Papers by Feng Xu
Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer via Self-Learning with Uncertainty Estimation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance . we propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages to select silver labels for cross-lingual transfer tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two cross-lingual tasks by 10 F1 on average and 2.5 accuracy on natural language inference (NLI). |
Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Weight Sharing (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) is a new approach for machine translation . the model uses only one shared encoder to map pairs of sentences from different languages to a shared-latent space . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach which trains the model without labeling data . they propose two independent encoders but share some partial weights to extract high-level representations of input sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements on English-German, English-French and Chinese-to-English translation tasks. |
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
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. |
Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey (2025.acl-long)
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Yiyan Xu, Jinghao Zhang, Alireza Salemi, Xinting Hu, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Hamed Zamani, Xiangnan He, Tat-Seng Chua
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large generative models have catalyzed a paradigm shift in content generation to Personalized Generation (PGen). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level taxonomy that systematically formalizes PGen's key components, core objectives, and abstract workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy bridging PGen research across multiple modalities highlights open challenges and promising directions for future exploration. |
I-MCTS: Enhancing Agentic AutoML via Introspective Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents struggle with low diversity and suboptimal code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that iteratively expands tree nodes through an introspective process that meticulously analyzes solutions and results from parent and sibling nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows a 4% improvement in performance compared to the strong open-source AutoML agents. |
Building a Macro Chinese Discourse Treebank (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Discourse structure analysis is an important research topic in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a macro discourse structure framework and annotate 147 Newswire articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can lay the foundation for further analysis of macro discourse structure. |
CLHA: A Simple Yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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Feiteng Fang, Liang Zhu, Xi Feng, Jinchang Hou, Qixuan Zhao, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention from academic and industrial communities due to their outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment to evaluate the noise within the data and dynamically adjust the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses other algorithms in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used dataset "Helpful and Harmless" |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
GlobeSumm: A Challenging Benchmark Towards Unifying Multi-lingual, Cross-lingual and Multi-document News Summarization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yangfan Ye, Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Libo Qin, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Current studies focus on single-language or single-document tasks for news summarization . lack of a benchmark inhibits researchers from adequately studying this invaluable problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that unifies Multi-lingual, Cross-lingual and Multi-document Summarization into one task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task encapsulates the real-world requirements all-in-one and is validated by extensive analysis. |
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Yujie Feng, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Xu Chu, Zhaolu Kang, Yiran Liu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
Zero-shot Text Classification via Reinforced Self-training (2020.acl-main)
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Zhiquan Ye, Yuxia Geng, Jiaoyan Chen, Jingmin Chen, Xiaoxiao Xu, SuHang Zheng, Feng Wang, Jun Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn from unlabeled data are difficult for zero-shot text classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training based method to efficiently leverage unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot text classification tasks on benchmarks and a real-world e-commerce dataset. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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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
| 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. |
Beyond Linguistic Cues: Fine-grained Conversational Emotion Recognition via Belief-Desire Modelling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is essential for dialogue systems to identify the emotions expressed by speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates both belief and desire to accurately identify emotions by extracting emotion-eliciting events from utterances and construct graphs that represent beliefs and desires in conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on four popular ERC datasets and validates its performance with multiple state-of-the-art models. |
AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videos (2026.findings-acl)
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Chaoyang Wang, Kaituo Feng, Dongyang Chen, Zhongyu Wang, Zhixun Li, Sicheng Gao, Meng Meng, Xu Zhou, Manyuan Zhang, Yuzhang Shang, Xiangyu Yue
| Challenge: | Existing models exhibit blind tool-use reasoning patterns, which significantly increases inference overhead and degrades model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an MLLM that performs adaptive tool-use by determining whether a visual problem truly requires tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in visual reasoning tasks. |
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. |
Can Language Models Serve as Temporal Knowledge Bases? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have only considered language models as knowledge bases in a static setting . memorizing conflicting information is still challenging for LMs and hinders memorization of other unrelated one-to-one relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose two requirements for treating language models as temporal knowledge bases . they propose a dataset which is aimed at probing temporally-scoped knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can store conflicting information and use stored knowledge for temporal knowledge queries. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
