Papers by Feng Huang
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. |
Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities, but most of them have very unbalanced performance across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question translation data to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities by using mechanistic interpretability methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual alignment even with unannotated answers in English and a wide range of languages even with instruction-tuned LLMs. |
A Learnable Skill Combination Strategy for Multi-task Learning in Natural Language Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a novel multi-task learning framework for domain-specific natural language understanding tasks addresses these limitations by combing multiple tasks into a single framework. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that decomposes the language model into modular skill components and employs a dynamic, learnable skill-combination mechanism to adaptively handle diverse tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses conventional multi-task learning approaches in performance. |
Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity due to their lack of knowledge hallucination and lack of a coherent model. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised quantized representation method to compress KG structural and semantic knowledge into discrete codes that align the format of language sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing unsupervised methods producing more distinguishable codes on KG link prediction and triple classification tasks. |
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of tools are used to perform complex tasks, but the tool utilization process can cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique evaluation benchmark for tool learning that analyzes function-calling errors on tool evaluation benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed critique evaluation benchmark holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. |
LOT: A Story-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Chinese Long Text Understanding and Generation (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for natural language processing focus on understanding or generating short texts . lack of standardized benchmarks makes it difficult to assess and compare models . |
| Approach: | They propose a story-centric benchmark for Chinese long text modeling that aggregates two understanding tasks and two generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms similar-sized models on understanding and generation tasks. |
Gradient Consistency-based Parameter Allocation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual neural machine translation models are often prone to parameter interference . a common problem is that the model compromises with the language diversity to find a solution . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates parameters based on consistency between the gradients of the individual language and the average gradient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces parameter interference and improves translation quality. |
SciPedia: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Data for Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | High-quality scientific data is critical for advancing LLMs, yet academic literature remains underutilized. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale raw scientific corpus but identify a critical Learnability Gap . they develop a multi-stage pipeline featuring content cleaning and pedagogical augmentation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach boosts average performance by +2.12 (3B) and +2.95 (7B) on in-domain tasks. |
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Efficient Instruction-Following Text Embedding based on Guided Space Transformation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text embedding require re-encoding the entire corpus for each instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates dynamic text embeddings that adapt to user instructions, highlighting specific attributes of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following text embedding quality over state-of-the-art methods while speeding up processing on large datasets. |
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
From Superficial to Deep: Integrating External Knowledge for Follow-up Question Generation Using Knowledge Graph and LLM (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating follow-up questions are limited to shallow contextual questions that are uninspiring and have a large gap to the human level. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage external knowledge-enhanced follow-up question generation method which generates questions by identifying contextual topics, building a knowledge graph online, and finally combining these with a large language model to generate the final question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates questions by identifying contextual topics, building a knowledge graph (KG) online, and finally combining these with a large language model to generate the final question. |
Towards Context-Aware Code Comment Generation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for code comments generate comments manually, but they suffer from poor scalability and high maintenance cost due to the expensive overhead of writing comment templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically generate code comments at a function level by targeting object-oriented programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and is comparable with existing methods. |
Rethinking Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation: Contextualized Corpus as Better Textbook (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation use a two-stage paradigm: general distillation with a task-agnostic general corpus and task-specific distillation using augmented task- specific corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextualized corpus that contextualizes task corpus with large-scale general corpus through relevance-based text retrieval to improve student learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the GLUE benchmark and shows that it is better than generalized corpus and augmented task-specific corpus. |
Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Global and Local Semantic Representations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the ability of MLLMs to generate single tokens one by one, while lacking studies about how their representation vectors can encode global multimodal information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image-caption corpus to train Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) . they find that the topmost layers encode more global semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can encode more global semantic information, rather than the topmost layers, and perform better on visual-language entailment tasks. |
Generalized Intent Discovery: Learning from Open World Dialogue System (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing intent classification models rely on a pre-defined intent set and supervised labels, which is limited in some practical scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend an IND intent classifier to an open-world intent set including IND and OOD intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can classify IND and OOD intents while discovering new unlabeled OOD types incrementally. |
MT3: A Synergistic Multi-Task RL Framework for Specializing MLLMs in Text Image Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)
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Zhaopeng Feng, Yupu Liang, Shaosheng Cao, Jiayuan Su, Jiahan Ren, Zhijie Zhou, Wenxuan Huang, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT) is a critical subfield of machine translation . it requires accurate optical character recognition, robust visual-text reasoning, and high-quality translation a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task optimization framework to specialize MLLMs into expert TIMT models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the latest in-domain MIT-10M benchmark. |
Unlocking the Potential of Model Merging for Low-Resource Languages (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages requires continual pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging solution that integrates LLMs with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model merging outperforms CT-then-SFT in low-resource languages with scarce data. |
Task-Oriented Conversation Generation Using Heterogeneous Memory Networks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory networks do not perform well when leveraging heterogeneous information from different sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to use user utterances, dialogue history and background knowledge tuples to integrate external knowledge into a neural dialogue model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art data-driven task-oriented dialogue models on real-world datasets. |
More than Classification: A Unified Framework for Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event temporal relation extraction ignore meaning of relations and wipe out their intrinsic dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified event temporal relation extraction framework that transforms temporal relations into logical expressions of time points and completes the ETRE by predicting the relations between certain time points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art model on TB-Dense and MATRES by 0.3% on both datasets. |
Rewrite to Jailbreak: Discover Learnable and Transferable Implicit Harmfulness Instruction (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak methods create a forced instruction-following scenario, or search adversarial prompts with prefix or suffix tokens to achieve a specific representation manually or automatically. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewrites the original instruction to achieve a jailbreak . they propose rewriting the original instructions to improve the attack strategy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more efficient and easier to identify since no additional features are introduced. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
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. |
HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a promising alternative to expensive human evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . they decompose a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . it decomposes a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . the framework is efficient to train and more explainable than relying solely on prompts . |
Putting Captions to the Test: Evaluating Video Caption Quality through Multiple-Choice Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics for video captioning are based on text-based comparisons with ground-truth references. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-free benchmark that assesses video captions based on their utility . they will release the benchmark to facilitate reproducible research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves on human-verified, fine-grained questions . it correlates significantly better with human judgments than existing metrics . |
TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance (2021.acl-long)
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Fengbin Zhu, Wenqiang Lei, Youcheng Huang, Chao Wang, Shuo Zhang, Jiancheng Lv, Fuli Feng, Tat-Seng Chua
