Papers by Feng Xiao

SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for intent classification fail to distinguish new intents due to intertwined centers . a novel framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents is proposed .
Approach:	They propose a new intent discovery framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarking datasets.

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Wei Shi, Shuang Li, Kerun Yu, Jinglei Chen, Zujie Liang, Xinhui Wu, Yuxi Qian, Feng Wei, Bo Zheng, Jiaqing Liang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao

SKEP: Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks.
Approach:	They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently.
Outcome:	The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks.

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Hao Tian, Can Gao, Xinyan Xiao, Hao Liu, Bolei He, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Feng Wu

TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)

Challenge:	sentiment knowledge is ignored in sentiment analysis, despite its use in pretraining.
Approach:	They propose to use sentiment knowledge to learn a unified sentiment representation for multiple sentiment analysis tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms strong pre-training baseline on three kinds of sentiment tasks.

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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi

GAPO: Learning Preferential Prompt through Generative Adversarial Policy Optimization (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications.
Approach:	They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities.
Outcome:	The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions.

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Zhouhong Gu, Xingzhou Chen, Xiaoran Shi, Tao Wang, Suhang Zheng, Tianyu Li, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for achieving this require a limited understanding of constraints and can be hallucinating or brittle.
Approach:	They propose a framework that combines adversarial training dynamics with an encoder-only reward model to progressively learn and adapt to increasingly complex constraints.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that GAPO significantly outperforms existing methods like PPO, DPO, and KTO in fine-grained constraints.

Unlocking Memorization in Large Language Models with Dynamic Soft Prompting (2024.emnlp-main)

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Zhepeng Wang, Runxue Bao, Yawen Wu, Jackson Taylor, Cao Xiao, Feng Zheng, Weiwen Jiang, Shangqian Gao, Yanfu Zhang

Stumbling Blocks: Stress Testing the Robustness of Machine-Generated Text Detectors Under Attacks (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Pretrained large language models excel in a variety of natural language processing tasks . however, they pose significant security risks due to their tendency to memorize training data .
Approach:	They propose a method to estimate LLM memorization using dynamic, prefix-dependent soft prompts.
Outcome:	The proposed method can achieve maximum relative improvement of 135.3% and 39.8% over baseline compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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Yichen Wang, Shangbin Feng, Abe Hou, Xiao Pu, Chao Shen, Xiaoming Liu, Yulia Tsvetkov, Tianxing He

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing studies on this topic focus on the robustness of specific detectors or particular attack methods.
Approach:	They stress test the detectors’ robustness to malicious attacks under realistic scenarios using LLMs and metric-based detectors.
Outcome:	The proposed methods are based on a set of LLM-based models and their performance is compared under different budget levels.

How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)

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Chen Zhang, Jiuheng Lin, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Lai, Yansong Feng, Dongyan Zhao

CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Despite recent progress in multi-answer MRC, there is no systematic analysis of how this phenomenon arises and how to better address it.
Approach:	They develop a taxonomy to categorize commonly-seen multi-answer MRC instances and examine how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced questions.
Outcome:	The proposed taxonomy categorizes commonly-seen multi-answer instances and analyzes how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced instances.

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Nianqi Li, Jingping Liu, Sihang Jiang, Haiyun Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Jiaqing Liang, Zujie Liang, Feng Wei, Jinglei Chen, Zhenghong Hao, Bing Han

A Two-Stage Framework with Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Domain Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing concept reasoning related datasets suffer from modeledge leakage and context leakage.
Approach:	They propose a concept reasoning for large language models with modeledge leakage prevention and context leakage preventive methods to improve the models' conceptual reasoning abilities.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves the existing models and reasoning methods, achieving a 7% increase in accuracy compared to CoT and showing better granularity.

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Yunlong Feng, Bohan Li, Libo Qin, Xiao Xu, Wanxiang Che

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing work on cross-domain text classification relies on domain-invariant features or task-agnostic features.
Approach:	They propose a two-stage framework for cross-domain text classification that leverages or reuses rich labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data in the target domain.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on a public cross-domain text classification benchmark.

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

EvolvR: Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning for Story Evaluation to Enhance Generation (2026.acl-long)

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.

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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao

Beyond Decoder-only: Large Language Models Can be Good Encoders for Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for story evaluation lack reasoning capabilities for open-source models . evolvR framework provides high-fidelity evaluators for story generation tasks .
Approach:	They propose a framework that self-synthesizes chain-of-thought data via a multi-persona strategy . they propose evolvR to provide a reward model for story generation .
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three evaluation benchmarks . it also enhances the quality of generated stories, validating the superiority of the framework .

