Papers by Feng Zhao
Probing the Geometry of Truth: Consistency and Generalization of Truth Directions in LLMs Across Logical Transformations and Question Answering Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast corpora that contain substantial knowledge but their outputs often contain confidently stated inaccuracies. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode truthfulness as a distinct linear feature, termed the "truth direction", which can classify truthfulness reliably. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to logical transformations, question-answering tasks, in-context learning, and external knowledge sources. |
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Li, Xiaoran Shang, Qizhi Pei, Yun Zhu, Xin Gao, Honglin Lin, Zhanping Zhong, Zhuoshi Pan, Zheng Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Conghui He, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora. |
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). |
DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning in Dentistry (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenyang Cai, Jiaming Zhang, Junjie Zhao, Ziyi Zeng, Yanchao Li, Liang Jingyi, Junying Chen, Yunjin Yang, Jiajun You, Shuzhi Deng, null Xieruiqiii, Yuanting Chen, Xiangyi Feng, Jianquan Li, Liangyi Chen, Junwen Wang, Shan Jiang, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show limited understanding of dental images. |
| Approach: | They propose a dental-specialized multimodal large language model trained via staged multimodal alignment and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on disease classification and dental VQA tasks. |
LLM-based Translation Inference with Iterative Bilingual Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that the ability of large language models to generate contextual understanding of the sentence can degrade translation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates contextual understanding for both source and target languages separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong comparison methods in multiple domains. |
Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity due to their lack of knowledge hallucination and lack of a coherent model. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised quantized representation method to compress KG structural and semantic knowledge into discrete codes that align the format of language sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing unsupervised methods producing more distinguishable codes on KG link prediction and triple classification tasks. |
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of tools are used to perform complex tasks, but the tool utilization process can cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique evaluation benchmark for tool learning that analyzes function-calling errors on tool evaluation benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed critique evaluation benchmark holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. |
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" |
Cross-Lingual Question Answering over Knowledge Base as Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing high-quality xMRC datasets can be further utilized to fine-tune our model. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual question answering over knowledge base approach that converts KB subgraphs into passages to narrow the gap between KB schemas and questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines and achieves strong few-shot and zero-shot performance on two xKBQA datasets in 12 languages. |
Learning Geometry-Aware Representations for New Intent Discovery (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for intent classification fail to distinguish new intents due to intertwined centers . a novel framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a new intent discovery framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarking datasets. |
PVPO: Pre-Estimated Value-Based Policy Optimization for Agentic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | extending grouping-based methods to agentic reasoning presents unique challenges . frequent environment interactions and tool invocations render intra-group advantage estimation unstable . |
| Approach: | They propose a grouping-based method that uses a single round of rollouts to stabilize advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | a new RL framework outperforms grouping-based methods in retrieval tasks and advanced mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Commonsense Subgraph for Inductive Relation Reasoning with Meta-learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing subgraph-based models focus on predicting missing relations in knowledge graphs . a new meta-learning model extracts concepts from entities to construct commonsense subgraphs based on semantic information . |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense subgraph meta-learning model that extracts concepts from entities to construct commonsensible subgraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in inductive reasoning tasks and in few-shot scenarios. |
Chain-of-Discussion: A Multi-Model Framework for Complex Evidence-Based Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable language generation capabilities, propelling advancements in various understanding/generation tasks, including opendomain question answering (QA). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of- Discussion framework to leverage synergy among multiple open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) aiming to provide more correct and more comprehensive answers for open-ended QA, although they are not strong enough individually. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages the synergy among multiple open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide more correct and comprehensive answers for open-ended QA, although they are not strong enough individually. |
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. |
Towards Context-Aware Code Comment Generation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for code comments generate comments manually, but they suffer from poor scalability and high maintenance cost due to the expensive overhead of writing comment templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically generate code comments at a function level by targeting object-oriented programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and is comparable with existing methods. |