| Challenge: | Existing QA systems focus on unstructured text, structured knowledge base, or semi-structured tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question answering model based on financial reports . numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 58.0% inF1, an 11.1% increase over the baseline model, but still lags behind the best human model. |
MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Jingqun Tang, Qi Liu, Yongjie Ye, Jinghui Lu, Shu Wei, An-Lan Wang, Chunhui Lin, Hao Feng, Zhen Zhao, Yanjie Wang, Yuliang Liu, Hao Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) is a text-centric visual task understanding tool. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark that features human expert annotations across 9 languages . they prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images. |
Adversary-Aware DPO: Enhancing Safety Alignment in Vision Language Models via Adversarial Training (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Adversary-aware DPO (ADPO) is a training framework that explicitly considers adversary. |
| Approach: | a new framework integrates adversarial training into a pre-trained large language model to enhance safety alignment . adversary-aware DPO provides a framework that explicitly considers adversary . |
| Outcome: | a new training framework outperforms baselines in safety alignment and general utility of large language models. |
Gated Mechanism Enhanced Multi-Task Learning for Dialog Routing (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog routing are mostly heuristic and cannot achieve high-quality performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework with a dialog encoder and two tailored gated mechanism modules to solve this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can play the role of hierarchical information filtering and is non-invasive to existing dialog systems. |
Unifying the Convergences in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual neural machine translation are overfitting and inconsistency is ignored . |
| Approach: | They propose a training strategy that picks up language-specific best checkpoints for each language pair to teach the current model on the fly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy alleviates convergence inconsistency and achieves state-of-the-art on language pairs. |
Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yi Feng, Jiaqi Wang, Wenxuan Zhang, Zhuang Chen, Shen Yutong, Xiyao Xiao, Minlie Huang, Liping Jing, Jian Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mental health support lack realism and capture therapeutic progression over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate responses through retrieval-augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard methods in quality and depth on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants. |
Automating Legal Interpretation with LLMs: Retrieval, Generation, and Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a novel framework for automated legal interpretation is proposed to alleviate the burden on legal experts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated legal interpretation that uses large language models to extract concept-related information and interpret legal concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework eliminates the need for legal experts to interpret legal concepts . it uses large language models to extract concept-related information and interpret legal concept interpretations . |
PRIM: Towards Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current research on in-image machine translation focuses on synthetic data with simple background, single font, fixed text position, and bilingual translation. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model to handle the challenge of practical conditions in PRIM . they annotate a real-world one-line text image with complex background, fonts, diverse text positions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation quality and visual effect compared to other models. |
DocMEdit: Towards Document-Level Model Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models only output short phrases or sentences, raising doubts about their practical usability. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset focused on document-level model editing that aims to correct errors and outdated knowledge in Large language models (LLMs) they propose to use document-based model editing to improve model capabilities in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model editing task improves model capabilities in real-world scenarios and reduces the cost of retraining. |
A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent years, Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) has been greatly improved by designing task-specific pre-training methods or introducing auxiliary tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose Chinese Spelling Check into detection, reasoning, and searching subtasks and to train a module that is compatible with existing CSC models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can be trained for one model and benefit other models. |
From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zekun Zhou, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng, Ziyun Song, Ruihan Chen, Liang Zhao, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has inspired researchers to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance research. |
| Approach: | They organize the relevant studies into three main categories: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
| Outcome: | The authors summarize the current state of research in three main areas: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
Three Sentences Are All You Need: Local Path Enhanced Document Relation Extraction (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (RE) is more challenging than sentence RE as it often requires reasoning over multiple sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to heuristically select evidence sentences for document-level relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be easily combined with BiLSTM to achieve good performance on benchmark datasets even better than fancy graph neural network based methods. |
Alleviating Hallucinations from Knowledge Misalignment in Large Language Models via Selective Abstention Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Yuchun Fan, Xiachong Feng, Yuxuan Gu, Yangfan Ye, Liang Zhao, Weihong Zhong, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Xiao, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) suffer from severe hallucination issues due to the knowledge misalignment between the pre-training stage and the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a training objective with an abstention mechanism that selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
Transfer Learning for Context-Aware Question Matching in Information-seeking Conversations in E-commerce (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent researches focus on deep learning and reinforcement learning for multi-turn information seeking conversation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and effective multi-turn conversation model based on convolutional neural networks and extend it to adapt the knowledge learned from a resource-rich domain to enhance the performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than the existing model on an industrial chatbot called AliMe Assist. |
GeAR: Generation Augmented Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Liu, Shaohan Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Furu Wei, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Document retrieval techniques are used to compute semantic similarity between a query and documents, but the scalar similarity fails to reflect enough information, hindering the interpretation of retrieval results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large audio-language models focus on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations, but they assume that inputs remain semantically answerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation setting distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
CLAIM: Mitigating Multilingual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models with Cross-Lingual Attention Intervention (2025.acl-long)
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Zekai Ye, Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Libo Qin, Yichong Huang, Baohang Li, Kui Jiang, Yang Xiang, Zhirui Zhang, Yunfei Lu, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have impressive multimodal abilities but remain prone to multilingual object hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual attention intervention method to mitigate multilingual object hallucination in LVLMs by aligning attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves 13.56% (up to 30%) on the POPE and 21.75% on the hallucination subsets across languages. |
Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Jiahai Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a tailored learning approach to distill the exclusive reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate democratization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability by leveraging the black-box model as a reasoning teacher. |
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)
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Guanting Dong, Daichi Guo, Liwen Wang, Xuefeng Li, Zechen Wang, Chen Zeng, Keqing He, Jinzheng Zhao, Hao Lei, Xinyue Cui, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts. |
D2PCM:A Multi-Turn Dialogue Dataset with Personalized Contextual Memory (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Conventional interactive algorithms have predominantly treated memory as a contextual element, neglecting the nuanced cognitive processes involved in individualized memory encoding and retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with Personalized Contextual Memory to facilitate advanced research on personalized memory processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide a comprehensive benchmark to facilitate advanced research on personalized memory processing. |
Aligning Translation-Specific Understanding to General Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language models (LLMs) have remarkable abilities in understanding complex texts . however, understanding misalignment leads to LLMs mistakenly translating complex concepts . |
| Approach: | They propose a translation process that aligns the translation-specific understanding with the general understanding to improve translation quality and reduce translation literalness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed translation process improves translation quality and reduces translation literalness by -25% -51%. |
SocialEval: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Yihan Shi, Xuanming Zhang, Leqi Lei, Yi Feng, Zexuan Xiong, Miao Yan, Xunzhi Wang, Yaru Cao, Jianing Yin, Shuai Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs does not address their social intelligence (SI) and their discrepancy with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based bilingual SI benchmark that integrates outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a script-based bilingual evaluation paradigm that integrates outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