PairCFR: Enhancing Model Training on Paired Counterfactually Augmented Data through Contrastive Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that training with CAD may lead models to overly focus on modified features while ignoring other important contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contrastive learning to promote global feature alignment and learning counterfactual clues to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on out-of distribution (OOD) datasets. |
Language Models can be Deductive Solvers (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to potentially exhibit reasoning capabilities, but complex logical reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel language model that internalizes and emulates the reasoning processes of logical solvers and avoids parsing errors by learning strict adherence to solver syntax and grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art solver-augmented language models and few-shot prompting methods on public deductive reasoning benchmarks. |
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. |
SQL-to-Text Generation with Graph-to-Sequence Model (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate SQL-to-text using seq2seq models do not capture graph-structured information in SQL query. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-to-sequence model to encode global structure information into node embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the Seq2Seq and Tree2Sq baselines on the WikiSQL and Stackoverflow datasets. |
Mitigating Over-Generation for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction with Heterogeneous Centrality Detection (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction models incorrectly determine a keyphrase as a phrase but output other candidates as keyphrases because they contain the same word. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that detects both implicit and explicit centrality within a heterogeneous graph as the importance score of each candidate keyphrase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction models on three benchmark datasets. |
A Two-Stage Framework with Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Domain Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| 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. |
Equipping Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Document Structure Awareness (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval-augmented generation ignore valuable structure that is crucial for document organization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly incorporates structural information throughout the RAG process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates structural information throughout the RAG process. |
MedForge: Interpretable Medical Deepfake Detection via Forgery-aware Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses against forgery are inadequate for healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark for pre-hoc, evidence-grounded medical forgery detection using a doctor inspection guideline and gold edit locations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed solution can detect and explain medical scans with high fidelity and accuracy. |
KAPA: A Deliberative Agent Framework with Tree-Structured Knowledge Base for Multi-Domain User Intent Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiakai Tang, Shiqi Shen, ZhipengWang ZhipengWang, Gong Zhi, Xueyang Feng, Zexu Sun, Haoran Tan, Xu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on the use of LLMs for estimating user intents are either too far from real human thought processes or require labeled samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative agent framework that leverages human thought process to build high-level domain knowledge and a tree-structured knowledge base to store refined experience and data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to build high-level domain knowledge and efficiently store it across multiple steps. |
Can Multi-agent Help Disambiguation in Multi-domain Translation? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent systems have shown strong potential for machine translation (MT) but their performance in multidomain translation remains unsatisfactory due to cross-domain word ambiguity . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaborative disambiguation framework for MDT that leverages the collaborative capabilities of LLMs for disambiguations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation performance across multiple domains and improves disambiguation accuracy. |
Beyond Decoder-only: Large Language Models Can be Good Encoders for Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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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
| 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. |
Why Do More Experts Fail? A Theoretical Analysis of Model Merging (2026.acl-long)
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Zijing Wang, Xingle Xu, YongKang Liu, Yiqun Zhang, Peiqin Lin, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Existing methods for model merging struggle to maintain performance gains as the number of merged models increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reparameterized Heavy-Tailed method to extend the merged model’s coverage and enhance performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extends the merged model’s coverage and enhances performance on 19 benchmarks, including knowledge-intensive and general-purpose tasks. |
Large Language Model-based Human-Agent Collaboration for Complex Task Solving (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to the development of LLM-based autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Human-Agent Collaboration method which trains a policy model to determine the most opportune stages for human intervention within the task-solving process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves human-agent collaboration significantly through well-planned, limited human intervention. |
Teaching Large Language Models Number-Focused Headline Generation With Key Element Rationales (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus only on textual quality and numerical accuracy for headline generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for using rationales of key elements of Topic, Entities, and Numerical reasoning in news articles to enhance LLMs' ability to generate topic-aligned texts with precise numerical accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the ability of large language models to generate high-quality texts with precise numerical accuracy. |
TaoType: Predicting Fine-Grained Typing Intent for Faster Search (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale industrial ranking systems operate under stringent real-time performance requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a client-side framework that determines whether a user’s query is complete at each typing . this method leverages client-based typing behavior for real-time early prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves offline precision/recall/accuracy of 0.7936/0.8196/0.7742 and decreases online response time by 640.5193.65 milliseconds. |