Rethinking Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation: Contextualized Corpus as Better Textbook (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation use a two-stage paradigm: general distillation with a task-agnostic general corpus and task-specific distillation using augmented task- specific corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextualized corpus that contextualizes task corpus with large-scale general corpus through relevance-based text retrieval to improve student learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the GLUE benchmark and shows that it is better than generalized corpus and augmented task-specific corpus. |
Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Global and Local Semantic Representations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the ability of MLLMs to generate single tokens one by one, while lacking studies about how their representation vectors can encode global multimodal information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image-caption corpus to train Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) . they find that the topmost layers encode more global semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can encode more global semantic information, rather than the topmost layers, and perform better on visual-language entailment tasks. |
Understanding Procedural Text using Interactive Entity Networks (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to track multiple entities in a procedural text treat each entity separately . e.g., scientific articles, instruction books, recipes, often contain multiple entities involved . |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent network with memory equipped cells for state tracking . they maintain different attention matrices through specific memories to model different types of entity interactions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on a benchmark dataset. |
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. |
EpiCoDe: Boosting Model Performance Beyond Training with Extrapolation and Contrastive Decoding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance performance of Large language models are limited due to the cost of training data and privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances a finetuned model with its inferior version and adopts contrastive decoding to reduce predicted errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in data-scarcity scenarios across three domains and shows that it is more robust and robust. |
Align-then-Enhance: Multilingual Entailment Graph Enhancement with Soft Predicate Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn typed entailment graphs with predicates as nodes and enttailment relations as edges are incomplete. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to utilize entailment information from one EG to enhance another in a different language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing graphs in multilingual entailment graph enhancement tasks. |
Unlocking the Potential of Model Merging for Low-Resource Languages (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages requires continual pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging solution that integrates LLMs with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model merging outperforms CT-then-SFT in low-resource languages with scarce data. |
More than Classification: A Unified Framework for Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event temporal relation extraction ignore meaning of relations and wipe out their intrinsic dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified event temporal relation extraction framework that transforms temporal relations into logical expressions of time points and completes the ETRE by predicting the relations between certain time points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art model on TB-Dense and MATRES by 0.3% on both datasets. |
“None of the Above”: Measure Uncertainty in Dialog Response Retrieval (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end (E2E) dialog retrieval models jointly encode a dialog and a candidate response, assuming the ground truth is always present in the candidate set. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture the original retrieval model's confidence concerning the best prediction using trivial additional computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture the model's confidence concerning the best prediction using trivial additional computation. |
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. |
Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into users’ daily lives, leading to a growing demand for personalized outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that models inter-user differences in the latent space instead of relying on language-based prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on personalized review generation. |
Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Search for Optimization Problem Solving (2026.acl-long)
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Linlin Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Chen Zhao, Feng Chen, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Language model hallucinations and limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors and feasibility failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that automates optimization problems from natural language descriptions with efficiency and reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy and reduces token usage. |
Let The Jury Decide: Fair Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning through Incremental Greedy Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing demonstration selection strategies focus on optimizing performance metrics such as accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for selecting fair and representative demonstrations that improve group fairness in In-Context Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves fairness metrics without compromising accuracy. |
How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite recent progress in multi-answer MRC, there is no systematic analysis of how this phenomenon arises and how to better address it. |
| Approach: | They develop a taxonomy to categorize commonly-seen multi-answer MRC instances and examine how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes commonly-seen multi-answer instances and analyzes how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced instances. |
MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Jingqun Tang, Qi Liu, Yongjie Ye, Jinghui Lu, Shu Wei, An-Lan Wang, Chunhui Lin, Hao Feng, Zhen Zhao, Yanjie Wang, Yuliang Liu, Hao Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) is a text-centric visual task understanding tool. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark that features human expert annotations across 9 languages . they prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images. |
A Context-based Framework for Modeling the Role and Function of On-line Resource Citations in Scientific Literature (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing academic search engines cannot detect relevant papers where a resource is mentioned. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to model the role and function of on-line resource citations . they construct a dataset SciRes, which includes 3,088 manually annotated resource contexts based on a multi-task framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves the best results on both the classification task and recommendation task. |
Priority on High-Quality: Selecting Instruction Data via Consistency Verification of Noise Injection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction selection rely on external models or rules, overlooking the intrinsic association between pre-trained model and instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes noise injection to identify the quality of instruction data without relying on external models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the model trained on the entire dataset and established baselines. |
EvolvR: Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning for Story Evaluation to Enhance Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for story evaluation lack reasoning capabilities for open-source models . evolvR framework provides high-fidelity evaluators for story generation tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that self-synthesizes chain-of-thought data via a multi-persona strategy . they propose evolvR to provide a reward model for story generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three evaluation benchmarks . it also enhances the quality of generated stories, validating the superiority of the framework . |
From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zekun Zhou, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng, Ziyun Song, Ruihan Chen, Liang Zhao, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has inspired researchers to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance research. |
| Approach: | They organize the relevant studies into three main categories: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
| Outcome: | The authors summarize the current state of research in three main areas: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
Learning a Matching Model with Co-teaching for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning a robust matching model from noisy training data are retrieval-based or generation-based. |
| Approach: | They propose a general co-teaching framework that learns matching models from noisy training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning framework can improve existing models on two public data sets. |
DialogUSR: Complex Dialogue Utterance Splitting and Reformulation for Multiple Intent Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Haoran Meng, Zheng Xin, Tianyu Liu, Zizhen Wang, He Feng, Binghuai Lin, Xuemin Zhao, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | DialogUSR is a plug-in and domain-agnostic module that empowers multi-intent detection for chatbots . a single user query triggers inquiries on highspeed train ticket price and weather of destination. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialog utterance splitting and reformulation task that splits multi-intent user query into multiple single-intention sub-queries and recovers all coreferred and omitted information in the sub-questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to split multi-intent user queries into multiple sub-queries . it can be trained in two stages and perform in-depth analyses on the proposed models . |
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative entity embeddings are insufficient for semi-supervised entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on benchmark datasets and further analyses. |
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. |
Learning to Update Knowledge Graphs by Reading News (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to update knowledge graphs rely on elaborately designed IE systems and domain-specific rules. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel neural network method to update knowledge graphs (KGs) they use a text-based attention mechanism to guide updating messages through KGs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can effectively broadcast news information to KG structures and perform necessary link-adding or link-deleting operations to ensure the KG up-to-date according to news snippets. |
Three Sentences Are All You Need: Local Path Enhanced Document Relation Extraction (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (RE) is more challenging than sentence RE as it often requires reasoning over multiple sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to heuristically select evidence sentences for document-level relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be easily combined with BiLSTM to achieve good performance on benchmark datasets even better than fancy graph neural network based methods. |
Alleviating Hallucinations from Knowledge Misalignment in Large Language Models via Selective Abstention Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Yuchun Fan, Xiachong Feng, Yuxuan Gu, Yangfan Ye, Liang Zhao, Weihong Zhong, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Xiao, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) suffer from severe hallucination issues due to the knowledge misalignment between the pre-training stage and the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a training objective with an abstention mechanism that selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
Structure-aware Knowledge Graph-to-text Generation with Planning Selection and Similarity Distinction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate knowledge graph-to-text (KG-to) text rely on pre-trained language models to bridge the gap between the different structures of the input KG and the target text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates graph structure-aware modules with pre-trained language models to capture the intricate topology information present in the KG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures the topology information present in the knowledge graph and distinguishes similar input KGs through contrastive learning techniques. |