MC2: Towards Transparent and Culturally-Aware NLP for Minority Languages in China (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MC2 is the largest open-source corpus of minority languages in china . MC2, however, includes four underrepresented languages: Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual corpus of minority languages in China that includes four underrepresented languages . they prioritize accuracy while enhancing diversity by using a quality-centric approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model prioritizes accuracy while enhancing diversity, the authors say . MC2 includes four underrepresented languages: Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian . |
A Bounding Box is Worth One Token - Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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Jinghui Lu, Haiyang Yu, Yanjie Wang, Yongjie Ye, Jingqun Tang, Ziwei Yang, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Hao Feng, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating spatial layouts with text have limitations . existing methods produce overly long text sequences or lack autoregressive traits of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They introduce Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model (LayTextLLM) they use OCR-derived text and spatial layouts to integrate with LLMs for document understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows an increase in performance in KIE and VQA tasks. |
Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on neural machine translation (NMT) has demonstrated impressive performance improvements and became the de-facto standard. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic curriculum learning method to reorder training samples in training using a Transformer-based system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three low-resource machine translation benchmarks and different sized data of WMT’16 En-De. |
WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild? (2025.emnlp-main)
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An-Lan Wang, Jingqun Tang, Lei Liao, Hao Feng, Qi Liu, Xiang Fei, Jinghui Lu, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for document understanding in the wild are based on scanned or digital documents . however, these benchmarks fail to capture the challenges posed by documents in the real world . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that incorporates a diverse set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions and is compared with digital or scanned documents. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
Auto Search Indexer for End-to-End Document Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generative retrieval heavily relies on the “preprocessed” document identifiers, thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm that can learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and industrial datasets and can handle new documents. |
Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhijun Wang, Jiahuan Li, Hao Zhou, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They investigate the existence of code-switching in the pre-training corpus and categorize it into four types within two quadrants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across benchmarks and representation space. |
Enlivening Redundant Heads in Multi-head Self-attention for Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve multi-head self-attention are lacking in many languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a redundant head enlivening method to identify redundant heads and vitalize their potential by learning syntactic relations and prior knowledge in the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can identify and vitalize redundant heads without sacrificing the roles of important heads. |
Exploring and Adapting Chinese GPT to Pinyin Input Method (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a frozen GPT can generate state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin, but performance drops when input includes abbreviated pinyan, which links to even larger number of Chinese characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese GPT to generate fluent sentences using abbreviated pinyin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on abbreviated pinyin across all domains. |
Scalable-DSC: A Structural Template Prompt Approach to Scalable Dialogue State Correction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to correct wrong slot values in dialogue state tracking are intertwined with specific DST models, limiting their applicability to other DSTs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Scalable Dialogue State Correction model that corrects wrong slot values in predicted dialogue states by using a structural template prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4. |
PKAG-DDI: Pairwise Knowledge-Augmented Language Model for Drug-Drug Interaction Event Text Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Drug-drug interactions arise when multiple drugs are administered concurrently. |
| Approach: | They propose a pairwise knowledge-augmented generative method for DDIE text generation that integrates biological functions from a knowledge set into a language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in DDIE text generation on two professional datasets. |
MLDebugging: Towards Benchmarking Code Debugging Across Multi-Library Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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JinYang Huang, Xiachong Feng, Qiguang Chen, Hanjie Zhao, Zihui Cheng, Jiesong Bai, Jingxuan Zhou, Min Li, Libo Qin
| Challenge: | MLDebugging is a benchmark designed to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a benchmark to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code using 126 Python libraries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 126 Python libraries and a wide range of multi-library code issues. |
Marrying Up Regular Expressions with Neural Networks: A Case Study for Spoken Language Understanding (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the combination of regular expressions and NNs improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a neural network (NN) with regular expressions (RE) to improve supervised learning for NLP by exploiting the rich expressiveness of REs at different levels within a NN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available. |
Context-Aware Hierarchical Taxonomy Generation for Scientific Papers via LLM-Guided Multi-Aspect Clustering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing taxonomy construction methods lack coherence and granularity . Existing approaches rely on manual or narrowly defined schemes . |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware hierarchical taxonomy generation framework that integrates LLMs with dynamic clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in taxonomy coherence, granularity, and interpretability. |
Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Weihong Zhong, Xiaocheng Feng, Liang Zhao, Qiming Li, Lei Huang, Yuxuan Gu, Weitao Ma, Yuan Xu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from multimodal hallucinations . however, the generated hallucines could influence the models’ subsequent generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LVLMs' behaviors when encountering generated hallucinations and a method to revise the output distribution of LVLs with the one derived from the residual visual input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the performance of open-source LVLMs by 31%, indicating that they are prone to accept the generated hallucinations and make false claims that they would not have supported without distractions. |
QDMR-based Planning-and-Solving Prompting for Complex Reasoning Tasks (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Plan-and-Solve prompting methods are difficult to implement for complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-solve prompting method based on Question Decomposition Meaning Representation (QDMR) it allows LLM to generate a QDMR graph to represent problem-solving logic . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can represent and execute the problem-solving logic of complex questions more accurately than existing methods. |
SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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Yuchun Fan, Yongyu Mu, YiLin Wang, Lei Huang, Junhao Ruan, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, Shujian Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant improvements in reasoning abilities, but these improvements are primarily focused on English, leading to inferior performance in non-English scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reasoning alignment approach that fine-tunes the layers responsible for multilingual comprehension in one stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fine-tunes 6 of the 9 layers responsible for multilingual comprehension, while reducing training time by 4.1-11.9 compared to the two-stage method. |
DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhouhong Gu, Lin Zhang, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Jiangjie Chen, Wenhao Huang, Yikai Zhang, Shusen Wang, Zheyu Ye, Yan Gao, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs' abilities to detect evidence in long contexts are far inferior to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' abilities in evidence and multi-step commonsense reasoning within a long context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLMs in evidence detection and commonsense reasoning. |
MECoT: Markov Emotional Chain-of-Thought for Personality-Consistent Role-Playing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models struggle to maintain emotionally consistent and psychologically plausible character personalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances LLMs’ ability to generate authentic personality-driven dialogues through stochastic emotional transitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 93.3% emotional accuracy on the RAPD dataset and significantly outperforms existing approaches. |
Beyond Accuracy: Unveiling Inefficiency Patterns in Tool-Integrated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) is a tool that can be used to solve complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hardware-aware TIR-efficiency metric that unifies internal reasoning and external tool-use costs while explicitly accounting for non-reusable KV-Cache and long-tool-response scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric explains wall-clock latency significantly better than token-count metric in a simulated high-concurrency industrial setting. |
Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator for Dialogue Systems (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a multi-domain dialogue state tracker are lacking in accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator to train a DST meta-learning model with a few domains as source domains and a new domain as target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the traditional training approach with extremely little training data in target domain. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
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Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
Breaking Language Preference in Multilingual RAG via Language-Controllable Retrieval and Language-Agnostic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve retrieval accuracy and generation quality of large language models suffer from language preference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly disentangles multilingual RAG into language-controllable retrieval and language-agnostic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baselines across multilingual benchmarks. |
MeepleLM: A Virtual Playtester Simulating Diverse Subjective Experiences (2026.acl-long)