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. |
MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MMDialog is a dataset of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a curated set of 1.08 million dialogues with 1.53 million unique images to generalize the open domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can predict responses to multi-modal content with state-of-the-art techniques and measure their performance. |
RAAMove: A Corpus for Analyzing Moves in Research Article Abstracts (2024.lrec-main)
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Hongzheng Li, Ruojin Wang, Ge Shi, Xing Lv, Lei Lei, Chong Feng, Fang Liu, Jinkun Lin, Yangguang Mei, Linnan Xu
| Challenge: | RAAMove is a comprehensive multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in Research Article (RA) abstracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in RA abstracts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a human-annotated dataset and a BERT-based model to verify its effectiveness. |
UniCOQE: Unified Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction As A Set (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods decompose the COQE task into multiple subtasks and solve them in a pipeline manner, but ignore the intrinsic connection between subtask and the error propagation among stages. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified generative model that solves COQE in one shot by concatenating all the comparative tuples into a target output sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms the SOTA method on multiple benchmarks and ablation experiments. |
Synergistic Interplay between Search and Large Language Models for Information Retrieval (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Information retrieval (IR) is an indispensable technique for locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates information refinement through synergy between RMs and LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of large-scale retrieval benchmarks on web searches and low-resource retrieval tasks. |
IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Aosong Feng, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Yun Zhou, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Yueyan Chen, Xian Wu, Ninad Kulkarni, Yi Zhang, Zhengyuan Shen, Dmitriy Bespalov, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Yifei Teng, Darren Yow-Bang Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing systems require users to manually select models or employ rigid routing rules that fail to capture the continuous spectrum of query complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-constrained intelligent prompt routing framework that automatically selects optimal models based on predicted response quality and user-specified tolerance levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 43.9% cost reduction while maintaining quality parity with strongest model in the Claude family and processes requests with sub-150ms latency. |
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. |
MUSTIE: Multimodal Structural Transformer for Web Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Shaoliang Nie, Sinong Wang, Madian Khabsa, Hamed Firooz, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Recent sequential modeling approaches focus on extracting information from textual sources while ignoring rich information from other modalities such as image and web layout. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel MUltimodal Structural Transformer that integrates multiple modalities for web information extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on WebSRC and Common Crawl benchmarks. |
Data Contamination Can Cross Language Barriers (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect contamination of public benchmarks are too superficial to reflect deeper forms of contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose generalization-based approaches to unmask a cross-lingual form of contamination that inflates LLMs’ performance while evading current detection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing detection methods while avoiding contamination of public benchmarks in the pre-training data. |
OpenSLU: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Toolkit for Spoken Language Understanding (2023.acl-demo)
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| 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. |
MCDTB: A Macro-level Chinese Discourse TreeBank (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Discourse analysis is becoming increasingly important in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate macro discourse information and additional discourse information to make annotation more objective and accurate. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the annotations are more objective and accurate than the previous ones. |
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. |
Beyond Static Evaluation: A Dynamic Approach to Assessing AI Assistants’ API Invocation Capabilities (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for human-machine interactions are static and can be misleading. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a LLM-based user agent to assess an assistant's API call capability without human involvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mirrors real human conversation patterns in human-machine interactions, and shows that it aligns more closely with human assessment. |
Answering Narrative-Driven Recommendation Queries via a Retrieve–Rank Paradigm and the OCG-Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate narrative-driven recommendation are based on large language models (LLMs) but the RAG paradigm is inherently ill-suited for such special queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel retrieve-rank paradigm that generatively retrieves structurally adaptive and semantically aligned candidates, ensuring both extensive candidate coverage and high-quality information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms the existing paradigm and the existing one under real-world scenarios. |
MoLAN: A Unified Modality-Aware Noise Dynamic Editing Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal sentiment analysis treat entire modality as an independent unit for feature enhancement or denoising, which often suppresses redundant noise at the cost of weakening critical information. |
| Approach: | They propose a ModaLity-aware noise dynAmic editiNg framework that performs modality-awful block partitioning by dividing features of each modality into multiple blocks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five models and four datasets show that MoLAN+ achieves the state-of-the-art performance. |