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Yingfeng Luo, Tong Zheng, Yongyu Mu, Bei Li, Qinghong Zhang, Yongqi Gao, Ziqiang Xu, Peinan Feng, Xiaoqian Liu, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu

Past Meets Present: Creating Historical Analogy with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances in machine translation have focused on a single pre-trained decoder . encoder-decoder architectures have received relatively little attention in NMT .
Approach:	They propose a method that leverages LLMs as MT encoders and pairs them with lightweight decoders to develop universal translation models.
Outcome:	The proposed method matches or surpasses baselines in terms of translation quality but achieves 75% reduction in memory footprint of the KV cache.

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Nianqi Li, Siyu Yuan, Jiangjie Chen, Jiaqing Liang, Feng Wei, Zujie Liang, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao

AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Historical analogies are important abilities that help people make decisions and understand the world.
Approach:	They propose a historical analogy acquisition task that uses large language models to acquire historical analogies.
Outcome:	The proposed method mitigates hallucinations and stereotypes when LLMs generate historical analogies.

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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

Token-level Inference-Time Alignment for Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Kejia Chen, Junjun Zheng, Jiawen Zhang, Manxi Lin, Xiao Pan, Jiacong Hu, Jian Lou, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song

LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often prioritize linguistic fluency over visual fidelity . despite widespread adoption, VLMs often exhibit a critical failure mode: hallucination .
Approach:	They propose a framework for Token-level Inference-Time Alignment that steers the decoding process without updating the base model parameters.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves performance on 13 benchmarks across architectures . it boosts LLaVA-1.5-7B by 8.6% on MMVet and achieves a 74.0 MMStar score .

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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang

Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring.

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Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, JingBo Zhu

Alleviating Hallucinations from Knowledge Misalignment in Large Language Models via Selective Abstention Learning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages.
Approach:	They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction.
Outcome:	The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning.

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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

HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)

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.

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Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li

OpenSLU: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Toolkit for Spoken Language Understanding (2023.acl-demo)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases.
Approach:	They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from ChatGPT and real-world data fromdoctors in the supervised fine-tuning stage.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources.

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Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Xiao Xu, Yunlong Feng, Wanxiang Che

CASA: Causality-driven Argument Sufficiency Assessment (2024.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a task-oriented dialogue system . open-source toolkit provides a unified, modularized, and extensible toolkit for SLU .
Approach:	They introduce an open-source toolkit to provide a unified toolkit for spoken language understanding.
Outcome:	The proposed toolkit unifies 10 models for both single-intent and multi-intention scenarios.

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Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng, Kai-Wei Chang

Challenge:	Existing methods to assess the sufficiency of arguments are laborious and inconsistent due to subjective criteria.
Approach:	They propose a causality-driven argument sufficiency assessment framework that uses the probability of sufficience to estimate the probability that a premise event would lead to a conclusion when both premise and conclusion events are absent.
Outcome:	The proposed framework identifies insufficient arguments and improves them in a writing aid application.

Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)

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Chen Xu, Bojie Hu, Yufan Jiang, Kai Feng, Zeyang Wang, Shen Huang, Qi Ju, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

Text Generation

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.

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.

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

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

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

MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)

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.

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Jifan Yu, Gan Luo, Tong Xiao, Qingyang Zhong, Yuquan Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Junyi Luo, Chenyu Wang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang

Everything Has a Cause: Leveraging Causal Inference in Legal Text Analysis (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research.
Approach:	They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource.
Outcome:	The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs.

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Xiao Liu, Da Yin, Yansong Feng, Yuting Wu, Dongyan Zhao

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on analyzing structured data, while mining causal relationship among factors from unstructured data is of great importance.
Approach:	They propose a graph-based causal inference framework which builds causal graphs from fact descriptions without much human involvement.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can capture nuance from fact descriptions among confusing charges and provide explainable discrimination in few-shot settings.

Counterfactual Recipe Generation: Exploring Compositional Generalization in a Realistic Scenario (2022.emnlp-main)

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Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng, Jizhi Tang, Chengang Hu, Dongyan Zhao

The Magic of IF: Investigating Causal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models of Code (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing models fail to learn and use culinary knowledge in a compositional way, argues a new study.
Approach:	They propose a task that asks models to modify a base recipe according to the change of an ingredient.
Outcome:	The proposed model can perform compositional generalization in a realistic setting . existing models have difficulties in modifying ingredients while preserving original style .