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Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Yifei Huang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have expanded the role of board games as creative co-designers . however, current systems lack the capacity to offer constructive critique grounded in the emergent user experience . |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model that internalizes persona-specific reasoning patterns to accurately simulate the subjective feedback of diverse player archetypes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms commercial models in community alignment and critique quality. |
Cross-model Transferability among Large Language Models on the Platonic Representations of Concepts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that a single LLM’s concept representations can be captured as steering vectors (SVs) prior work has demonstrated that SVs extracted from smaller LLMs can effectively control the behavior of larger LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a linear transformation method to bridge LLM concept representations using simple linear transformations to enable efficient cross-model transfer and behavioral control via SVs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges concept representations across different LLMs and enables efficient cross-model transfer and behavioral control via SVs. |
M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Taowen Wang, Yiyang Liu, James Liang, Junhan Zhao, Yiming Cui, Yuning Mao, Shaoliang Nie, Jiahao Liu, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Qifan Wang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal prompt tuning approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows superior performance on multimodal evaluation datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
AlignedCoT: Prompting Large Language Models via Native-Speaking Demonstrations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are delicate and elusive in prompt words and styles. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-acquainted prompting technique that includes proficient "native-speaking" they propose to use in-context learning to prompt LLMs to perform high-performance reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves step-wise prompts in zero-shot scenarios while maintaining the prompt quality. |
Diffusion Language Model Inference with Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zheng Huang, Kiran Ramnath, Yueyan Chen, Aosong Feng, Sangmin Woo, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Shuai Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference use heuristics to determine which positions to unmask and which tokens to commit . MEDAL is an inference-time scaling framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 22.0% improvement over existing inference strategies across multiple benchmarks. |
Harder Task Needs More Experts: Dynamic Routing in MoE Models (2024.acl-long)
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Quzhe Huang, Zhenwei An, Nan Zhuang, Mingxu Tao, Chen Zhang, Yang Jin, Kun Xu, Kun Xu, Liwei Chen, Songfang Huang, Yansong Feng
| Challenge: | Unlike existing MoE approaches that rely on fixed TopK Routing, our dynamic expert selection framework dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic expert selection framework that dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average improvement of 0.7% with less than 90% activated parameters and outperforms dense models in QA and machine translation tasks. |
Length-Adaptive Distillation: Customizing Small Language Model for Dynamic Token Pruning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to accelerate inference speed are model compression and dynamic computation (e.g., dynamic token pruning). |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that produces a customized small language model for dynamic token pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can make the small language model more customized for dynamic token pruning and achieve better speed-performance trade-off. |
Towards Low-Resource Semi-Supervised Dialogue Generation with Meta-Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that use labelled data to generate dialogues are lacking in high accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning based semi-supervised explicit dialogue state tracker for neural dialogue generation, denoted as MEDST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing systems by 18.7% goal accuracy and 14.3% entity match rate on the KVRET corpus with 2% labelled data in semi-supervision. |
Large Language Models Are Cross-Lingual Knowledge-Free Reasoners (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities across multiple languages, but the relationship between capabilities in different languages is less explored. |
| Approach: | They decompose the process of reasoning tasks into two separate components: knowledge retrieval and knowledge-free reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be transferred across source-target languages despite secondary impact of resource in some specific target languages, while cross-lingual knowledge retrieval significantly hinders the transfer. |
Fine-Mem: Fine-Grained Feedback Alignment for Long-Horizon Memory Management (2026.acl-long)
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Weitao Ma, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to memory management rely on final task performance as the primary reward, resulting in severe reward sparsity and ineffective credit assignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-grained feedback alignment using a Chunk-level step reward and Evidence-Anchored Reward Attribution to redistribute global rewards based on memory items utilized as evidence in reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and supports generalization across different model configurations and backbones. |
Palette of Language Models: A Solver for Controlled Text Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a single-attribute model with a discriminative model to achieve a combination strategy that incorporates positive correlation and attribute enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is adapted for single-attribute control scenario and achieves surpassing results. |
One for All: Update Parameterized Knowledge Across Multiple Models with Once Edit (2025.acl-long)
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Weitao Ma, Xiyuan Du, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Yichong Huang, Huiyi Zhang, Xiaoliang Yang, Baohang Li, Xiachong Feng, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for modifying large language models focus on individual models, resulting in errors and hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose an ensemble-based approach that employs a plug-in model as the editing module and a dynamic weight mechanism to enhance its effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods while achieving superior editing efficiency. |
Question Tells You Where the Answer Is: Intention-aware Long-Context KV Cache Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Liang Zhao, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Lei Huang, Kun Zhu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Recent methods to reduce the KV cache size fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user’s goal and determines which part of the context is relevant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting. |
ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Qi Zhu, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Baolin Peng, Zheng Zhang, Shutong Feng, Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Dazhen Wan, Xiaochen Zhu, Jianfeng Gao, Milica Gasic, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing tools for building TOD systems often lack a user-friendly interface . a toolkit with advanced, easily integrable modules is needed to bridge this gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a multifaceted dialogue system toolkit that integrates diverse datasets and models with a streamlined training process and in-depth evaluation tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit combines RL and transfer learning to support the rapid development and evaluation of robust dialogue policies. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Thought-Action Graph Reasoning: Faithful and Efficient Reasoning of Large Language Models via Reusing Past Experience (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhixiao Qi, Feng Huang, Yunqi Zhang, Shijie Zhang, Qingqing Sun, Yongfeng Huang, Minghu Jiang, Shuai Chen, Tianyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs with LLMs suffer from poor generalization or low reasoning efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a thought-action Graph (TAG) that decomposes LLM-KG interaction trajectories into fine-grained semantic operators and guides LLM to execute on them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on KGQA benchmarks while reducing the number of LLM calls and generated tokens. |
NL2Lean: Translating Natural Language into Lean 4 through Multi-Aspect Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yue Fang, Shaohan Huang, Xin Yu, Haizhen Huang, Zihan Zhang, Weiwei Deng, Furu Wei, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Existing formal proof assistants rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to translate natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 . they use a model with basic translation ability to refine the model's reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks. |
UCL-Bench: A Chinese User-Centric Legal Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Ruoli Gan, Duanyu Feng, Chen Zhang, Zhihang Lin, Haochen Jia, Hao Wang, Zhenyang Cai, Lei Cui, Qianqian Xie, Jimin Huang, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing legal benchmarks focusing on knowledge and logic evaluate LLMs on various tasks in legal domain, but few have explored the practical application of LLM by actual users. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese user-centric legal benchmark that aims to assess the practical application of LLMs by real users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on various tasks in legal domain but does not outperfect ChatGPT. |
Towards Higher Pareto Frontier in Multilingual Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Pareto optimization approaches are limited by the long-tailed distribution of multilingual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pareto mutual distillation framework that pushes the Paret frontier outwards rather than making trade-offs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework pushes the Pareto frontier outwards rather than making trade-offs, the authors show. |
Enabling Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Word-level Visual Representations (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised neural machine translation methods have been observed to make particular errors in comparison to supervised machine translation, such as confusing nouns that pertain to the same semantic category. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates images at the word level to augment lexical mappings. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a multi-lingual dataset show that the proposed method generates more accurate translations with only monolingual data. |
TACO: Enhancing Multimodal In-context Learning via Task Mapping-Guided Sequence Configuration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) is a key mechanism for harnessing the capabilities of large vision–language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based model with task-aware attention that dynamically configures ICL sequences. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five LVLMs and nine datasets show that TACO surpasses baselines across diverse ICL tasks. |
Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Zihao Tang, Xin Yu, Ziyu Xiao, Zengxuan Wen, Zelin Li, Jiaxi Zhou, Hualei Wang, Haohua Wang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
Do Charge Prediction Models Learn Legal Theory? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for charge prediction are sensitive, selective, and presumption of innocence . a recent study has shown that deep learning models can predict the charges accurately, but their reliability and interpretability are still underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose that trustworthy charge prediction models should take legal theories into consideration . they propose three principles for trustworthy models to follow in this task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates whether existing models learn legal theories . it shows that models meet selective and presumption of innocence principles . |
Why Machine Reading Comprehension Models Learn Shortcuts? (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that many MRC models learn shortcuts to outwit benchmarks, but the performance is unsatisfactory in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use shortcut questions to analyze learning difficulty of MRC models . they propose to analyze the learning difficulty regarding shortcut and challenging questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that a large proportion of shortcut questions in training data make models rely on shortcut tricks excessively. |
Guiding Variational Response Generator to Exploit Persona (2020.acl-main)
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Bowen Wu, MengYuan Li, Zongsheng Wang, Yifu Chen, Derek F. Wong, Qihang Feng, Junhong Huang, Baoxun Wang
| Challenge: | Neural Response Generators (NRGs) use persona information of users to perform personalized conversations . current studies focus on incorporating explicit meta-data of user profiles or character descriptions to generate persona-aware responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use persona information of users in Neural Response Generators to perform personalized conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves persona-aware response generation and the metrics are reasonable to evaluate them. |
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)
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Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
Self-Reflection Improves Safety of Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment methods are shallow and do not address deeper risks and attacks in reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that introduces a special Self-Reflection token to enable LRMs to perform self-reflection during generation and recover from harmful outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model in terms of safety and helpfulness, and significantly improves model safety without adversarial training. |
CTTA-T: Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Text Understanding via Teacher-Student with a Domain-aware and Generalized Teacher (2026.acl-long)
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Tianlun Liu, Zhiliang Tian, Zhen Huang, Xingzhi Zhou, Wanlong Yu, Tianle Liu, Feng Liu, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing models for text understanding fail to adapt to domain shifts in real-world applications . current models do not improve themselves as they are applied to new domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a continual test-time adaptation framework that adapts to evolving domains . they propose accumulating domains and a refine-then-filter framework to calibrate teacher predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels in a teacher-student framework adaptable to evolving domains. |
IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yinghao Tang, Xueding Liu, Boyuan Zhang, Tingfeng Lan, Yupeng Xie, Jiale Lao, Yiyao Wang, Haoxuan Li, Tingting Gao, Bo Pan, Luoxuan Weng, Xiuqi Huang, Minfeng Zhu, Yingchaojie Feng, Yuyu Luo, Wei Chen
| Challenge: | Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate reliability of text-to-infographic generation using IGenBench . they employ multimodal large language models to verify each question . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Language-Specific Layer Matters: Efficient Multilingual Enhancement for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models exhibit an imbalance in multilingual capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a training recipe that achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by Precise Language Specific layers fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by fine-tuning language specific layers. |
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. |
MTAVG-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multi-Talker Dialogue-Centric Audio-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yanghao Zhou, Haitian Li, Rexar Lin, Heyan Huang, Jinxing Zhou, Changsen Yuan, Tian Lan, Ziqin Zhou, Yudong Li, Jiajun Xu, Jingyun Liao, YiMing Cheng, Xuefeng Chen, Xian-Ling Mao, Yousheng Feng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation are largely designed for human-recorded videos or single-speaker settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-driven diagnostic benchmark for multi-talker dialogue-centric audio-video generation. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates multi-speaker dialogue generation at four levels: audio-visual signal fidelity, temporal attribute consistency, social interaction, and cinematic expression. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
JX4MEI: Multimodal Semantically-Enhanced LLM for Joint Multimodal Emotion-Intent Explanation and Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal emotion and intent recognition tasks focus on classification, not rationale and intrinsic connections between these states. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that requires models to jointly predict emotion and intent while generating natural language explanations for why they co-occur. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in prediction and explanation generation. |
Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning-oriented LLMs lack a blind self-thinking paradigm . current models fail to recognize when their reasoning is underinformed or based on ambiguous user instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing. |
Enhancing Large Vision-Language Models with Ultra-Detailed Image Caption Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines for generating high-quality, ultra-detailed image captions are limited by the scarcity of image caption data. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for generating high-quality, ultra-detailed image captions that integrates both pre-processing and post-processor stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves LVLMs' perception and cognitive abilities across multiple vision-language benchmarks. |
Exploring Distantly-Labeled Rationales in Neural Network Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on distantly-labeled rationales, ignoring the potential important non-rationale words and not distinguishing the importance of different rationale words. |
| Approach: | They propose two novel auxiliary loss functions to make better use of distantly-labeled rationales, which encourage models to maintain their focus on important words beyond labeled rationals (PINs) and alleviate redundant training on non-helpful rationale (NoIRs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods on two representative classification tasks while maintaining the ability to spread focus to other unlabeled important words. |
Integrating Multi-scale Contextualized Information for Byte-based Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Subword tokenization is a common method for vocabulary building in NMT systems . but, it has its disadvantages, such as a vocabulary cannot be modified once it is learned . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns contextualized information of varying scales . they propose byte-based tokenization to solve these problems with few embedding parameters . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms subword-based methods in multilingual and out-of-domain scenarios. |
APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Qifan Wang, Yuning Mao, Jingang Wang, Hanchao Yu, Shaoliang Nie, Sinong Wang, Fuli Feng, Lifu Huang, Xiaojun Quan, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing prompt tuning methods only introduce prompts at the input layer, limiting performance and leaving large room for improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that involves tuning a small set of soft prompts for pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with pre-trained models on the SuperGLUE benchmark. |
DAM: Dynamic Attention Mask for Long-Context Large Language Model Inference Acceleration (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, but transformers struggle with efficiency due to quadratic complexity of self-attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic sparse attention mechanism that assigns adaptive masks at the attention-map level, preserving heterogeneous attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high alignment with full-attention models while reducing memory and compute overhead. |
Length Controlled Generation for Black-box LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Gu, Wenjie Wang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Kun Zhu, Lei Huang, Ting Liu, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua
| Challenge: | Existing length control methods involve fine-tuning the parameters of LLMs, which is inefficient and suboptimal for practical use. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative sampling framework that regulates LLMs to generate length-constrained text without modifying the underlying parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 100% success rates on Llama3.1 tasks with minimal additional computational overhead. |
PEGRL: Improving Machine Translation by Post-Editing Guided Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong promise for LLM-based machine translation . however, translation-oriented RL remains challenged by high-variance policy gradients induced by Monte Carlo baselines and large trajectory space that favors global exploration over fine-grained local optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage RL framework that uses post-editing as an auxiliary task to stabilize training and guide overall optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports global exploration and fine-grained optimization while supporting global exploration. |
ResLoRA: Identity Residual Mapping in Low-Rank Adaption (2024.findings-acl)
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Shuhua Shi, Shaohan Huang, Minghui Song, Zhoujun Li, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method that adds residual paths during training and merges them together during inference to achieve better results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.5x faster convergence speed and improves performance by 14.3% on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
Causal Discovery Inspired Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yuncheng Hua, Yujin Huang, Shuo Huang, Tao Feng, Lizhen Qu, Christopher Bain, Richard Bassed, Reza Haf