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent code large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that learns from expert battles to address these limitations . they create an arena where leading LLMs challenge each other with evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by leveraging expert battles . it achieves state-of-the-art performance even without relying on proprietary models . |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Recurrent Knowledge Identification and Fusion for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yujie Feng, Xujia Wang, Zexin Lu, Shenghong Fu, Guangyuan Shi, Yongxin Xu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) is crucial for large language models without costly retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for recurrent knowledge identification and fusion that enables dynamic estimation of parameter importance distributions to enhance knowledge transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enhances knowledge transfer. |
Stealthy Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Benign Data Mirroring (2025.naacl-long)
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Honglin Mu, Han He, Yuxin Zhou, Yunlong Feng, Yang Xu, Libo Qin, Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Xudong Han, Qi Shi, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing black-box jailbreak methods often rely on model feedback . existing methods may be intercepted by content moderators during the search process . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that guides malicious prompt construction by local training a mirror model of the target black-box model through benign data distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 92% attack success rate and 80% stealth rate on a subset of AdvBench. |
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. |
EvoNarrator: Modeling Scientific Evolution for Feasible Hypothesis Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Scientific discovery evolution does not occur ex nihilo but is characterized by structural deepening and reconfiguration of existing functionalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for hypothesis generation based on evolutionary narratives . they extract structured P-M-L-F quadruples from citation networks and introduce a mechanism to assess their semantic compatibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces logical disconnects by evaluating its semantic compatibility. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
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. |
Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs’ hidden states. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space by using Sparse Autoencoders to identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 15% in control effectiveness. |
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. |
FOFO: A Benchmark to Evaluate LLMs’ Format-Following Capability (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to assess large language models’ format-following proficiency adequately. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models' ability to follow complex, domain-specific formats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates large language models' ability to follow complex, domain-specific formats across open-source and closed-source models. |
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. |
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. |
Agentic Verification for Ambiguous Query Disambiguation (2026.findings-acl)
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Youngwon Lee, Seung-won Hwang, Ruofan Wu, Feng Yan, Danmei Xu, Moutasem Akkad, Zhewei Yao, Yuxiong He
| Challenge: | Prior Diversify-then-Verify pipelines generate interpretations and then retrieve evidence . ambiguous queries require RAG to disambiguate into interpretations that can be answered from corpus . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that unifies diversification with verification by integrating retriever relevance and generator answerability feedback early. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves grounding-aware F1 by 23% over baselines across multiple LLMs. |
Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Yang Xu, Yunlong Feng, Honglin Mu, Yutai Hou, Yitong Li, Xinghao Wang, Wanjun Zhong, Zhongyang Li, Dandan Tu, Qingfu Zhu, Min Zhang, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing methods suffer from key information loss and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable performance to the upper-bound baseline under 16x compression ratio. |
MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)
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Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks. |
| Outcome: | The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics. |
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. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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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
| 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. |
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Yu Chen, Madian Khabsa, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value extraction focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning approach to extract attributes from product information using mixed prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two product benchmarks and shows parameter-efficient training and avoids model overfitting. |
Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yongxin Xu, Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Yujie Feng, Yuzhen Xiao, Xinyu Ma, Runchuan Zhu, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| 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. |
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. |
AgentOCR: Reimagining Agent History via Optical Self-Compression (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems trained with reinforcement learning over multi-turn interaction, but practical deployment is bottlenecked by rapidly growing textual histories that inflate token and memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that represents the accumulated observation-action history as a compact rendered image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves over 95% of text-based agent performance while significantly reducing token consumption (>50%), yielding consistent token and memory efficiency. |
TemplateRL: Structured Template-Guided Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jinyang Wu, Chonghua Liao, Mingkuan Feng, Shuai Zhang, Zhengqi Wen, Haoran Luo, Ling Yang, Huazhe Xu, Jianhua Tao
| Challenge: | Existing RL methods rely on unstructured self-sampling to fit scalar rewards, resulting in inefficient rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured template-guided RL framework that augments policy optimization with explicit template guidance. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TemplateRL outperforms GRPO and GRPI by 99% on AIME and 41% on AMC with superior stability on weak models and remarkable cross-domain generalization. |
Premise-based Multimodal Reasoning: Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues (2022.acl-long)