Reciprocal Learning of Knowledge Retriever and Response Ranker for Knowledge-Grounded Conversations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on grounding dialogue agents with knowledge documents has sparked increased attention . hand-labeling data to that end is time-consuming and many datasets lack knowledge annotations . |
| Approach: | They propose a reciprocal learning approach to optimize a knowledge retriever and a response ranker for knowledge-grounded response retrieval without ground-truth knowledge labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on two public benchmarks. |
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. |
The Mark Fades: Adaptive Evolutionary Paraphrase-based Attack against LLM Watermarks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paraphrase-based watermark removal methods struggle to balance efficacy with text quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free evolutionary framework that models watermark removal as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem by using a Pseudo-Log-Likelihood-guided mutation to precisely target and modify watermark-carrying tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on a Qwen3 series watermark scheme while maintaining high semantic fidelity. |
CERES: Pretraining of Graph-Conditioned Transformer for Semi-Structured Session Data (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite advances in self-supervised learning, there is a lack of models that can effectively capture both intra- and intra-item semantics for semi-structured session data. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based transformer model for semi-structured session data that captures both intra- and intra-item semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in three session search and entity linking tasks by up to 9%. |
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. |
Correcting on Graph: Faithful Semantic Parsing over Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Complex multi-hop questions require comprehensive retrieval and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing framework to establish faithful logical queries that connect LLMs and knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art KGQA methods on knowledge-intensive questions. |
LipoAgent: Coordinating Fine-Tuned LLM Agents for Safer Lipid Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are among the most clinically mature platforms for nucleic acid delivery, yet designing lipids that are effective and biologically safe remains a major bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety-aware multi-agent LLM framework for lipid discovery that enforces toxicity as a prerequisite for efficiency prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement in mRNA transfection efficiency prediction across multiple foundation models. |
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. |
Multi-grained Attention Network for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to aspect sentiment classification use coarse-grained attention mechanisms . a novel approach captures word-level interaction between aspect and context . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-grained attention network model for aspect level sentiment classification . they use a fine-grounded attention mechanism to capture word-level interaction between aspect and context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three datasets . it shows that aspect-level interactions can bring extra useful information and improve performance . |
Vision-Language Models Mistake Head Orientation for Gaze Direction: Nonverbal Conversation Cues (2026.findings-acl)
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Zory Zhang, Pinyuan Feng, Bingyang Wang, Tianwei Zhao, Suyang Yu, Qingying Gao, Hokin Deng, Ziqiao Ma, Yijiang Li, Dezhi Luo
| Challenge: | Where someone looks is a nonverbal communication cue that children and adults readily use. |
| Approach: | They used 1,360 real-world photos to construct evaluation stimuli for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) they found a substantial performance gap between VLMs and humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in predicting gaze direction using head orientation rather than eye appearance. |
Concealed Data Poisoning Attacks on NLP Models (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | In contrast, adversarial attacks can cause model errors by modifying inputs, such as the universal triggers attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a data poisoning attack that allows an adversary to control model predictions whenever a desired trigger phrase is present in the input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack can cause model errors by modifying inputs, but it can also cause extra human annotation. |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |
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. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
Learning to Organize a Bag of Words into Sentences with Neural Networks: An Empirical Study (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to encode natural languages without orders are lacking. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of the ability of neural models to organize sentences from a bag of words under three typical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can reorder or reconstruct sentences from a bag of words under three typical scenarios. |
SemanticCamo: Jailbreaking Large Language Models through Semantic Camouflage (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made safety issues of LLMs more prominent and critical. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which attacks LLMs through semantic camouflage and replaces unsafe content with semantic features to conceal malicious intent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in over 80% of cases and is highly effective against various defenses. |
MLDebugging: Towards Benchmarking Code Debugging Across Multi-Library Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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JinYang Huang, Xiachong Feng, Qiguang Chen, Hanjie Zhao, Zihui Cheng, Jiesong Bai, Jingxuan Zhou, Min Li, Libo Qin
| Challenge: | MLDebugging is a benchmark designed to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a benchmark to assess debugging challenges within multi-library Python code using 126 Python libraries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 126 Python libraries and a wide range of multi-library code issues. |