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Xiao Liu, Da Yin, Chen Zhang, Yansong Feng, Dongyan Zhao

Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	entailment a)
Approach:	entailment : We want to explore whether Code-LLMs with code prompts are better . encoding a code prompt is better than text-only LLMs, they say .
Outcome:	entailment : Our results show that Code-LLMs with code prompts are better compared to text-only LLMs.

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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao

Pre-training Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Alignment Information (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent work on unsupervised reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning using confidence-based endogenous rewards focuses on open-ended text generation, requiring either annotated data or powerful closed-source models.
Approach:	They propose a method that rewards the relative information gain between a specialist and a generalist reference policy, modulated by a probability-dependent correction mechanism.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on multiple writing benchmarks and model architectures without external supervision and validates generality across different generation tasks.

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Zehui Lin, Xiao Pan, Mingxuan Wang, Xipeng Qiu, Jiangtao Feng, Hao Zhou, Lei Li

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Existing pre-training methods are not effective for machine translation tasks.
Approach:	They propose a method to pre-train a universal multilingual neural machine translation model . they use random aligned substitution technique to bring words and phrases with similar meanings closer in the representation space.
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves translation quality on low, medium, rich resource languages.

Recipe2Plan: Evaluating Planning Abilities of LLMs for Efficient and Feasible Multitasking with Time Constraints Between Actions (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Zirui Wu, Xiao Liu, Jiayi Li, Lingpeng Kong, Yansong Feng

Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on single task performance, ignoring multitask planning and execution efficiency.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark framework based on real-world cooking scenarios . recipe2plan challenges agents to optimize cooking time through parallel task execution .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks highlight the need for improved temporal awareness and global multitasking capabilities in large language models.

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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che

Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits.
Approach:	They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task.
Outcome:	The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists.

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Yongxin Xu, Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Yujie Feng, Yuzhen Xiao, Xinyu Ma, Runchuan Zhu, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang

AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for integrating internal and external knowledge lack effective control mechanisms for generating hallucinations and dealing with outdated knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness.
Outcome:	The proposed framework decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness.

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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

Read it in Two Steps: Translating Extremely Low-Resource Languages with Code-Augmented Grammar Books (2025.acl-long)

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.

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Chen Zhang, Jiuheng Lin, Xiao Liu, Zekai Zhang, Yansong Feng

Text Generation

Challenge:	Using code rules improves rule retrieval and application of grammar books in low-resource languages.
Approach:	They propose to decompose a grammar rule retrieval and application step into two steps . they propose to represent grammar rules as code functions to facilitate LLM reasoning .
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly boosts rule retrieval and application, resulting in 13.1% BLEU improvement.

Self-Constructed Context Decompilation with Fined-grained Alignment Enhancement (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Yunlong Feng, Dechuan Teng, Yang Xu, Honglin Mu, Xiao Xu, Libo Qin, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che

SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Decompilation is the process of converting compiled code back into a high-level programming language for analysis when source code is unavailable.
Approach:	They propose two methods to improve decompilation performance without fine-tuning and fine-grained alignment enhancement to achieve further improvements.
Outcome:	The proposed methods achieved a Re-Executability performance improvement of approximately 3.90% on the Decompile-Eval benchmark, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance of 52.41%.

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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang

Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases.
Approach:	They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs.

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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

Neighborhood Matching Network for Entity Alignment (2020.acl-main)

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.

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Yuting Wu, Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng, Zheng Wang, Dongyan Zhao

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Structural heterogeneity between knowledge graphs is an outstanding challenge for entity alignment.
Approach:	They propose a framework for entity alignment that uses a neighborhood matching module to combine neighborhood differences.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on three datasets.

Language-Specific Layer Matters: Efficient Multilingual Enhancement for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Yuchun Fan, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Lei Huang, Bei Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu

RouterHGC: Optimized Router for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems via Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Yitao Xiao, Shaoyong Guo, Guoming Yang, Qingnan Wang, Yinlin Ren, Xuesong Qiu, Qi Feng

BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs)-driven Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable scalability and generalizability across complex tasks.
Approach:	They propose a new framework for routing using large language models . they formalize routing as node selection through edge-weight prediction .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms the best single LLM and baselines on five datasets . it achieves 0.80%–6.17% accuracy gains on MATH and HotpotQA while reducing inference cost by 27.40%.

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Ran Xin, Chenguang Xi, Jie Yang, Feng Chen, Hang Wu, Xia Xiao, Yifan Sun, Shen Zheng, Ming Ding

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored.
Approach:	They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods.