| Challenge: | Emotion-cause pair extraction is a task that aims to extract emotions and the events causing such emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep latent model which captures the underlying latent structures of data and utilizes the easily transferable knowledge of emotions as the bridge to link the distributions of events in different domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the strongest baseline by approximately 11.05% on a Chinese benchmark and 2.45% on an English benchmark in terms of weighted-average F1 score. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
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Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
Correlation-Aware Example Selection for In-Context Learning with Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qiunan Du, Zhiliang Tian, Zhen Huang, Kailun Bian, Tianlun Liu, Zhaoning Zhang, Xinwang Liu, Feng Liu, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning (ICL) focus on the selection of individual examples and ignore correlations among examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture positive and negative correlations using the determinantal point process . they optimize the method via kernel decomposition-based MLE to fit a constructed pseudo-labeled dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in ICL example selection. |
x1: Learning to Think Adaptively Across Languages and Cultures (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangfan Ye, Xiaocheng Feng, Xiachong Feng, Yichong Huang, Zekun Yuan, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Qichen Hong, Yunfei Lu, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) ignore this diversity by reasoning in a single dominant language. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of reasoning models that can adaptively reason in an advantageous language on a per-instance basis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reason in a single dominant language on a per-instance basis. |
Emotion Trajectory-aware Retrieval for Markov-driven Emotion Anticipation in LLM-based Emotional Support Conversation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing strategies focus on planning the next-turn dialogue strategies, while external strategy planners focus on generating empathetic responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov-driven emotion anticipation framework with emotion trajectory-aware retrieval for LLM-based ESC, which anticipates future emotion states to guide strategy planning and achieve sustained emotional support. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can anticipate future emotions and achieve sustained emotional support on two datasets with two models. |
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yichen Ouyang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chenghua Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Bochen Pang, Yaming Yang, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
Towards Non-task-specific Distillation of BERT via Sentence Representation Approximation (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for transferring knowledge from BERT into a model with large parameters are not efficient due to their large-scale and high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence representation approximating oriented distillation framework that can distill pre-trained BERT into a simple LSTM based model without specifying tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other distillation methods and larger models on multiple NLP tasks with efficiency well-improved. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
Improving Role-Oriented Dialogue Summarization with Interaction-Aware Contrastive Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for encoding dialogues do not capture interaction information between roles, thus ignore interaction-related key information. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning based interaction-aware model for the role-oriented dialogue summarization namely CIAM and use it to train the decoder to learn role-level interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures interaction information between different roles and produces informative summaries on two public datasets. |
Larger-Context Tagging: When and Why Does It Work? (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing tagging systems that use sentence-level data are not well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a larger-context approach to tagging tasks that incorporates contextual information into existing tapping systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed aggregators improve on four tagging tasks and 13 datasets. |
MGPO: Thinking with Images via Multi-Turn Grounding-Based Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art large multimodal models face challenges when processing high-resolution images, as these inputs are converted into enormous visual tokens, many of which are irrelevant to the downstream task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn grounding-based policy optimization framework that enables LMMs to iteratively focus on key visual regions by automatically cropping sub-images based on model-predicted grounding coordinates within a multiple-turn conversation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on Qwen2.5-VL-7B with 21K samples and surpasses OpenAI’s o1 and GPT-4o models on the out-of-distribution (OOD) V* Bench. |
Two-Stage Parameter Alignment for Multi-LoRA Merging in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current general model merging methods are prone to parameter interference problems . a novel two-stage parameter alignment framework is proposed to address this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage parameter alignment framework that integrates low-rank LoRAs . they propose to reduce the computational complexity of existing methods by preserving fine-grained functions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits greater robustness than other methods in high-rank and high-interference scenarios while preserving fine-grained functions. |
MeasHalu: Mitigation of Scientific Measurement Hallucinations for Large Language Models with Enhanced Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruijun Huang, Zhiqiao Kang, Yuxuan Zhu, Junxiong Li, Jiahao Zhao, Minghuan Tan, Feng Jiang, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit severe hallucinations, which undermine reliability of automated scientific document understanding systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for mitigating scientific measurement hallucinations through enhanced reasoning and targeted optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces hallucination rates and improves overall accuracy on the MeasEval benchmark. |
Enhancing Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Units (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model and leverage semantic units in natural language do not provide a complete understanding of the whole sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which models the integral meanings of semantic units within a sentence . they propose 'word pair encoder' to help identify the boundaries of semantic unit boundaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and supports the semantic unit representation of subwords and tokens. |
Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Jiayi Chen, Chenhao Huang, Feng Chen, Wei Chengzhi, Huiyuan Zheng, Shichun Liu, Yan Liu, Chenxiao Liu, Chao Xin, Lin Yan, Zongzhang Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing reward models concatenate contexts and responses, but they often ignore crucial segments of the context that are important for evaluating the response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model that evaluates the response quality based on a given context and assigns a rewards reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves preference modeling by increasing attention to relevant information within the context and achieves better generalizability. |
LLM as a metric critic for low resource relation identification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that small language models (SLMs) overfit in low resource situations . however, the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning leads to performance decay . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine large language models and LLM for relation identification by co-evolution . they propose to use a masked language model prompt to generate a relation identification task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle low resource relation identification tasks with minimal overfitting . the proposed model provides essential background knowledge to assist training process . |
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Xiaochi Wei, Ge Shi, Xiao Liu, Chong Feng, Tong Zhou, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art. |
Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiyang Xu, Chao Feng, Rulin Shao, Trevor Ashby, Ying Shen, Di Jin, Yu Cheng, Qifan Wang, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities as general visual assistants, but there are two challenges to their performance: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning; (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework that fine tunes VLMs firstly and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. |
Stratagem: Learning Transferable Reasoning via Trajectory-Modulated Game Self-Play (2026.acl-long)
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Xiachong Feng, Deyi Yin, Xiaocheng Feng, Yi Jiang, Libo Qin, Yangfan Ye, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Qiming Li, Yuxuan Gu, Bing Qin, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing self-play approaches to developing general reasoning in language models rely on terminal game outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a game-based reasoning transfer model that addresses two barriers to reasoning transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves mathematical reasoning, general reasoning, and code generation benchmarks. |
Cognitive Alpha Mining via LLM-Driven Code-Based Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to finding effective predictive signals from financial data are limited by their complexity and low signal-to-noise ratio. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. |
PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | We introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models . despite being trained on synthetic data, PaSA outperforms existing baselines on RealScholarQuery . |
| Approach: | They introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models . they optimize PaSA using a synthetic dataset, AutoScholarQuery, which includes 35k fine-grained queries . |
| Outcome: | The paper analyzes the performance of a paper search agent using a synthetic dataset . it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks on RealScholarQuery . |
Speeding Up Neural Machine Translation Decoding by Cube Pruning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation suffers from slow translation speed due to the large search space . a trade-off has to be made between translation quality and speed, argues a new study . |
| Approach: | They apply cube pruning technique to speed up dynamic programming into neural machine translation to speed it up. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can translate faster on GPUs and CPUs with better translation quality than naive beam search. |
DPEPO: Diverse Parallel Exploration Policy Optimization for LLM-based Agents (2026.acl-long)
