning on the found parameters is guaranteed to perform as well as full fine- tuning. |
LLaMAX: Scaling Linguistic Horizons of LLM by Enhancing Translation Capabilities Beyond 100 Languages (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional translation capabilities in high-resource language tasks, yet their effectiveness in low-resourced languages is suboptimal. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive multilingual continual pre-training on the LLaMA series models and develop LLiMAX for translation support across more than 100 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves higher translation performance than existing open-source models and performs on-par with specialized translation model on the Flores-101 benchmark. |
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively. |
UniLR: Unleashing the Power of LLMs on Multiple Legal Tasks with a Unified Legal Retriever (2025.acl-long)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yifei Liu, Ming Cai, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Yangyang Kang, Chengyuan Liu, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods are designed for general domains, struggling with legal knowledge, or tailored for specific legal tasks, unable to handle diverse legal knowledge types. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel retrieval method that integrates specialized knowledge into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can perform multiple legal retrieval tasks for LLMs. |
Unified Language Representation for Question Answering over Text, Tables, and Images (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer complex questions are limited to text or structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that transforms images and tables into unified language representations to simplify QA problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two datasets and the WebQA leaderboard. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
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Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
ART: rule bAsed futuRe-inference deducTion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Mengze Li, Tianqi Zhao, Bai Jionghao, Baoyi He, Jiaxu Miao, Wei Ji, Zheqi Lv, Zhou Zhao, Shengyu Zhang, Wenqiao Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-based premises and deduce valid conclusions from visual observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-based deductive reasoning task that uses video to deduce the correct future event . they use commonsense knowledge to annotate video and a strong baseline to conduct reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies validate the rationality of ARTNet in deductive reasoning upon visual observations . ART is a method that rigorously follows a set of explicit constraints to deduce valid conclusions from empirical facts . |
MultiSQL: A Schema-Integrated Context-Dependent Text2SQL Dataset with Diverse SQL Operations (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text2SQL is a task that translates natural language into SQL statements. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that translates natural language into SQL statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task enables users to convert natural language into SQL statements. |
XY-Tokenizer: Mitigating the Semantic-Acoustic Conflict in Low-Bitrate Speech Codecs (2026.acl-long)
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Yitian Gong, Luozhijie Jin, Kuangwei Chen, Dong Zhang, Ruifan Deng, Xiaogui Yang, Xin Zhang, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance these objectives at low bitrates . XY-Tokenizer achieves stronger semantic alignment than representative semantic-distillation codec . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-bitrate speech codec that aligns discrete speech representations with text while preserving fine-grained acoustic details for reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing low-bitrate speech codecs in speech understanding and generation tasks. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
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. |
Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Court View Generation by Stimulating Internal Knowledge and Incorporating External Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022. |
DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications. |
Rescue Implicit and Long-tail Cases: Nearest Neighbor Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RE models are incapable of handling implicit expressions and long-tail relation types due to language complexity and data sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance relation extraction using k nearest neighbors (kNN-RE) kNN is a nearest-neighbor search tool that allows the model to consult training relations at test time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best model to date on ACE05, SciERC, and Wiki80 datasets and outperformed the best on i2b2 and Wik80 dataset. |
Speech-Text Pre-training for Spoken Dialog Understanding with Explicit Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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Tianshu Yu, Haoyu Gao, Ting-En Lin, Min Yang, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing speech-text pre-training methods are limited to one or two specific tasks, despite their success in speech-language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal position prediction task to capture the speech-text alignment . they use a textual dialog pre-training task to generalize a response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior in learning speech-text alignment and multi-turn dialog context. |
Teaching Small Language Models Reasoning through Counterfactual Distillation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual distillation framework that leverages LLMs to generate high-quality counterfacts and utilizes multi-view CoT to enhance the diversity of reasoning samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances reasoning capabilities of large language models and is more robust to OOD data. |
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks. |
Lego-MT: Learning Detachable Models for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing monolithic models for multilingual neural machine translation encounter parameter interference and inefficient inference for large models. |
| Approach: | They propose a detachable multi-way model that assigns each language to an individual branch . they use data from OPUS to build a translation benchmark covering 433 languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in OPUS and is faster than existing models. |
XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser (2025.coling-main)
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Xianfu Cheng, Hang Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiang Li, Weixiao Zhou, Fei Liu, Kui Wu, Xiangyuan Guan, Tao Sun, Xianjie Wu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Document AI parsing semi-structured image form is a key information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal and multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER which integrates SER and relation extraction into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 1.79% improvement on RE tasks in multilingual and zero-shot settings. |
Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | In implicit sentiment analysis, the opinion cues come in an implicit and obscure manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-step prompting principle for THOR to step-by-step induce the implicit aspect, opinion and finally the sentiment polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework pushes the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 6% F1 on supervised setup and more strikingly, boosts the SoTA by over 50% F1 with THOR+GPT3. |
Better Combine Them Together! Integrating Syntactic Constituency and Dependency Representations for Semantic Role Labeling (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies use only one singleton syntax for semantic role labeling (SRL). |
| Approach: | They propose a TreeLSTM-based integration that integrates phrasal boundaries and semantic relations from dependency into a labelaware GCN solution for simultaneously modeling syntactic edges and labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on span-based and dependency-based SRL. |
GDLLM: A Global Distance-aware Modeling Approach Based on Large Language Models for Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to analyzing large language models are limited by their pre-trained knowledge of Small Language Models(SLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a global distance-aware modeling approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs) they first present a distance-based graph structure utilizing Graph Attention Network(GAT) |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves minority relation class learning ability on two publicly available datasets, TB-Dense and MATRES. |
kFolden: k-Fold Ensemble for Out-Of-Distribution Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies studying OOD detection in NLP often rely on external data to diversify model predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which mimics OOD detection behavior without external data . they take text classification as an archetype and compare them to existing datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can resolve in- and out-distribution examples in a natural way using existing datasets. |
SpeechIQ: Speech-Agentic Intelligence Quotient Across Cognitive Levels in Voice Understanding by Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Yahan Yu, Jinchuan Tian, Sheng Li, Ke Hu, Zhehuai Chen, Shinji Watanabe, Fei Cheng, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | SIQ quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Approach: | They propose a human cognition-inspired evaluation pipeline for voice understanding large language models (LLM_Voice) that quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models, identifies annotation errors in existing benchmarks, and detects hallucinations in LLM_Voice. |
Cross-Document Cross-Lingual NLI via RST-Enhanced Graph Fusion and Interpretability Prediction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the development of many subdirections, Cross-Document Cross-Lingual NLI remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel paradigm that extends traditional NLI capabilities to multi-document, multilingual scenarios by integrating RST-enhanced graph fusion with interpretability-aware prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing models and document-level NLI to multi-document, multilingual scenarios. |
SUN: Exploring Intrinsic Uncertainties in Text-to-SQL Parsers (2022.coling-1)
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Bowen Qin, Lihan Wang, Binyuan Hui, Bowen Li, Xiangpeng Wei, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Min Yang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods that learn from multiple semantically-equivalent questions are limited to one-to-one mapping . |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint to explore the underlying complementary semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent questions and learn robust feature representations with reduced spurious associations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong competitors and achieves state-of-the-art results on five benchmark datasets. |