FedCSR: A Federated Framework for Multi-Platform Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation with Dual Contrastive Learning (2025.coling-main)

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Dongyi Zheng, Hongyu Zhang, Jianyang Zhai, Lin Zhong, Lingzhi Wang, Jiyuan Feng, Xiangke Liao, Yonghong Tian, Nong Xiao, Qing Liao

LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset (2022.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing federated frameworks for cross-domain sequential recommendation rely on user alignment, which increases communication costs and privacy risks.
Approach:	They propose a federated cross-domain sequential recommendation framework that eliminates the need for user alignment between platforms.
Outcome:	The proposed framework eliminates the need for user alignment between platforms.

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Feng Yao, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Cunchao Tu, Juanzi Li, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, Maosong Sun

MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing legal event detection datasets only cover incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data.
Approach:	They present a large-scale Chinese legal event detection dataset . they use legal events as side information to promote downstream applications .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction and 1.5 points precision for unsupervised case retrieval.

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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities.
Approach:	They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark.
Outcome:	The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark.

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

SPS: Steering Probability Squeezing for Better Exploration in Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Yifu Huo, Chenglong Wang, Ziming Zhu, Shunjie Xing, Peinan Feng, Tongran Liu, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao

CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Reinforcement learning (RL) training typically improves single-sample success rates but limited exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories.
Approach:	They propose a training paradigm that interleaves conventional RL with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) they propose 'Steering Probability Squeezing' to enhance exploration without external supervision .
Outcome:	The proposed training paradigm improves Pass@k and improves exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories without external supervision.

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Xidong Wang, Guiming Chen, Song Dingjie, Zhang Zhiyi, Zhihong Chen, Qingying Xiao, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li

StrucText-Eval: Evaluating Large Language Model’s Reasoning Ability in Structure-Rich Text (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great breakthrough in medicine, says a new study . existing studies on LLMs leverage subjective evaluation, but evaluation in medicine is professional .
Approach:	They propose a localized medical benchmark in Chinese rooted in native Chinese . they propose to use traditional Chinese medicine to evaluate large-scale LLMs .
Outcome:	a new benchmark is developed to evaluate large-scale LLMs in china . the proposed model is rooted in the native Chinese linguistic and cultural framework .

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Zhouhong Gu, Haoning Ye, Xingzhou Chen, Zeyang Zhou, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao

Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Structured data has been central to corporate data strategies for decades . however, with the advancement of large language models (LLMs), there has been a significant shift towards the effective utilization of unstructured data.
Approach:	They propose an automatic evaluation data generation method to assess LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on structure-rich text.
Outcome:	The proposed method supports 8 structured languages and 29 tasks, generating data with adjustable complexity through controllable nesting and structural width.

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Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Xiaochi Wei, Ge Shi, Xiao Liu, Chong Feng, Tong Zhou, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin

SWING: Balancing Coverage and Faithfulness for Dialogue Summarization (2023.findings-eacl)

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.

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Kung-Hsiang Huang, Siffi Singh, Xiaofei Ma, Wei Xiao, Feng Nan, Nicholas Dingwall, William Yang Wang, Kathleen McKeown

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

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.

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

MultiLingPoT: Boosting Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs through Multilingual Program Integration (2025.findings-emnlp)

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.

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Nianqi Li, Zujie Liang, Siyu Yuan, Jiaqing Liang, Feng Wei, Yanghua Xiao

Teaching Large Language Models an Unseen Language on the Fly (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Program-of-Thought is an important way for LLMs to solve mathematical problems.
Approach:	They propose a multilingual programme reasoning method that uses program instead of natural language in reasoning and proposes to integrate multilingual integration into the training and inference.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves individual language’s reasoning accuracy by 2.5% and improves performance by 8%.

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Chen Zhang, Xiao Liu, Jiuheng Lin, Yansong Feng

Jointly Learning Entity and Relation Representations for Entity Alignment (D19-1)

Challenge:	Existing large language models struggle to support numerous low-resource languages . Existing models lack sufficient training data for effective parameter updating .
Approach:	They propose a framework for adapting LLMs to unseen languages by in-context learning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves Chinese-to-Zhuang translation performance and Zhuan-to Chinese translation performance.

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Yuting Wu, Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng, Zheng Wang, Dongyan Zhao

NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Entity alignment is a viable method for integrating heterogeneous knowledge among different knowledge graphs (KGs).
Approach:	They propose a Graph Convolutional Network-based framework for learning relation representations by embedding relation seeds into entities and incorporating relation approximation into entities to iteratively improve alignment.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three real-world cross-lingual datasets.

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Yingfeng Luo, Ziqiang Xu, Yuxuan Ouyang, MuRun Yang, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Tong Zheng, Bei Li, Peinan Feng, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) yet scaling to many languages while maintaining robust performance across directions remains challenging.
Approach:	They propose a strategy to reduce the number of translations in one direction . they propose auxiliary parallel sentences to promote cross-lingual transfer .
Outcome:	The proposed model performs on par with or better than substantially larger baselines.