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Qingxiu Dong, Ziwei Qin, Heming Xia, Tian Feng, Shoujie Tong, Haoran Meng, Lin Xu, Zhongyu Wei, Weidong Zhan, Baobao Chang, Sujian Li, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Existing work in vision language cross-modal reasoning uses binary or multi-choice classification based on source image and textual query. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a textual premise is the background presumption on each source image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a dataset of 15,360 movie screenshots and human-curated premise templates from 6 pre-defined categories. |
Self-Constructed Context Decompilation with Fined-grained Alignment Enhancement (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| 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%. |
Guided by the Plan: Enhancing Faithful Autoregressive Text-to-Audio Generation with Guided Decoding (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models excel at generating temporally coherent audio by producing tokens sequentially, yet they often falter in faithfully following complex textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight auxiliary model trained with a GAE-inspired objective to predict final instruction-following quality from partial generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 10 points improvement in CLAP score over baseline AR models while maintaining computational parity with best-of-N decoding. |
HS-STaR: Hierarchical Sampling for Self-Taught Reasoners via Difficulty Estimation and Budget Reallocation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have incorporated reward models to guide response selection or decoding, aiming to obtain higher-quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Sampling framework for self-taught reasoners that allocates a fixed sampling budget to problem boundary-level problems and then reallocates the remaining budget toward high-utility problems during a re-sampling phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models without additional sampling budgets across multiple reasoning benchmarks and backbone LLMs. |
KC-ISA: An Implicit Sentiment Analysis Model Combining Knowledge Enhancement and Context Features (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing research results on explicit sentiment analysis are limited . implicit sentiment analysis is a process of analyzing text based on whether it contains explicit sentiment words. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates external knowledge and contextual features . they use a knowledge graph to supplement implicit sentiment expression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better results on the SMP2019 implicit sentiment analysis dataset. |
Word-level Cross-lingual Structure in Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across a broad spectrum of cross-lingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Word-level Cross-lingual Structure to prove that the word-level embedding on the hidden layers isomorphic between languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on two representative LLM foundations, LLaMA2 and BLOOM. |
BayesFlow: A Probability Inference Framework for Meta-Agent Assisted Workflow Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generality, often solving tasks with a single carefully engineered prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose to cast automatic workflow generation as Bayesian inference over a posterior distribution on workflows and instantiate BayesFlow as Bayer-based workflow generation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 9 percentage points over baselines and 65 percentage points on pool-wide benchmarks. |
Enhancing Recommendation Explanations through User-Centric Refinement (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanations for user reviews often fail to meet user-centric aspects, reducing their usefulness to users. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that refines initial explanations generated by existing models during the inference stage to enhance their quality in multiple aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves explanations generated by existing models during the inference stage to enhance their quality in multiple aspects. |
Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for learning and deployment of neural dialogue models have been used for online chit-chat scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy dialogue skills continually and efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performance under deployment-friendly model capacity. |
Improving Language Model Reasoning with Self-motivated Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale high-quality training data is important for improving the performance of models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that motivates the model to automatically generate rationales on existing datasets and improves the performance of reasoning through reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms InstructGPT on multiple reasoning datasets and outperformed InstructGPT on other datasets. |
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. |
Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward (2025.naacl-long)
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Ruohong Zhang, Liangke Gui, Zhiqing Sun, Yihao Feng, Keyang Xu, Yuanhan Zhang, Di Fu, Chunyuan Li, Alexander G Hauptmann, Yonatan Bisk, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that direct preference optimization (DPO) can be effective in generalizing large language models, but its effectiveness in video domain remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content to enable language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it can be used to align language models with video content and improves performance on open-ended video QA tasks. |
Can CLIP Count Stars? An Empirical Study on Quantity Bias in CLIP (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Despite its versatility, CLIP-based applications often suffer from misunderstandings regarding user intent, leading to discrepancies between the required number of objects and the actual outputs. |
| Approach: | They empirically evaluate CLIP’s understanding of quantity from text, image, and cross-modal perspectives by carefully designing different experimental settings and datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has shown significant success in various downstream tasks, including editing, generation, and quality evaluation. |
Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Liang Zhao, Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance length extrapolation of large language models have been developed, but a systematic survey is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the effects of positional encoding on length extrapolation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the extrapolation of large language models, but they are still lacking a systematic survey. |
Enhancing Key-Value Memory Neural Networks for Knowledge Based Question Answering (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing Key-value Memory Neural Networks are effective for shallow reasoning over documents . but extending them to Knowledge Based Question Answering is not trivial . |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism to enable conventional KV-MemNNs models to perform interpretable reasoning for complex questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution provides better reasoning abilities on complex questions and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