PaCE: Unified Multi-modal Dialogue Pre-training with Progressive and Compositional Experts (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on multi-modal dialogue pre-training is limited due to limited availability of multi-dimensional data . a recent emergence of chatGPT 1 has increased confidence in the potential for this goal . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-modal dialogue pre-training that integrates experts to accommodate multi-faceted tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on eight multi-modal dialog benchmarks. |
CMMaTH: A Chinese Multi-modal Math Skill Evaluation Benchmark for Foundation Models (2025.coling-main)
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Zhongzhi Li, Ming-Liang Zhang, Pei-Jie Wang, Jian Xu, Rui-Song Zhang, Yin Fei, Zhi-Long Ji, Jin-Feng Bai, Zhen-Ru Pan, Jiaxin Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in various language tasks, while large multimodal models effectively handle visual-language problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multimodal multimodal model evaluation benchmark to evaluate model performance in Chinese K12 classrooms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluation tool is integrated with the CMMaTH dataset. |
DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) enabled dialogue systems are one of the central modes in human-machine interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark task for dialogue element MOdeling and Element Awareness and a new benchmark for dialogue agent interaction that allows the agent to model dialogue elements via imitation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs well in both dialogue element modeling and out-of-domain tasks. |
Multi-Document Summarization with Determinantal Point Processes and Contextualized Representations (D19-54)
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| Challenge: | Determinantal point processes (DPP) is one of the best performing techniques for extractive summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine determinantal point processes with surface indicators for effective identification of summary-worthy sentences. |
| Outcome: | The determinantal point processes (DPP) framework is one of the best performing in summarization competitions. |
EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ding-Chu Zhang, Yida Zhao, Jialong Wu, Liwen Zhang, Baixuan Li, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Yu-Feng Li, Kewei Tu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enabling LLM web search proficiency struggle with data production in open-search domains, while supervised fine-tuning struggles with data utilization efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative self-evolution framework that combines SFT and RL to enhance agentic web search capabilities without external human-annotated reasoning data. |
| Outcome: | EvolveSearch achieves 4.7% improvement over current state-of-the-art in seven benchmarks . supervised fine-tuning struggles with data production in open-search domains compared with RL . |
Fortify the Shortest Stave in Attention: Enhancing Context Awareness of Large Language Models for Effective Tool Use (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that compensates an attention trough with an attention peak by a process to enhance the model's awareness to various contextual positions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of a 7B model on the largest tool-use benchmark, comparable to that of GPT-4. |
Fast Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Fast kNN-MT uses the entire corpus as the datastore for the nearest neighbor search . knn-MT is two-orders slower than vanilla MT models . |
| Approach: | They propose a fast kNN-MT model that uses the entire corpus as the datastore for nearest neighbor search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is two-orders faster than kNN-MT and is only two times slower than the standard model. |
Domain Incremental Lifelong Learning in an Open World (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lifelong learning (LL) models require access to task identities in the testing phase or cannot handle samples from unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic architecture-based lifelong learning model that tries to learn a sequence of tasks with a prompt-enhanced language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in handling unseen tasks and focuses on task-level prompts to capture knowledge from different granularities. |
CoEvo: Coevolution of LLM and Retrieval Model for Domain-Specific Information Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yinghao Hu, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Chengyuan Liu, Tao Wu, Adam Jatowt, Ming Cai, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Recent methods to enhance queries by generating intermediary elements can degrade retrieval performance . combining LLMs and retrievers can be difficult, resulting in unreliable or irrelevant intermediaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates the coevolution of large language models and retrieval models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework facilitates the coevolution of LLMs and retrieval models. |
AutoEvolve: Automatically Evolving Queries for Applicable and Scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmarking (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ding-Chu Zhang, Xiaowen Zhang, Yue Fei, Renjun Hu, Xiao-Wen Yang, Zhi Zhou, Baixuan Li, Yu-Feng Li, Xing Shi, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Existing automated generation methods exhibit Weak Applicability and Weak Scalability . existing methods are limited by their reliance on metadata from specific corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to generate scalable RAG benchmarks using corpus-agnostic methods . they propose a difficulty-guided metric that directs query evolution process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach evolves queries significantly more challenging than existing methods . it is able to dynamically increase difficulty, limiting scalability of the query . |
Scaling External Knowledge Input Beyond Context Windows of LLMs via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing context window extension methods obstruct scaling external knowledge input. |
| Approach: | They develop a multi-agent framework to overcome two core bottlenecks in existing agent orchestration designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes two core bottlenecks and improves inference-time knowledge integration without longer-context training. |
Long-Tailed Question Answering in an Open World (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA approaches require access to seen tasks or do not explicitly model samples from unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-tailed QA model that encourages knowledge sharing between head, tail and unseen tasks and explicitly mines knowledge from a large pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on a large-scale dataset. |
Balancing Speciality and Versatility: a Coarse to Fine Framework for Supervised Fine-tuning Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aligned Large Language Models exhibit remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse to fine framework to fine-tune aligned Large Language Models to achieve a balance between speciality and versatility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales. |
MedConQA: Medical Conversational Question Answering System based on Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have the problems of weak scalability, insufficient knowledge, and poor controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical conversational question-answering system based on the knowledge graph to improve scalability and controllability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can conduct knowledge-grounded dialogues with users, using a Chinese medical knowledge graph and a large-scale dataset. |
Prefix-diffusion: A Lightweight Diffusion Model for Diverse Image Captioning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing image captioning models require large trainable parameters to bridge visual and textual representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight image captioning network in combination with continuous diffusion that injects prefix image embeddings into denoising process of diffusion model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse captions with relatively less parameters while maintaining fluency and relevance compared with other models. |
MuCGEC: a Multi-Reference Multi-Source Evaluation Dataset for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a multi-reference multi-source evaluation dataset, Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) is relatively scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-reference multi-source evaluation dataset for Chinese grammar error correction . the dataset contains 7,063 sentences written by Chinese-as-a-Second-Language learners . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate Chinese grammar errors in Chinese. |
Can LLMs Learn from Previous Mistakes? Investigating LLMs’ Errors to Boost for Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown the benefits to LLMs from fine-tuning golden-standard Chain-of-Thought rationales or using them as correct examples in few-shot prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark to test the effectiveness of large language models by leveraging errors to enhance reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to fine-tune models in correct and incorrect domains, rather than tuning models to learn ground truth in traditional methods. |
EPO: Explicit Policy Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Xiaoqian Liu, Ke Wang, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Aobo Kong, Fei Huang, Jianbin Jiao, Junge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for strategic reasoning face challenges in adaptability, scalability, and transferring strategies to new contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit policy optimization model that provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. |
Conversations Are Not Flat: Modeling the Dynamic Information Flow across Dialogue Utterances (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent intelligent open-domain chatbots have made substantial progress thanks to the rapid development of large-scale pre-training approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic flow mechanism to model the context flow and a model to capture the information dynamics across dialogue utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the DialoGPT on the dialogue generation task. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
One-Shot Learning as Instruction Data Prospector for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yunshui Li, Binyuan Hui, Xiaobo Xia, Jiaxi Yang, Min Yang, Lei Zhang, Shuzheng Si, Ling-Hao Chen, Junhao Liu, Tongliang Liu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Contemporary practices in instruction tuning often hinge on enlarging data scaling without a clear strategy for ensuring data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages one-shot learning to discern and select high-quality instruction data from extensive datasets. |