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JunShuo Zhang, Chengrui Huang, Feng Guo, Zihan Li, Ke Shi, Menghua Jiang, Jiguo Yu, Shuo Shang, Shen Gao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language model (LLM) agents that follow the sequential "reason-then-act" paradigm suffer from limited exploration and incomplete environmental understanding as they interact with only a single environment per step. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables an agent to interact with multiple environments simultaneously and share cross-trajectory experiences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) success rates while maintaining comparable efficiency to strong sequential baselines. |
DivScore: Zero-Shot Detection of LLM-Generated Text in Specialized Domains (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot detectors fail when applied to specialized content due to domain shift . DivScore outperforms state-of-the-art detectors in specialized domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot detection framework that uses normalized entropy-based scoring and domain knowledge distillation to identify LLM-generated text in specialized domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art detectors on medical and legal datasets with 14.4% higher AUROC and 64.0% higher recall. |
SWING: Balancing Coverage and Faithfulness for Dialogue Summarization (2023.findings-eacl)
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Kung-Hsiang Huang, Siffi Singh, Xiaofei Ma, Wei Xiao, Feng Nan, Nicholas Dingwall, William Yang Wang, Kathleen McKeown
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dialogue summarization rely on features of conversation data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language inference models to improve coverage and faithfulness . they use fine-grained training signals to encourage model to generate missing content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves higher faithfulness and coverage while maintaining conciseness compared to prior methods. |
Advancing Sequential Numerical Prediction in Autoregressive Models (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive models are the de facto choice for sequence generation tasks, but standard approaches treat digits as independent tokens and apply cross-entropy loss, overlooking the coherent structure of numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to entropy loss by extending the Earth Mover’s Distance to preserve ordinal relationships between numerical values and sequence-level to penalize the overall discrepancy between predicted and actual sequences. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that NTIL improves numerical prediction and integrates effectively with LLMs/MLLMs. |
CMDL: A Large-Scale Chinese Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction Dataset (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has attracted significant attention in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese Multi-Defendant LJP dataset . they propose case-level evaluation metrics dedicated for the multi-defendant scenario . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show weaknesses when applied to cases involving multiple defendants. |
CritiqueLLM: Towards an Informative Critique Generation Model for Evaluation of Large Language Model Generation (2024.acl-long)
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Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Andrew Feng, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jiale Cheng, Shengyuan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing models for NLP evaluations lack the ability to generate informative critiques in pointwise grading and pairwise comparison especially without references. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can acquire pointwise grading critiques with pseudo references and revise these critiques via multi-path prompting to obtain informative evaluation data in different tasks and settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all open-source models and even GPT-4 in system-level correlations of pointwise grading. |
EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jianfeng Chi, Jiahao Liu, Jingang Wang, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Yi Fang, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product attribute value require multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction approach using lightweight sparse-layer interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. |
Beyond Static Profiles: Capturing the Fluidity of User Preferences in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to personalize Large Language Models often default to homogeneous behaviors . preferences can shift, and conflict, depending on context, authors argue . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical taxonomy to differentiate between stable and situational preferences . they use a dataset of 10k meticulously curated preferences to test their taxonomies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model differentiates between stable and situational preferences based on curated user preferences . it provides a practical testbed for advancing dynamic, context-aware personalization in conversational agents. |
Entriever: Energy-based Retriever for Knowledge-Grounded Dialog Systems (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge retrieval methods fail to account for interrelationship between knowledge pieces . however, current methods fail in a situation where multiple knowledge pieces are relevant . |
| Approach: | They propose an energy-based retriever that directly models the candidate retrieval results as a whole instead of modeling the knowledge pieces separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed retriever outperforms the baseline energy-based retriever in knowledge retrieval tasks. |
Understanding LLMs’ Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual context retrieval is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs) remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They evaluate cross-lingual context retrieval of over 40 large language models . they use cross-linguistic machine reading comprehension as a representative scenario . |
| Outcome: | The results show that open LLMs show strong cross-lingual context retrieval ability . the results also show that their oracle performances improve after training . |
HoWToBench: Holistic Evaluation for LLM’s Capability in Human-level Writing using Tree of Writing (2026.acl-long)
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Andrew Zhuoer Feng, Cunxiang Wang, Yu Luo, Lin Fan, Irene Zhou, Zikang Wang, Xiaotao Gu, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Evaluating the writing capabilities of large language models remains a significant challenge due to the multidimensional nature of writing skills and the limitations of existing metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the aggregation weights of sub-features in a tree-structured workflow and propose a Chinese writing benchmark that mitigates biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tree-of-writing (ToW) measures the writing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in Chinese and shows that it mitigates biases and achieves a *0.93* Pearson correlation with human judgments. |
MoCE: Adaptive Mixture of Contextualization Experts for Byte-based Neural Machine Translation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Byte-based machine translation systems can be used in multilingual settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that maps each character to specific byte(s) they propose byte-level tokenization that eliminates unknown words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods without manual adjustment of hyper-parameters and surpasses subword-based models with fewer parameters in Ted-59 dataset. |
Calibrating LLM-Based Evaluator (2024.lrec-main)
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Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for large language models lack the ability to calibrate their outputs towards human preference. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage, gradient-free approach to calibrate an LLM-based evaluator toward human preference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves correlation with expert evaluation on multiple text quality evaluation datasets. |
CC-Tuning: A Cross-Lingual Connection Mechanism for Improving Joint Multilingual Supervised Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yangfan Ye, Xiaocheng Feng, Zekun Yuan, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Yichong Huang, Zhirui Zhang, Yunfei Lu, Xiaohui Yan, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing fine-tuning approaches that focus on English-centric training corpora often introduce implicit cross-lingual alignment, overlooking the potential for more profound, latent-level cross-linguistic interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual fine-tuning paradigm that explicitly establishes a cross-lingual connection mechanism at the latent level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla SFT and offers a strong latent-level alternative to data-level augmentation methods. |
JUREX-4E: Juridical Expert-Annotated Four-Element Knowledge Base for Legal Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have introduced legal theories into LLM workflows to improve their understanding of legal texts and reasoning accuracy. |
| Approach: | They evaluate an expert-annotated four-element knowledge base covering 155 criminal charges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to analyze criminal charges and retrieve them in legal cases. |
Genre Separation Network with Adversarial Training for Cross-genre Relation Extraction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract genre-specific and genre-agnostic features require great human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two encoders to explicitly extract genre-specific and genre-agnostic features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.7% on three distinct genres. |
OpenMEVA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation Metrics (2021.acl-long)
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Jian Guan, Zhexin Zhang, Zhuoer Feng, Zitao Liu, Wenbiao Ding, Xiaoxi Mao, Changjie Fan, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing automatic metrics are observed to correlate poorly with human evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use OpenMEVA to evaluate open-ended story generation metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suite assesses the capabilities of open-ended story generation metrics on annotated stories and auto-constructed test examples. |
Learning to Leverage High-Order Medical Knowledge Graph for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical terms are difficult to understand and relations between medical entities become complicated. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage medical domain knowledge for extracting entities and relations for Chinese medical texts by building a heterogeneous graph based on medical knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than state-of-the-art methods on real Chinese medical texts. |
Dynamic and Multi-Channel Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | . - (EN) |
| Approach: | . - (EN) |
| Outcome: | . - (EN) |
Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving (2024.emnlp-main)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Liang Zhao, Yuchun Fan, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Teaching large language models to generate text with citations to evidence sources requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of large language models (LLMs) by attributing output to verifiable sources. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets show that START improves in aggregating information across multiple sources. |