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. |
Rose-SQL: Role-State Evolution Guided Structured Reasoning for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-turn Text-to-SQL tasks rely on unstable APIs or expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that leverages small-scale LRMs through in-context learning to enable accurate context-dependent parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms in-context learning baselines at the 4B scale and surpasses state-of-the-art models at the 8B and 14B scales. |
MAgIC: Investigation of Large Language Model Powered Multi-Agent in Cognition, Adaptability, Rationality and Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional reasoning, tool usage, and memory capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a competition-based benchmark framework specifically designed to assess LLMs within multi-agent environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the LLMs’ abilities in navigating complex social and cognitive dimensions by over threefold between the strongest and weakest LLM models. |
Cultural Bias Matters: A Cross-Cultural Benchmark Dataset and Sentiment-Enriched Model for Understanding Multimodal Metaphors (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Metaphors are pervasive in communication, making them crucial for natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multicultural multimodal metaphor dataset designed for cross-cultural studies of metaphor in Chinese and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves metaphor comprehension across cultural backgrounds and cultural domains. |
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. |
ProxyQA: An Alternative Framework for Evaluating Long-Form Text Generation with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Haochen Tan, Zhijiang Guo, Zhan Shi, Lu Xu, Zhili Liu, Yunlong Feng, Xiaoguang Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Linqi Song
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models are labor-intensive and lack efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework dedicated to assessing long-text generation that includes in-depth human-curated meta-questions spanning various domains . they use a set of proxy-quests with pre-annotated answers to assess the content's quality by incorporating the generated texts as contextual background. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the quality of long-text content by matching it with references through human evaluation or automated metrics. |
ChatVLA: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhongyi Zhou, Yichen Zhu, Minjie Zhu, Junjie Wen, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Weibin Meng, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng, Yi Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language-action models prioritize robotic action mastery . however, models trained on visual-text pairs struggle to interpret multimodal data . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multimodal data after initial control mastery and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to minimize task interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) methods on multimodal understanding benchmarks and achieves six times higher performance on visual question-answering datasets. |
Improving Neural Machine Translation with Conditional Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the traditional RNNSearch and the newly emerged state-of-the-art Transformer on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for applying GANs to NMT by building a conditional sequence generative adversarial net with two adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing RNNSearch and Transformer on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks. |
Efficient Paths and Dense Rewards: Probabilistic Flow Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yan Liu, Feng Zhang, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He, Han Liu, Yangdong Deng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mitigate inference inefficiency and optimization difficulty are fragmented and constrained by inherent trade-offs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconceptualizes discrete reasoning steps as a continuous probabilistic flow, quantifying the contribution of each step toward the ground-truth answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a superior balance between inference efficiency and reasoning performance on challenging benchmarks. |
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 Retrospective Language Agents via Joint Policy Gradient Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have sparked interest in creating autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly optimizes both task-planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves task planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
Reasoning Over Space: Enabling Geographic Reasoning for LLM-Based Generative Next POI Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based recommenders lack explicit modeling of geographic signals . without explicit modeling geographic signals, recommenders struggle to capture core mobility patterns . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes geography as a decision variable within the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves over 10% relative gains in hit rate over strongest LLM-based baselines and improves cross-city transfer. |
NeuReduce: Reducing Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic Expressions by Recurrent Neural Network (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA) expressions are difficult to simplify because of interleaving bitwise and arithmical operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn and reduce MBA expressions using a string to string method . they propose to use a dataset to train the method to reduce MBA rules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all other tools in terms of accuracy, solving time, and performance overhead. |
ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate training data with pre-trained language models have been found effective in various scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised zero-shot learning method that generates a dataset from scratch and trains a tiny task model under supervision of the synthesized dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is annotated-free and efficient, but can provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation and unreferenced text generation evaluation. |
Regularizing Dialogue Generation by Imitating Implicit Scenarios (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue generation lack the flexibility to handle such freedoms. |
| Approach: | They propose to take into account dialogue history and future conversation to implicitly reconstruct the scenario knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on diversity and relevance and expresses scenario-specific knowledge. |