| Outcome: | Nuggets outperforms existing methods on MT-Bench and Alpaca-Eval benchmarks. |
Pan More Gold from the Sand: Refining Open-domain Dialogue Training with Noisy Self-Retrieval Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating open-domain dialogue systems underutilize training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-generation training framework that takes advantage of heterogeneous training data by considering them as "evidence" they use BERTScore retrieval framework which gives better qualities of the training data, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on zero-shot experiments and is more robust to real-world data. |
PhiloGPT: A Philology-Oriented Large Language Model for Ancient Chinese Manuscripts with Dunhuang as Case Study (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuqing Zhang, Baoyi He, Yihan Chen, Hangqi Li, Han Yue, Shengyu Zhang, Huaiyong Dou, Junchi Yan, Zemin Liu, Yongquan Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | philology requires years of professional training in extensive knowledge memorization and manual textual retrieval. |
| Approach: | They curated the PhiloCorpus-ZH, a rich collec-tion of ancient Chinese texts spanning a millennium with 30 diverse topics, including firsthand folk copies. |
| Outcome: | The PhiloCorpus-ZH corpus facilitated the development of the first LLM tailored for discovering ancient Chinese manuscripts. |
End-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Coreference Resolution (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent neural network models for coreference resolution are usually trained with heuristic loss functions that are computed over a sequence of local decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning based coreference resolution model to directly optimize coreference evaluation metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the English OntoNotes v5.0 benchmark. |
TRIDENT: Enhancing Large Language Model Safety with Tri-Dimensional Diversified Red-Teaming Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks but are vulnerable to harmful content and being exploited for malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures risk coverage across Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
A Simple yet Effective Training-free Prompt-free Approach to Chinese Spelling Correction Based on Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using an LLM for Chinese spelling correction tasks is completely different from previous approaches . given a Chinese character, there may exist many others with the same or similar pronunciations, or with similar shapes. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free prompt-free approach to leverage large language models for Chinese spelling correction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves performance on five public datasets, enabling them to compete with state-of-the-art domain-general CSC models. |
How Vocabulary Sharing Facilitates Multilingualism in LLaMA? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong performance on English tasks, but their performance in other languages is limited. |
| Approach: | They conducted an exhaustive analysis of the multilingual capability of LLMs by examining the performance gap before and after embedding fine-tuning across 101 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the attributes of four quadrants in the model and provides actionable and efficient guidelines for tuning these languages. |
CoSafe: Evaluating Large Language Model Safety in Multi-Turn Dialogue Coreference (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not noticed the safety risks of large language models . authors evaluated 1,400 questions in multi-turn dialogue coreference . |
| Approach: | They are the first to evaluate LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference . they created a dataset of 1,400 questions and tested five open-source models . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that model safety decreases in multi-turn dialogue coreference scenarios . the highest success rate was with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was with mistral-7B-Instruct model . |
Improved Policy Optimization for Mixture-of-Experts Models: Importance Sampling and Rewarding from an Expert-Centric Perspective (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) suffer from training instability . existing approaches often ignore token-specific discrepancies in expert assignments . |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce expert-level importance sampling to reduce complexity of RL . they propose to leverage expert-centric granularity to ensure a rigorous alignment between reward signals and policy updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines across reasoning tasks. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits. |
Towards Fewer Hallucinations in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Augmentative and Contrastive Knowledge-Dialogue (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models face the hallucination problem . Existing models generate inappropriate knowledge and generate inconsistent responses . |
| Approach: | They propose an Augmentative and Contrastive Knowledge Dialogue Expansion Framework to enhance existing knowledge dialogue models by polarizing optimization objectives and weak knowledge generation ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework expands existing training sets and smooths the optimization objective that enables models to generate ground-truth with or without gold knowledge. |
DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a task for discourse-level text scene graph parsing that merges sentence-level outputs for discourse input and propose 'DiscoSG' a dataset of 400 expert-annotated and 8,430 synthesised multi-sentence caption-graph pairs is used to test the new task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves SPICE by 30% over the baseline while achieving 86 faster inference than existing models. |
Improving Factual Consistency of News Summarization by Contrastive Preference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Huawen Feng, Yan Fan, Xiong Liu, Ting-En Lin, Zekun Yao, Yuchuan Wu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Qianli Ma
| Challenge: | Recent advances in news summarization have created problems with “hallucinations” that are factually inconsistent with the source text. |
| Approach: | They propose to disentangle LLMs’ propensities to generate faithful and fake content by adopting a probing-based specific training method to improve their capacity of distinguishing two types of propensity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method disentangles LLMs’ propensities to generate faithful and fake content and improves their ability to distinguish between two types of propensity. |
CPO: Addressing Reward Ambiguity in Role-playing Dialogue via Comparative Policy Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Comparative Policy Optimization (CPO) redefines the reward evaluation paradigm by shifting from sample-wise scoring to comparative group-wise score. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize subjective tasks by shifting from sample-wise to comparative group-wise scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shifts from sample-wise scoring to comparative group-wise score . it minimizes contextual bias and enables more robust and fair performance evaluation. |
Revisiting Structured Sentiment Analysis as Latent Dependency Graph Parsing (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) is a problem of bi-lexical dependency graph parsing due to the internal structures of spans neglected. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent spans as latent subtrees to model internal structures of spans and leverage TreeCRFs to extract the complete opinion tuple from a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs significantly better than all previous bi-lexical methods, achieving new state-of-the-art. |
LANS: A Layout-Aware Neural Solver for Plane Geometry Problem (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural solvers take GPS as vision-language task but lack layout awareness . Existing models are criticized for complex rules and poor adaptability . |
| Approach: | They propose a layout-aware neural solver called LANS that integrates two modules to solve GPS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solver outperforms existing neural and symbolic solvers on two datasets. |
Addressing Inquiries about History: An Efficient and Practical Framework for Evaluating Open-domain Chatbot Consistency (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate consistency capacity of open-domain chatbots are costly and low-efficient. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient framework for evaluating consistency of open-domain chatbots . they use human judges to interact with chatbot, which is costly and low-efficient . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can assess the consistency capacity of chatbots and achieve a high ranking correlation with the human evaluation. |
SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Wentao Ma, Shiwan Zhao, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Ke Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various tasks, but is limited in multi-turn social interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which dynamically selects key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods and proprietary LLMs on the SOTOPIA benchmark and show that they can improve social intelligence. |
Challenging Large Language Models with New Tasks: A Study on their Adaptability and Robustness (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation approaches for large language models (LLMs) rely on existing tasks and benchmarks, raising concerns about test set contamination and the genuine comprehension abilities of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs by designing new tasks, automatically generating evaluation datasets for the tasks, and conducting detailed error analyses to scrutinize LLM's adaptability to new tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method examines LLMs’ adaptability to new tasks, their sensitivity to prompt variations, and their error tendencies. |
Recognizing Everything from All Modalities at Once: Grounded Multimodal Universal Information Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on IE tasks have focused on recognizing and analyzing cross-modal information . a multimodal large language model (MLLM) is developed to analyze IE across modalities . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model (MLLM) capable of grounding information from all modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a framework to analyze IE tasks over various modalities and their fine-grained groundings. |
Effective Token Graph Modeling using a Novel Labeling Strategy for Structured Sentiment Analysis (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured sentiment analysis is a dependency parsing problem, with imbalanced label distributions and large text spans. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel labeling strategy which contains two sets of token pair labels . they propose tuple extraction problem with a more balanced label distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 5 benchmark datasets in four languages. |