Things not Written in Text: Exploring Spatial Commonsense from Visual Signals (2022.acl-long)

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Xiao Liu, Da Yin, Yansong Feng, Dongyan Zhao

Align-smatch: A Novel Evaluation Method for Chinese Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing based on Alignment of Concept and Relation (2022.lrec-1)

Challenge:	Pretrained language models fail in many NLP tasks, but are ineffective in spatial commonsense reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a spatial commonsense benchmark that focuses on relative scales of objects and the positional relationship between people and objects under different actions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms pretrained models in answering spatial questions.

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Liming Xiao, Bin Li, Zhixing Xu, Kairui Huo, Minxuan Feng, Junsheng Zhou, Weiguang Qu

Outcome-Grounded Advantage Reshaping for Fine-Grained Credit Assignment in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Abstract Meaning Representation abstracts the meaning of sentences into a single-rooted, acyclic and directed graph.
Approach:	They propose to use a metric to evaluate concept alignment and relation alignment to improve Chinese AMR parsing evaluation methods.
Outcome:	The proposed method is more robust and compatible with concept alignment and relation alignment and more robust in evaluating arcs.

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Ziheng Li, Liu Kang, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing, Qingyi Si, Zhuoran Li, Weikang Gong, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao, Hongcheng Guo

Are LLMs Capable of Data-based Statistical and Causal Reasoning? Benchmarking Advanced Quantitative Reasoning with Data (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) uses a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level rewards uniformly to to every token in a sequence, neglecting the varying contribution of individual reasoning steps.
Approach:	They introduce Outcome-grounded Advantage Reshaping (OAR) which redistributes advantages based on how much each token influences the model’s final answer.
Outcome:	Empirical results show that OAR-G outperforms GRPO on a high-fidelity attribution signal and suppresses low-impact tokens while preserving the advantage mass.

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Xiao Liu, Zirui Wu, Xueqing Wu, Pan Lu, Kai-Wei Chang, Yansong Feng

HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Quantitative reasoning with data is a critical skill to analyze data, yet the assessment of such ability remains limited.
Approach:	They propose a quantitative reasoning with data benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' ability in statistical and causal reasoning with real-world data.
Outcome:	The proposed model GPT-4 achieves an accuracy of 58%, while open-source model Deepseek-coder-instruct gets the highest accuracy of 37%.

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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

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

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.

Ensuring Readability and Data-fidelity using Head-modifier Templates in Deep Type Description Generation (P19-1)

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Jiangjie Chen, Ao Wang, Haiyun Jiang, Suo Feng, Chenguang Li, Yanghua Xiao

Challenge:	Existing generative methods overlook grammatical structure or make factual mistakes in generated texts.
Approach:	They propose a template-based method to ensure the readability of generated type descriptions . they also propose measurable metrics to measure the readibility of the generated type description .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves substantially compared with baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.

Knowledge-guided Open Attribute Value Extraction with Reinforcement Learning (2020.emnlp-main)

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Ye Liu, Sheng Zhang, Rui Song, Suo Feng, Yanghua Xiao

DiNeR: A Large Realistic Dataset for Evaluating Compositional Generalization (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for open attribute value extraction for emerging entities are noisy or incomplete, even missing.
Approach:	They propose a knowledge-guided reinforcement learning framework for open attribute value extraction for emerging entities.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines by 16.5 - 27.8%.

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Chengang Hu, Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng

Generation Meets Verification: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Smart Parallel Auto-Correct Decoding (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing compositional generalization datasets lack natural language variation due to limited data scale or lack of diversity.
Approach:	They propose a compositional generalization task to evaluate natural language understanding ability under compositional settings.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the plain seq2seq trained version by a large margin . it uses two strong baseline methods and large language models to tackle the task .

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Hanling Yi, Feng Lin, Hongbin Li, Ning Peiyang, Xiaotian Yu, Rong Xiao

Flow-Based Page Unique Semantic Mapping Architecture for Document Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing autoregressive models generate tokens sequentially and are memory-bound, resulting in a memory-based inference stage that is memory-limited.
Approach:	They propose an approach to accelerate the inference speed of large language models with billions of parameters by integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities.
Outcome:	The proposed approach has demonstrated inference speedups of 2.7x-4.0x on humanEval-X while maintaining output quality.

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Haosen Wang, Jing Xiao, Chaochao Du, Xiaowang Zhang, Zhiyong Feng