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. |
Semi-Supervised Disfluency Detection (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Detecting disfluency can be difficult because of the flexible nature of reparandum structure and the lack of a nested structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised approach which extracts hidden features from self-attention without any Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or Convolutional Neural Net (CNN). |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves over baselines by using unlabelled data . identifying and removing non-fluent factors would help to improve spontaneous speech quality . |
Learning to Generate Question by Asking Question: A Primal-Dual Approach with Uncommon Word Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing automatic question generation methods focus on encoding passage and answer to generate question. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic question generation approach which integrates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks. |
MIRAGE: Exploring How Large Language Models Perform in Complex Social Interactive Environments (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in environmental perception, reasoning-based decision-making, and simulating complex human behaviors, particularly in interactive role-playing contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess LLMs' proficiency in portraying advanced human behaviors through murder mystery games using eight intricately crafted scripts. |
| Outcome: | The framework evaluates LLMs' performance in portraying advanced human behaviors through murder mystery games. |
Look Within or Beyond? A Theoretical Comparison Between Parameter-Efficient and Full Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is an alternative to Full-Parameter Fine-tuning, but its effectiveness on complex tasks such as reasoning and instruction-following remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PEFT to reduce the number of trainable parameters while freezing the weights of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on standard tasks, but weaknesses on complex and adversarial settings call for new directions beyond current paradigms. |
TaSL: Continual Dialog State Tracking via Task Skill Localization and Consolidation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for Continual Dialogue State Tracking (DST) struggle with catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer between tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for task skill localization and consolidation that enables effective knowledge transfer without relying on memory replay. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a 7.6% increase in Avg. JGA and 11% rise in BWT metrics over existing state-of-the-art methods. |
Cascaded Mutual Modulation for Visual Reasoning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Visual reasoning is a multi-step and compositional problem that requires intensive text-vision interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual reasoning model that uses a feature-wise linear modulation technique to enable textual/visual pipelines to mutually control each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on visual reasoning benchmarks CLEVR and NLVR . it can generate a textual answer to a visual question answering problem with images . |
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. |
SpellGCN: Incorporating Phonological and Visual Similarities into Language Models for Chinese Spelling Check (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese take external input or just heuristic rules. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate phonological and visual similarity knowledge into Chinese language models by using a specialized graph convolutional network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three human-annotated datasets. |
Debiasing Large Language Models via Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from excessive token usage and limited generalisability across diverse reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought framework that leverages structural causal models to infer the causal effect of a query on its answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing prompting baselines in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. |
MAPLE: Enhancing Review Generation with Multi-Aspect Prompt LEarning in Explainable Recommendation (2025.acl-long)
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Ching-Wen Yang, Zhi-Quan Feng, Ying-Jia Lin, Che Wei Chen, Kun-da Wu, Hao Xu, Yao Jui-Feng, Hung-Yu Kao
| Challenge: | Existing models that generate generic aspects do not provide personalized informative recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates aspect category as another input dimension to facilitate memorizing fine-grained aspect terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline model on restaurant review datasets in the restaurant domain. |
NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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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
| 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. |
Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slips (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer, we analyze ancient Chinese scripts . a large proportion of the characters in ancient Chinese are rare or undeciphered . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for ancient Chinese scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer improves on the part-of-speech tagging task on the Chu bamboo slip script. |
Graph-to-Tree Neural Networks for Learning Structured Input-Output Translation with Applications to Semantic Parsing and Math Word Problem (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Graph2Tree model encodes graph-structured input and decodes tree-structures output. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Graph-to-Tree Neural Network consisting of a graph encoder and a hierarchical tree decoder that encodes an augmented graph-structured input and decodes a tree-structure-output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or matches the performance of other state-of-the-art models on two problems, neural semantic parsing and math word problem. |
ChemActor: Enhancing Automated Extraction of Chemical Synthesis Actions with LLM-Generated Data (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting chemical procedures from literature are insufficient and low-quality due to the inherent ambiguity of chemical language and the high cost of human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully fine-tuned large language model (LLM) as a chemical executor to convert between unstructured experimental procedures and structured action sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on R2D and D2A tasks by 10%. |
Align-smatch: A Novel Evaluation Method for Chinese Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing based on Alignment of Concept and Relation (2022.lrec-1)