Transforming Visual Scene Graphs to Image Captions (2023.acl-long)
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Xu Yang, Jiawei Peng, Zihua Wang, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Zhangzikang Li, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate captions using image captioning are based on multi-head attention (MHA) |
| Approach: | They propose to transform scene graphs into more descriptive captions by using multi-head attention to build a Graph Neural Network (GNN) . they construct a Mixture-of-Expert (MOE)-based decoder where each expert is built on MHA for discriminating the graph embeddings to generate different kinds of words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate captions from multiple visual features and objects . it is based on a mixture-of-expert (MOE)-based decoder based upon MHA . |
Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for classical Chinese poetry generation only allow users to use keywords to interfere with the meaning of generated poems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate classical Chinese poems from vernacular . their model uses unsupervised machine translation to generate Chinese poems . human evaluation shows it can generate high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems - authors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the perplexity and BLEU of the proposed model compared with typical models and human evaluation shows it generates high-quality poems comparable to amateur poems. |
A Secure and Efficient Federated Learning Framework for NLP (2021.emnlp-main)
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Chenghong Wang, Jieren Deng, Xianrui Meng, Yijue Wang, Ji Li, Sheng Lin, Shuo Han, Fei Miao, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Caiwen Ding
| Challenge: | Existing FL frameworks require a trusted aggregator or require heavy-weight cryptographic primitives, which makes the performance significantly degraded. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that is federated and efficient for NLP . they propose to eliminate the need for trusted entities and achieve better model accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves better model accuracy and model accuracy than existing FL frameworks. |
Dial2vec: Self-Guided Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Dialogue Embeddings (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue embeddings are a critical prerequisite for semantically understanding dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided contrastive learning approach called dial2vec that captures interaction patterns between interlocutors and leverages them to guide the learning of the embeddings corresponding to each interlocuter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 8.7, 9.0, and 13.8 points absolute improvements over the strongest baseline on the three evaluation tasks respectively. |
HiTrans: A Transformer-Based Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Model for Emotion Detection in Conversations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion detection in conversations is to detect the emotion for each utterance in conversations that have multiple speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based context- and speaker-sensitive model for EDC . they utilize a low-level transformer to generate local utterance representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three benchmark datasets. |
Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Bowen Li, Haiyang Yu, Jinyang Li, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Nevin Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) rely on general pre-trained language models without a tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures causal relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a causally-complete dataset construction strategy for developing million-scale DocGD pre-training corpora and a perturbation-based strategy to capture causality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy yields significant and consistent improvements in fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. |
Supportiveness-based Knowledge Rewriting for Retrieval-augmented Language Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and pluggable knowledge rewriter that is optimized for LLM generation by supporting the model's supportiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to rewrite knowledge in a supervised manner. |
Optimizing Instruction Synthesis: Effective Exploration of Evolutionary Space with Tree Search (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the quality of instruction data is essential for the success of this alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving existing instruction data by using Monte Carlo tree search to find suitable prompts that align the language model to effectively learn multiple skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the evaluation scores of seed instruction data, raising the average evaluation scores from 2.19 to 3.81. |
PromptGen: Automatically Generate Prompts using Generative Models (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent prompt learning has received significant attention, where downstream tasks are reformulated to the mask-filling task with the help of a textual prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose a model PromptGen which can automatically generate prompts conditional on the input sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the knowledge probing LAMA benchmark. |
MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding (2026.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Shengfeng Lou, Chi Chen, Ziyue Wang, Chenliang Li, Weizhou Shen, Jiyue Guo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for MLLMs struggle with fine-grained temporal reasoning . despite advances in video understanding, current methods struggle with time-sensitive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a time-stamp-aware multi-segment grounding method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on time-sensitive tasks and generalizes well across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. |
OneEE: A One-Stage Framework for Fast Overlapping and Nested Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Event extraction (EE) is an essential task of information extraction, which aims to extract structured event information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a tagging scheme and a model to form EE as word-word relation recognition using parallel grid tapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 3 overlapped and nested EE benchmarks and faster than baselines. |
Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can reveal toxic or offensive content inadvertently or intentionally. |
| Approach: | They propose to control the diversity of both sides according to the number of samples for fine-tuning, which can directly reflect their impact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models after fine-tuning. |
Towards Efficient LLM Grounding for Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for grounding large language models suffer from inefficient querying . Existing approaches that rely on physical verification or self-reflection suffer from excessive querying. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces Reinforced Advantage feedback for efficient self-refinement of plans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines in success rate and significantly decreases interaction steps of agents and query rounds of LLMs. |
EIFBENCH: Extremely Complex Instruction Following Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focusing on single-task environments with limited constraints lack the complexity required to fully reflect the evolution of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Segment Policy Optimization algorithm to enhance the LLM's ability to accurately fulfill multi-task workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that existing benchmarks lack the complexity required to fully reflect the evolution of large language models. |
Enhancing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution by Discourse Structure and Semantic Information (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing cross-document event coreference resolution models lack the ability to capture long-distance dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct document-level Rhetorical Structure Theory trees and cross-document Lexical Chains to model structural and semantic information of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on English and Chinese datasets by large margins. |
Exposing Numeracy Gaps: A Benchmark to Evaluate Fundamental Numerical Abilities in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Haoyang Li, Xuejia Chen, Zhanchao Xu, Darian Li, Nicole Hu, Fei Teng, Yiming Li, Luyu Qiu, Chen Jason Zhang, Li Qing, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on linguistic competence or structured mathematical problem-solving, neglecting fundamental numerical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate numerical capabilities for large language models . they use a dataset to assess number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates six fundamental numerical capabilities: number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
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Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
Universal Information Extraction with Meta-Pretrained Self-Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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Xin Cong, Bowen Yu, Mengcheng Fang, Tingwen Liu, Haiyang Yu, Zhongkai Hu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for IE are task-specific, resulting in specialized and isolated approaches for different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve task-specific knowledge from pretrained language models to enhance universal IE by using a Meta-Pretraining Algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art on 4 IE tasks, 12 datasets under fully-supervised, low-resource and few-shot scenarios. |
GPT-RE: In-context Learning for Relation Extraction using Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to in-context learning (ICL) are lacking in relation extraction (RE) . emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 represents a significant advancement in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate task-aware representations into demonstration retrieval and enrich the demonstrations with gold label-induced reasoning logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA and competitive performances on the Semeval and SciERC datasets. |
Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing question generation systems focus on the internal knowledge within the textual passage or the semantic word space for diverse content planning. Existing solutions focus on relying on the knowledge of the text and the semantic words, but have not considered the potential of external knowledge for expression diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer that utilizes the style of diverse templates for question generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on diversity while being comparable in terms of consistency scores. |
ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification Questions (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in conversational information seeking (CIS) suggest a remedy for the lack of interactive clarification when people face unfamiliar domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully autonomous conversational information-seeking agent that couples large language models with a set of domain-specific tools to provide product demand clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can iterate over 2,000 automatically generated sessions and score high on real-world evaluations without human annotation. |
A Systematic Survey of Claim Verification: Corpora, Systems, and Case Studies (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | This survey analyses 198 studies published between January 2022 and March 2025 . |
| Approach: | This survey synthesizes recent advances in CV corpus creation and system design. |
| Outcome: | The results of this study are synthesized from 198 studies published between January 2022 and March 2025. |
ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ChineseBERT model incorporates glyph and pinyin information of Chinese characters into pretraining . proposed model achieves new performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a ChineseBERT model that incorporates glyph and pinyin information into pretraining . the glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a character, and the pinyink embeddment characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new performance boosts over baseline models with fewer training steps. |
Entity-centered Cross-document Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Fengqi Wang, Fei Li, Hao Fei, Jingye Li, Shengqiong Wu, Fangfang Su, Wenxuan Shi, Donghong Ji, Bo Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction only use text snippets surrounding target entities in multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-extraction model that uses cross-path entity relation attention to detect the semantic relations between entities in a given text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the dataset CodRED by 10%. |
Towards Abstractive Grounded Summarization of Podcast Transcripts (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Podcast summarization is of practical benefit to content providers and consumers . however, podcast summarizing faces significant challenges including factual inconsistencies . speech recognizers induce transcription errors and abstractive summarisation models may hallucinate . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate podcast summaries while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can produce an abstractive summary while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
BENTO: A Visual Platform for Building Clinical NLP Pipelines Based on CodaLab (2020.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | CodaLab has limited support for creating reusable tools that can be easily applied to different datasets and composed into pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow management platform with a graphic user interface built on top of CodaLab to facilitate the process of building clinical NLP pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow management platform, BENTO, is designed for clinical NLP tasks and can be easily used by researchers and developers. |
FACTUAL: A Benchmark for Faithful and Consistent Textual Scene Graph Parsing (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhuang Li, Yuyang Chai, Terry Yue Zhuo, Lizhen Qu, Gholamreza Haffari, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, Quan Hung Tran
| Challenge: | Existing parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from errors and inconsistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that re-annotates image captions using a new intermediate representation called FACTUAL-MR and a metric to measure scene graph similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms existing parsers in terms of faithfulness and consistency on multiple benchmark datasets. |
Understanding Generalization in Role-Playing Models via Information Theory (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to characterize RPM generalization are inadequate . existing methods do not provide a fine-grained diagnosis of distribution shifts . |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-based effective mutual information difference (R-EMID) to measure RPM performance degradation in an interpretable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the worst-case generalization performance of RPMs and reveals how shifts contribute to degradation. |
Hint-Based Training for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | AutoRegressive Translation models have to generate tokens sequentially during decoding and thus suffer from high inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose to use hidden states and word alignments to help train NART models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the WMT14 En-De and De-En datasets but is faster in inference than the current models. |
Cross-lingual Cross-modal Pretraining for Multimodal Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pretrained vision-language models have achieved impressive performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks in English. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to learn cross-lingual cross-modal representations for matching images and captions in multiple languages using an annotated corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive performance on two multimodal multilingual image caption benchmarks: Multi30k with German captions and MSCOCO with Japanese captions. |
FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Wanjun Zhong, Liangyou Li, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models that adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can follow instructions with more constraints, and is deemed to have better instruction-following ability. |
Paraphrase Generation as Unsupervised Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paraphrase generation rely on labeled datasets or are limited in narrow domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for paraphrase generation by treating the task as unsupervised machine translation based on pairs of unlabeled monolingual sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can generate paraphrases on a large unlabeled monolingual corpus without relying on bilingual sentence pairs. |
BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GNN and BERT (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text classification is a core task in natural language processing (NLP) Graph neural networks (GNNs) serve as an effective approach for transductive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines large scale pretraining and transductive learning for text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance on a wide range of datasets. |
Bacteria Biotope Relation Extraction via Lexical Chains and Dependency Graphs (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we describe our approach for the Bacteria Biotopes relation extraction subtask in the BioNLP Shared Task 2019 . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for dependency graph construction based on lexical chains . they then propose 'neuro network' model which uses short-term memories and syntax information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the best F1 (66.3%) in the official evaluation participated by 7 teams. |
Rethinking Denoised Auto-Encoding in Language Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models such as BERT have achieved success in learning sequence representations, but they tend to learn representations that are covariant with the noise of pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to train self-trained models to learn noise invariant sequence representations . they encourage consistency between original sequence and corrupted version via unsupervised instance-wise training signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 11 natural language understanding and cross-modal tasks and achieves 0.6% gain on GLUE benchmarks and 0.8% increment on NLVR2 . |
Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing entity typing models are subject to spurious correlations due to shortcuts and biased training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to augment existing model biases by combining spurious correlations with debiasedcounterparts to improve generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization of different entity typing models on the original and debiased test sets. |
Uncertainty-Calibrated Elastic Alignment for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modalities (2026.findings-acl)
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Kang He, Yuzhe Ding, Rao Fu, Yukang Feng, Kaipeng Zhang, Yiming Liu, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis are often dynamically incomplete. |
| Approach: | They propose a new uncertainty-calibrated elastic alignment framework to address these issues by employing probabilistic imputation to capture cross-modal ambiguity and leverage the estimated uncertainty to drive elastic alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in multiple benchmarks and consistently outperformed existing models. |
Towards Generalizable and Robust Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL parsers must be generalizable and robust against input perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework to learn text-to-SQL parsing in stages to improve parser's ability to acquire general SQL knowledge instead of capturing spurious patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Spider, SParC, and CoSQL datasets. |
Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
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Zhikun Xu, Yinghui Li, Ruixue Ding, Xinyu Wang, Boli Chen, Yong Jiang, Haitao Zheng, Wenlian Lu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Recent work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer dynamic questions well. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Dynamic QA benchmark containing question-answer pairs related to the latest dynamic questions on the Chinese Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark will be one of the key data resources for improving LLMs’ Chinese question-answering ability in the future. |
MOA: Multi-Objective Alignment for Role-Playing Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on role-playing agents relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning with scalarized rewards, but these approaches do not address the coordination of multiple reward dimensions during optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement-learning framework that enables multi-dimensional, fine-grained rubric optimization for general RPAs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on PersonaGym and RoleMRC show that MOA improves multi-dimensional role-playing performance over supervised and standard RL baselines. |
Supervised Optimism Correction: Be Confident When LLMs Are Sure (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and medical diagnosis. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning-based auxiliary loss for Q-value estimations during supervised refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms beam search on GSM8K, MATH, and GAOKAO on reasoning benchmarks. |