AlphaQT-Bench: Diagnosing the Gap between Financial Code Generation and Quantitative Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Sichun Luo, Yi Huang, Shichang Meng, Fengyuan Liu, Mukai Li, Qinghua Yao, Zefa Hu, Junlan Feng, Qi Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks rely on outcome-driven metrics such as profitability and look-ahead bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic benchmark for instruction-grounded financial code generation under strict semantic and temporal constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models fail under causal, structural, or functional constraints. |
Unveiling Entity-Level Unlearning for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Analysis (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on instance-level unlearning, specifically removing predefined instances containing sensitive content. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to erase entity-related knowledge from the target model completely by analyzing the forget set and its size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task systematically evaluates popular unlearning algorithms and reveals that the knowledge coverage of the forget set and its size play pivotal roles. |
Does Recommend-Revise Produce Reliable Annotations? An Analysis on Missing Instances in DocRED (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction is a challenging task as it requires reasoning across multiple sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a recommend-revise scheme to reduce the workload of annotators by providing them with candidate relation instances from distant supervision to supplement and remove relational facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first large-scale and human-annotated dataset for relation extraction. |
RoAST: Robustifying Language Models via Adversarial Perturbation with Selective Training (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jaehyung Kim, Yuning Mao, Rui Hou, Hanchao Yu, Davis Liang, Pascale Fung, Qifan Wang, Fuli Feng, Lifu Huang, Madian Khabsa
| Challenge: | Several perspectives of robustness for pre-trained language models have been studied independently, but lacking a unified consideration in multiple perspectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to enhance the multi-perspective robustness of LMs by introducing adversarial perturbation while the model parameters are selectively updated upon their relative importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves the robustness of LMs by incorporating four perspectives on model robustness. |
Learning Fine-Grained Grounded Citations for Attributed Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Weihong Zhong, Xiachong Feng, Weijiang Yu, Weihua Peng, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | despite impressive performance, large language models still struggle with hallucinations . current approaches suffer from suboptimal citation quality due to reliance on in-context learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that teaches large language models to generate fine-grained citations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms all baselines on the ALCE benchmark and achieves an average improvement of 14.21% in citation quality. |
QRMeM: Unleash the Length Limitation through Question then Reflection Memory Mechanism (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for processing large textual content face insufficient adaptation to task-specific needs and missing multi-segmentation relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a question then reflection memory mechanism which integrates a dual-structured memory pool and a structured graph guidance to facilitate a reflective trial-and-error approach for navigating and identifying relevant segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance on multiple-choice questions and multi-doc QA. |
Cat-MoD: Accelerating Multimodal Alignment via Caption Token Guided Asymmetric Mixture-of-Depths (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing query-based alignment modules enforce uniform cross-attention across all layers, leading to computational redundancy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for asynchronous query-based alignment with large-scale visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or surpasses baseline performance while reducing alignment FLOPs by approximately 37% during training and inference. |
SAVOIR: Learning Social Savoir-Faire via Shapley-based Reward Attribution (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiachong Feng, Yi Jiang, Xiaocheng Feng, Deyi Yin, Libo Qin, Yangfan Ye, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Chonghan Qin, Bing Qin, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve social intelligence of AI systems employ retrospective attributions and lack theoretical grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses Shapley values to ensure fair credit distribution with axiomatic guarantees of efficiency, symmetry, and marginality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or exceeds proprietary models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. |
ERNIE-Layout: Layout Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Qiming Peng, Yinxu Pan, Wenjin Wang, Bin Luo, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhengjie Huang, Yuhui Cao, Weichong Yin, Yongfeng Chen, Yin Zhang, Shikun Feng, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visually rich document understanding lack layout-centered knowledge . experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout improves layout awareness . |
| Approach: | They propose a document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on key downstream tasks. |
Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Feng, Shu Wei, Xiang Fei, Wei Shi, Yingdong Han, Lei Liao, Jinghui Lu, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Chunhui Lin, Jingqun Tang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Current document image parsing solutions rely on specialized models or generate content autoregressively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal document image parsing model that integrates specialized models with autogeneous content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings while ensuring superior efficiency. |
HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns (2026.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Jian Yang, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xie, Jen-tse Huang, Jun Gao, Shuai Huang, Yueping Kang, Yuanli Guo, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats psychological patterns as interacting causal forces and synthesizes 113 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4 fewer parameters. |
LAiW: A Chinese Legal Large Language Models Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
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Yongfu Dai, Duanyu Feng, Jimin Huang, Haochen Jia, Qianqian Xie, Yifang Zhang, Weiguang Han, Wei Tian, Hao Wang
| Challenge: | Xie et al., 2023) show that large language models (LLMs) can generate legal text, but lack the legal syllogism . legal experts are cautious about their practical application due to the opaque nature of the LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese legal LLM benchmark structured around the legal syllogism . they evaluate LLMs across three levels of capability, each reflecting a more complex stage of legal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark identifies that LLMs lack the legal syllogism, which hinders trust and understanding from legal experts. |
FroM: Frobenius Norm-Based Data-Free Adaptive Model Merging (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new adaptive merging method is proposed to improve fine-tuning performance . traditional methods often encounter task interference when merging full fine-uning models . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive merging method that directly measures model parameters using the Frobenius norm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods in various fine-tuning scenarios. |
Thinking Alignment of Scenario-Oriented User Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing user simulators based on prompting to role-play or SFT focus on imitating textual utterances without considering multi-faceted cognitive processes that underlie human decision-making during interactions. |
| Approach: | They construct a user-simulator dataset that augments 51k human–LLM conversations by reconstructing the user’s inner reasoning during and at the end of each dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed user simulators augment 51k human–LLM conversations by reconstructing the user’s inner reasoning both during and at the end of each dialogue. |
Improving Contextual Faithfulness of Large Language Models via Retrieval Heads-Induced Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Yuchun Fan, Xiachong Feng, Yangfan Ye, Weihong Zhong, Yuxuan Gu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) are lacking in LFQA faithfulness testing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to teach retrieval-augmented large language models to explicitly discriminate between faithful and unfaithful generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GPT-4o in LFQA scenarios and outperformed existing benchmarks. |
Crab: A Novel Configurable Role-Playing LLM with Assessing Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Kai He, Yucheng Huang, Wenqing Wang, Delong Ran, Dongming Sheng, Junxuan Huang, Qika Lin, Jiaxing Xu, Wenqiang Liu, Mengling Feng
| Challenge: | Existing RP-LLMs employ only a single role with numerous dialogues, but Crab enables dynamic configuration of desired roles, thereby enhancing related flexibility and adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a Configurable Role-Playing LLM with Assessing Benchmark that combines a Role dataset curation, persona-emodying Llm construction, and comprehensive benchmark creation for RP dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing LLMs in performing fine-grained evaluations of RP while keeping dialogue per role minimal. |
Improving the Robustness of Deep Reading Comprehension Models by Leveraging Syntax Prior (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that the current machine reading comprehension systems suffer from weak robustness against adversarial samples. |
| Approach: | They propose to take sentence syntax as the leverage in the answer predicting process and exploit the syntactic elements of a question to improve the generalization and robustness of MRC models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization and robustness against adversarial samples, with performance well-maintained. |
Lattice-BERT: Leveraging Multi-Granularity Representations in Chinese Pre-trained Language Models (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models process text as a sequence of characters, ignoring more coarse granularity, e.g., words. |
| Approach: | They propose a new pre-training paradigm for Chinese that incorporates word representations along with characters and can model a sentence in a multi-granular manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can bring an average increase of 1.5% under the 12-layer setting, which achieves new state-of-the-art among base-size models on the CLUE benchmarks. |
MathFlow: Enhancing the Perceptual Flow of MLLMs for Visual Mathematical Problems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit significant limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that provides a fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs’ perception and reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing MLLMs exhibit limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. |