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| 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. |
GeoEdit: Geometric Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Li-Ming Zhan, Zexin Lu, Yongxin Xu, Xu Chu, Yasha Wang, Jiannong Cao, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Existing training-based model editing methods struggle to incorporate new knowledge while preserving unrelated general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses geometric relationships to differentiate between neurons associated with new knowledge updates and those related to general knowledge perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework avoids updating neurons with directions approximately orthogonal to existing knowledge, thus preserving the model’s generalization ability. |
Defining and Evaluating Visual Language Models’ Basic Spatial Abilities: A Perspective from Psychometrics (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies assessing the spatial abilities of VLMs lack a solid theoretical foundation and lack measurable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychometric framework defining five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models (VLMs) it provides a comprehensive evaluation benchmark and methodological perspective for embodied AI development . |
Unsupervised Out-of-Domain Detection via Pre-trained Transformers (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on out-of-domain detection requires in-domain task labels and is limited to supervised classification scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct out-of-domain detectors efficiently using pre-trained transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method greatly improves out-of-domain detection ability in a more general scenario. |
xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems (2025.naacl-long)
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Jianguo Zhang, Tian Lan, Ming Zhu, Zuxin Liu, Thai Quoc Hoang, Shirley Kokane, Weiran Yao, Juntao Tan, Akshara Prabhakar, Haolin Chen, Zhiwei Liu, Yihao Feng, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Rithesh R N, Zeyuan Chen, Ran Xu, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant research interest, but there are few standards for developing specialized models for agent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of large action models with dense and mixture-of-expert architectures that unifies, augments, and synthesizes diverse datasets to enhance agent generalizability and performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform GPT-4, Claude-3, and many other models in terms of tool use and outperformed GPT-based models on multiple agent ability benchmarks. |
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. |
A Survey on Natural Language Counterfactual Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP are driven by a variety of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 (175B) and PaLM (540B). |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes the methods into four groups and summarizes the metrics for evaluating the generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes the generation methods into four groups and summarizes the metrics for evaluating the quality. |
Extending Context Window of Large Language Models from a Distributional Perspective (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yingsheng Wu, Yuxuan Gu, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing scaling methods for extending context window rely on empirical approaches and lack understanding of the internal distribution within RoPE resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize the context window extending task from the view of rotary angle distribution by minimizing disturbance between rotary angles to maintain consistency with the pre-training phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces by up to 72% of the distributional disturbance when extending LLaMA2’s context window to 8k, and reduces it by up 32% when extending to 16k. |
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Jian Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Pengfei Xu, Xiaohui Zhou, Yujia Zhang, Zexin Lu, Yasha Wang, Alan Zhao, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Recent model merging-based methods struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model’s training status. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B). |
GraphMR: Graph Neural Network for Mathematical Reasoning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown the effectiveness of sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seque) on mathematics solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-to-sequence neural network which can learn hierarchical information of graphs inputs to solve mathematical problems and speculate answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed neural network outperforms other neural networks in hidden information learning and mathematics resolving. |
Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Matching Neural Network (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment rely on entity embeddings derived from monolingual KG structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic entity graph to represent entities with contextual information in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. |
OpenICL: An Open-Source Framework for In-context Learning (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | In-context Learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for large language model evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit for ICL and LLM evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly flexible and flexible and can be easily combined with other tools to suit users' needs. |
RATION: Entropy-Driven Task-Adaptive Visual Attention Allocation Framework for Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on strengthening multimodal reasoning by improving representation alignment or increasing computation, but these methods do not characterize the differences in visual demands across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-driven task-adaptive visual attention allocation framework that uses visual attention entropic as a control signal to dynamically allocate attention according to task demands. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves consistent performance gains across diverse reasoning tasks, datasets, and models, providing a clear direction toward more reliable multimodal reasoning. |
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. |
Escaping the Sisyphus Dilemma: Experience Replay for Robust Text-to-Optimization Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented strategies for large language models fail to capture dynamic reasoning required to resolve execution failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that implements Experience Replay to transform transient rectification steps into persistent knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model accuracy by 8.45% on complex tasks while reducing token consumption by 28.65% and interaction turns by 25.82%. |
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. |