Improving Seq2Seq Grammatical Error Correction via Decoding Interventions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to grammatical error correction (GEC) are sequence-to-sequence and sequence-edit. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified decoding intervention framework that employs an external critic to assess the appropriateness of the token to be generated incrementally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art methods on English and Chinese datasets. |
Triggerless Backdoor Attack for NLP Tasks with Clean Labels (2022.naacl-main)
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Leilei Gan, Jiwei Li, Tianwei Zhang, Xiaoya Li, Yuxian Meng, Fei Wu, Yi Yang, Shangwei Guo, Chun Fan
| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a new threat to neural natural language processing models due to the fragility and lack of interpretability of NLP models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to perform backdoor attacks without an external trigger . they propose to use clean-labeled examples to generate poisoned clean-labelled examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is effective and hard to defend due to its triggerless nature. |
GeoEval: Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs and Multi-Modal Models on Geometry Problem-Solving (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal models (MMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in problem-solving, but their proficiency in tackling geometry math problems has not been thoroughly evaluated. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of large language models and multi-modal models in solving geometry math problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 55.67% accuracy on main subset but only 6.00% accuracy on hard subset. |
Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract crime amounts from fact description and use them to learn distinguishable representations to exploit the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on real-world datasets and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. |
A Span-Based Model for Joint Overlapped and Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) focus on overlapped or discontinuous entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based named entity recognition model that can recognize both overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly. |
Actively Learn from LLMs with Uncertainty Propagation for Generalized Category Discovery (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generalized category discovery (GCD) is a crucial task in open-world computing, where new categories frequently emerge, necessitating models that can adapt and learn continually. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate the feedback from LLMs into an active learning paradigm to simplify the labeling task and minimize the spread of inaccurate feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves baseline models at a nominal average cost. |
Self-Improvement Programming for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods implicitly model time constraints by learning time-aware embeddings of questions and candidate answers, which is far from understanding the question comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-based temporal programming method that leverages the in-context learning ability of Large Language Models to understand combinatory time constraints in questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multiTQ and CronQuestions datasets and is highly efficient on multi-level questions. |
Reverse Preference Optimization for Complex Instruction Following (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying and evaluating preference pairs with multiple constraints are noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically reverses constraints to ensure the chosen response is perfect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces noise in preference pairs by reversing constraints to ensure the chosen response is perfect. |
Self-Explanation Prompting Improves Dialogue Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success in various NLP tasks, but the vast model parameters pose challenges in downstream fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic prompting strategy that analyzes each dialogue utterance before task execution to enhance LLMs' comprehension in multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms other zero-shot prompts and matches or exceeds efficacy of few-shot ones. |
Estimating Soft Labels for Out-of-Domain Intent Detection (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect out-of-dominance (OOD) intents are limited by the lack of OOD samples. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive soft pseudo labeling method that can estimate soft labels for pseudo OOD samples when training OOD detectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competing methods on three benchmark datasets and consistently outperformed previous methods. |
Dynamic Emotion and Personality Profiling for Multimodal Deception Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for deception detection lack sample-level dynamic annotations for emotions and personality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-model multi-prompt annotation scheme and a strict label quality evaluation standard for deception, emotion, and personality annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on the MDPE and DDEP datasets. |
SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog understanding only consider self-augmented dialogs as positive samples and treat all other dialogs like negative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured pre-trained conversation model which learns dialog representations from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised contrastive pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results on the DialoGLUE benchmark. |
CorefQA: Coreference Resolution as Query-based Span Prediction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing coreference resolution models suffer from mention proposal. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-based span prediction task that can retrieve mentions left out at the mention proposal stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can retrieve mentions left out at the mention proposal stage and improve generalization capability using existing question answering datasets. |
GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shuhe Wang, Xiaofei Sun, Xiaoya Li, Rongbin Ouyang, Fei Wu, Tianwei Zhang, Jiwei Li, Guoyin Wang, Chen Guo
| Challenge: | Large-scale language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for in-context learning with limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel sequence labeling task that transforms a sequence labeled as a text-generation task into a self-verification task that LLMs can adapt to. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on NER than supervised models on a variety of tasks . the proposed model can be easily adapted by LLMs to generate a text sequence . |
Towards Identifying Social Bias in Dialog Systems: Framework, Dataset, and Benchmark (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jingyan Zhou, Jiawen Deng, Fei Mi, Yitong Li, Yasheng Wang, Minlie Huang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Helen Meng
| Challenge: | a number of safety concerns hinder the deployment of open-domain dialog systems, such as offensive languages and toxic behaviors, such social bias is difficult to detect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dial-Bias Framework for analyzing social bias in conversations . they introduce a Chinese social bias dialog dataset and conduct in-depth ablation studies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is the first annotated Chinese social bias dialog dataset . the proposed framework also provides a fine-grained dialog bias measurement benchmark . |
Enhancing LLM Language Adaption through Cross-lingual In-Context Pre-training (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing cross-lingual transfer are limited by parallel resources and lack linguistic and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual in-context pre-training approach that leverages semantically related bilingual Wikipedia documents to enhance cross-linguistic transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves multilingual performance on three models across six target languages. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
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Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
Compilable Neural Code Generation with Compiler Feedback (2022.findings-acl)
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Xin Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yao Wan, Fei Mi, Yitong Li, Pingyi Zhou, Jin Liu, Hao Wu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing deep-learning approaches model code generation as text generation, but few of them account for compilability of the generated programs. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage pipeline utilizing compiler feedback for compilable code generation to improve compilability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves compilability of generated programs by combining compiler feedback, language model fine-tuning, and compilable discrimination. |
StructuralLM: Structural Pre-training for Form Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models focus on text-only representation, neglecting cell-level layout information. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training approach to leverage cell and layout information from scanned documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in various downstream tasks . it uses 2Dposition embeddings to model word-level layout information . |
Legal Judgment Prediction based on Knowledge-enhanced Multi-Task and Multi-Label Text Classification (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is an essential task for legal AI, aiming at predicting judgments based on the facts of a case. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced approach that incorporates 'label-level knowledge' to enhance the representation of case facts for each task and 'task-level' knowledge to improve synergy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
LegoMT2: Selective Asynchronous Sharded Data Parallel Training for Massive Neural Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a single model for massive languages have huge communication overheads and parameter interference. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient training approach with an asymmetric multi-way model architecture for massive multilingual neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 16.2 faster than the distributed training method for M2M-100-12B while improving the translation performance by an average of 2.2 BLEU on Flores-101. |
MadaKV: Adaptive Modality-Perception KV Cache Eviction for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference (2025.acl-long)
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Kunxi Li, Zhonghua Jiang, Zhouzhou Shen, ZhaodeWang ZhaodeWang, Chengfei Lv, Shengyu Zhang, Fan Wu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing KV cache eviction methods fail to capture modality-specific information, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-adaptive key-value (KV) cache eviction strategy to enhance the efficiency of multimodal large language models in long-context inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the KV cache memory footprint and model inference latency while maintaining high accuracy across multimodal long-context tasks. |
A Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Grounded Dialogues (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train grounded dialogues require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation framework for grounded dialogues that takes knowledge data and heuristics to determine a dialogue flow and incrementally turn it into a dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts model performance in training data and low-resource scenarios. |
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chenliang Li, Haiyang Xu, Junfeng Tian, Wei Wang, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Jiabo Ye, He Chen, Guohai Xu, Zheng Cao, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. |
Continual Prompt Tuning for Dialog State Tracking (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a model on a sequence of tasks are not efficient enough to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient framework that prevents forgetting and enables knowledge transfer between tasks by learning and freezing a pre-trained model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework avoids forgetting and enables knowledge transfer between tasks. |
Layer-wise Model Pruning based on Mutual Information (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In spite of impressive results of neural networks, the huge model size has hindered their applications in cases where computation and memory resources are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for layer-wise pruning using mutual information based feature selection in SVMs and logistic regression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy offers greater speedup and higher performance than weight-based pruning methods. |
Multi-modal Action Chain Abductive Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Jiahe Xu, Kairong Han, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing models for Abductive Reasoning are limited in their ability to infer the most plausible explanation of incomplete known phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language task that aims to imagine the most plausible event by spatio-temporal grounding in past video and infer the hypothesis of subsequent action chain layer by layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing video-language models in terms of effectiveness on the proposed dataset. |
EvoRoute: Experience-Driven Self-Routing LLM Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | EvoRoute is a self-evolving model routing paradigm that transcends static, pre-defined model assignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a model routing paradigm that transcends static, pre-defined model assignments. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GAIA and BrowseComp+ show that EvoRoute reduces execution cost and latency by over 70%. |
Embracing Imperfection: Simulating Students with Diverse Cognitive Levels Using LLM-based Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in education, enabling researchers to simulate students' learning patterns and learning patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework for student simulation that takes into account student cognitive diversity and realism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves 100% improvement in simulation accuracy and realism. |
Joint Alignment of Multi-Task Feature and Label Spaces for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ECPE fail to model specific features and interactive features in between, or suffer from inconsistency of label prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to align ECPE with a feature-task alignment mechanism to model emotion-&cause-specific features and the shared interactive feature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems on all ECA subtasks. |
"I Don’t Know What to Say": A Fact-Filling Questionnaire Method to Help Non-Experts Talk to LegalAI Assistant (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly expanded the scope of legal AI. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates questionnaires to help users refine queries . they leverage an iterative training process that collects valuable questionnaires . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the completeness of queries and ensures the performance of domain-specific models in downstream legal tasks. |
BrowseConf: Confidence-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Web Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Litu Ou, Kuan Li, Huifeng Yin, Liwen Zhang, Zhongwang Zhang, Xixi Wu, Rui Ye, Zile Qiao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing work on confidence in LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use confidence scores to determine model answer quality and encourage model to try again until it reaches satisfactory confidence level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce token consumption while demonstrating competitive performance compared to baseline fixed budget methods. |
Sentence Similarity Based on Contexts (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure sentence similarity face limited dataset size and training-test gap . existing methods lack large-scale labeled datasets with labeles that are labor-intensive and expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures sentence similarity by comparing probabilities of generating two sentences given the same context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance boosts over baselines under supervised and unsupervised settings. |
FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the efficacy of workflow-guided agent planning by formalizing different formats of workflow knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to improve the planning reliability of LLM-based agents by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. |
GlotEval: A Test Suite for Massively Multilingual Evaluation of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Hengyu Luo, Zihao Li, Joseph Attieh, Sawal Devkota, Ona de Gibert, Xu Huang, Shaoxiong Ji, Peiqin Lin, Bhavani Sai Praneeth Varma Mantina, Ananda Sreenidhi, Raúl Vázquez, Mengjie Wang, Samea Yusofi, Fei Yuan, Jörg Tiedemann
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on English and a handful of high-resource languages, thereby overlooking the realistic performance of large language models in multilingual and lower-resourced scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified and lightweight framework that integrates 27 benchmarks under a standard ISO 639-3 language identifier system to enable seamless incorporation of new benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates 27 benchmarks under a standard ISO 639-3 language identifier system, allowing for seamless incorporation of new benchmarks. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs (2023.emnlp-main)
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Minghao Li, Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Feifan Song, Hangyu Li, Haiyang Yu, Zhoujun Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Recent research has demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their capabilities by utilizing external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a runnable evaluation system consisting of 73 API tools and an annotation system for 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the effectiveness of existing LLMs by analyzing 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls. |
EviReport: From Reasoned Outlines to Evidence Tracked Long-Form Reports (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihan Liu, Jianhui li, Zexin Wang, Fei Sun, Jingjing LI, Zheyuan Li, Ke Xiang, Hang Cui, Houhua Gong, Changhua Pei, Gaogang Xie
| Challenge: | Evidence-intensive reports often produce fluent but under-supported drafts . eviReport is an evidence-grounded workflow for automated long-form report generation . |
| Approach: | They propose an evidence-tracked workflow that organizes corpus evidence into compact, traceable units and retrieves query-relevant subgraphs into retrieval-ready packages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow outperforms baselines in factual coverage, factual accuracy and visual evidence integration. |
DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Yuhan Wu, Jinsong Zhang, Shengqiong Wu, Jingye Li, Yijiang Liu, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | a new task of conversational aspect-based sentiment analysis (DiaASQ) is designed to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis to detect the quadrangle of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a high-quality dataset in Chinese and English . it improves the end-to-end quadruple prediction and integrates rich feature representations . |
Retrieval-free Knowledge Injection through Multi-Document Traversal for Dialogue Models (2023.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Jianzhu Bao, Fei Mi, Yi Chen, Hongru Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yitong Li, Lifeng Shang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Existing research on retrieval-augmented and retrieval free dialogue models focuses on retrieving knowledge from external sources and rely on finely annotated retrieval training data and knowledge-grounded responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-free approach by turning knowledge documents into simulated multi-turn dialogues using a Multi-Document Traversal algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms retrieval-augmented models while being cheaper and faster at domain transfer. |
Cross-Lingual Unsupervised Sentiment Classification with Multi-View Transfer Learning (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent neural network models have achieved impressive performance on sentiment classification in English and other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised sentiment classification model that leverages an uncontrolled machine translation system and a language discriminator to learn a shared representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models on five language pairs. |
Text Classification via Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have shown the ability for in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive reasoning strategy tailored to addressing complex linguistic phenomena such as intensification, contrast, irony and limited number of tokens allowed in in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on 4 out of 5 widely-used text-classification benchmarks, while demonstrating comparable performance to SOTA on MR. |
Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE): The Synergy of Reasoning Chains and Expert Mixtures in Self-Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhili Liu, Yunhao Gou, Kai Chen, Lanqing Hong, Jiahui Gao, Fei Mi, Yu Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, James Kwok
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that reasoning abilities contribute significantly to model safety, while integrating Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can further enhance alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically combines reasoning chains and expert mixtures to improve self-alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety, jailbreak resistance, and over-refusal capabilities, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model. |
Taming Actor-Observer Asymmetry in Agents via Dialectical Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of powerful autonomous systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model trained through dialectical alignment to enforce perspective-invariant reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model mitigates attribution inconsistency and significantly improves fault resolution rates in ambiguous scenarios. |
BenchMAX: A Comprehensive Multilingual Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual benchmarks focus primarily on language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They develop a multi-way multilingual benchmark that measures critical capabilities of large language models across languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on BenchMAX reveal uneven utilization of core capabilities across languages, emphasizing the performance gaps that scaling model size alone does not resolve. |
Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using dice loss, we find that data imbalance is a common issue in many NLP tasks . data imbalance affects the performance of many tasks, such as tagging and machine reading comprehension . |
| Approach: | They propose to use dice loss to replace the standard cross-entropy objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training objective achieves significant performance boost on a wide range of data imbalanced tasks. |
Refining and Synthesis: A Simple yet Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Cross-Domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) data augmentation has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to data sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to augment ABSA data using pseudo labels for target domain . they refine generated labeled data using a natural language inference filter . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms 7 strong baselines on 4 kinds of ABSA tasks. |
A Unified MRC Framework for Named Entity Recognition (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition is divided into nested NER and flat NER depending on whether entities are nesting. |
| Approach: | They propose to formulate named entity recognition task as machine reading comprehension task instead of sequence labeling problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves vast amount of performance boost over current models on nested and flat NER datasets. |
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shengyu Mao, Yong Jiang, Boli Chen, Xiao Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Wang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved to enhance document retrieval by reformulating queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models that leverages a reranker framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides ranking feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives without needing signals from annotations and supports both online and offline training models. |
CATS: A Pragmatic Chinese Answer-to-Sequence Dataset with Large Scale and High Quality (2023.acl-long)
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Liang Li, Ruiying Geng, Chengyang Fang, Bing Li, Can Ma, Rongyu Cao, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Current datasets bias in the English language while leaving other languages underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset with high quality and large scale . they propose encoding space for two hybrid knowledge resources to convert this task to a graph-totext problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in generating textual descriptions for the Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
ReSee: Responding through Seeing Fine-grained Visual Knowledge in Open-domain Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal dialogue systems are limited by the scale and quality of available datasets or the coarse concept of visual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly split visual knowledge into finer granularity and turn-level . they propose a framework to add visual representation into vanilla dialogue models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on automatic and human evaluations. |
Query Routing for Homogeneous Tools: An Instantiation in the RAG Scenario (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tool learning methods focus on selecting the most effective tool from a wide array of options, often overlooking cost-effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to predict query performance and cost required to accomplish a given task . they then assign queries to the optimal tools in a cost-effective manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher performance at lower cost compared to baseline approaches. |
Uncertainty-Aware Label Refinement for Sequence Labeling (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conditional random fields (CRF) for label decoding have been a problem for many tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage label decoding framework that model long-term label dependencies while being much more computationally efficient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the CRF-based methods and greatly accelerates the inference process. |
CodeEvo: Interaction-Driven Synthesis of Code-centric Data through Hybrid and Iterative Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating instruction-code pairs rely on rigid heuristics and are labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-agent architecture that integrates a Coder and a Reviewer to orchestrate the generation trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms baselines on a large-scale dataset of instruction-code pairs with stepped difficulty levels. |
What Factors Influence LLMs’ Judgments? A Case Study on Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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Lei Chen, Bobo Li, Li Zheng, Haining Wang, Zixiang Meng, Runfeng Shi, Hao Fei, Jun Zhou, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies indicate that Large Language Models perform at a level comparable to humans with advantages of speed and cost-effectiveness in different fields. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce four unexplored factors and a new dimension of question difficulty to provide a more comprehensive understanding of LLMs’ judgments across varying question intricacies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dimensions of question difficulty and answer quantity provide valuable insights into optimizing LLMs’ performance as judges. |
Multimodal Recommendation Dialog with Subjective Preference: A New Challenge and Benchmark (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal task-oriented dialog data fails to demonstrate the diverse expressions of user subjective preferences and recommendation acts in the real-life shopping scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal task-oriented dialog dataset with subjective preferences and recommendation acts that is well-annotated with sales experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is powered by a state-of-the-art multimodal model for these tasks. |
RL-PLUS: Countering Capability Boundary Collapse of LLMs in Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid-policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Yongding Tao, Huanyu Liu, Kechi Zhang, Lili Mou, Rongyu Cao, Yingwei MA, Jue Chen, Binhua Li, Zhi Jin, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid-policy optimization approach that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks and superior performance on out-of distribution reasoning tasks. |
Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve complex natural language processing tasks require multiple steps to verify the answers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use chain of thought prompting to solve reasoning tasks with large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve reasoning performance on arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. |
Tree-Instruct: A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the importance of data complexity as a crucial metric, but the impact of complexity remains relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to add a specified number of nodes to instructions’ semantic trees to enhance the instruction complexity in a controllable manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms diverse yet complex instructions under the same token budget and can control the difficulty level of modified instructions. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
PANDA: Preference Adaptation for Enhancing Domain-Specific Abilities of LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated considerable capabilities across various tasks . however, they often fall short of the performance achieved by domain-specific state-of-the-art models . |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free method to augment domain-specific abilities of Large language models . they leverage insights from the response preference of expert models to augment LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the expert model on 4 ScienceWorld tasks. |
Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yifan Hou, Jiaoda Li, Yu Fei, Alessandro Stolfo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guangtao Zeng, Antoine Bosselut, Mrinmaya Sachan
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanistic interpretation of language models for multi-step reasoning tasks by introducing a new probing approach that recovers the reasoning tree from the model’s attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model implicitly embeds a reasoning tree resembling the correct reasoning process within it, and detects the information from the model’s attention patterns for most examples. |
Dynamic Stochastic Decoding Strategy for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Stochastic sampling strategies are not widely used in open-domain dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic decoding strategy which can adjust the decoding space w.r.t. different contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoding strategy can improve the performance of pre-trained models when coupled with four well-used stochastic decoding algorithms. |
AEG: Argumentative Essay Generation via A Dual-Decoder Model with Content Planning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on argument generation focus on generating individual short arguments, while research on generating long and coherent argumentative essays is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to automatically generate argumentative essays using a writing prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates persuasive essays with higher diversity and less repetition compared to baselines. |
Combating Security and Privacy Issues in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial aims to provide a summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . a number of studies have focused on security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Approach: | This tutorial seeks to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . authors will discuss security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . it will also outline emerging challenges in security, privacy and reliability of LLMs . |