Marrying Up Regular Expressions with Neural Networks: A Case Study for Spoken Language Understanding (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the combination of regular expressions and NNs improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a neural network (NN) with regular expressions (RE) to improve supervised learning for NLP by exploiting the rich expressiveness of REs at different levels within a NN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available. |
Sampling Matters! An Empirical Study of Negative Sampling Strategies for Learning of Matching Models in Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on constructing a matching model with sophisticated neural architectures, but do little to how to effectively learn such architectures from data. |
| Approach: | They propose to sample negative examples to automatically construct a training set for effective model learning in retrieval-based dialogue systems by using four sampling strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning method improves the performance of matching models on two benchmarks with three matching models. |
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. |
Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph for Conditional Question Answering on Long Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conditional question answering on long documents ignore document structure and discourse relations between sentences in document sections. |
| Approach: | They construct a Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph and conduct bottom-up information propagation to address this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing methods on the conditional question answering on long documents by 3.0 EM score and 2.4 F1 score on answer measuring, and 2.2 EM and 1.9 F1 scores on jointly answer and condition measuring. |
Multi-Granularity Structural Knowledge Distillation for Language Model Compression (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer knowledge to a small model are not enough to represent the rich semantics of a text. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill the knowledge to a student hierarchically across layers using a large teacher-student framework. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms distillation methods on GLUE benchmark. |
MECoT: Markov Emotional Chain-of-Thought for Personality-Consistent Role-Playing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models struggle to maintain emotionally consistent and psychologically plausible character personalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances LLMs’ ability to generate authentic personality-driven dialogues through stochastic emotional transitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 93.3% emotional accuracy on the RAPD dataset and significantly outperforms existing approaches. |
SmartAD: Capacity-Aligned Agent Distillation for Small Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) show strong reasoning and decision-making ability, but their high inference cost motivates transferring agentic skills to small language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a capacity-aligned agent distillation framework that trains SLMs on full reason–act–observe trajectories from a tool-using teacher. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms all baselines on multi-hop QA and math benchmarks with 1.5B and 3B models. |
Beyond Accuracy: Unveiling Inefficiency Patterns in Tool-Integrated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) is a tool that can be used to solve complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hardware-aware TIR-efficiency metric that unifies internal reasoning and external tool-use costs while explicitly accounting for non-reusable KV-Cache and long-tool-response scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric explains wall-clock latency significantly better than token-count metric in a simulated high-concurrency industrial setting. |
Rethinking Reasoning: A Survey on Reasoning-based Backdoors in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 produce explicit reasoning traces, often via Chain-of-Thought prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that offers a unified perspective for summarizing existing approaches and categorizing reasoning-based backdoor attacks into associative, passive, and active. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes reasoning-based backdoor attacks into associative, passive, and active. |
CodeContests-O: Powering LLMs via Feedback-Driven Iterative Test Case Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianfeng Cai, Jinhua Zhu, Ruopei Sun, Kangwen Zhao, Dongyun Xue, Mingxiao Feng, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesize test cases using Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the model’s intrinsic generation capabilities without external feedback, resulting in insufficiently diverse cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-driven iterative framework that leverages Large Language Models to generate initial test cases, execute them against known correct and incorrect solutions, and utilizes the failed results as feedback to guide the LLM in refining the test cases toward high fidelity and discriminability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing codecontests and codecontests+ models by 4.30% and 8.78%. |
GDLLM: A Global Distance-aware Modeling Approach Based on Large Language Models for Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to analyzing large language models are limited by their pre-trained knowledge of Small Language Models(SLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a global distance-aware modeling approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs) they first present a distance-based graph structure utilizing Graph Attention Network(GAT) |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves minority relation class learning ability on two publicly available datasets, TB-Dense and MATRES. |
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. |
C2PO: Diagnosing and Disentangling Bias Shortcuts in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve large language models address stereotypical and structural biases in isolation . however, prior paradigms address these in isolation, often at the expense of exacerbating the other . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to tackle latent spurious feature correlations within input that drive erroneous reasoning shortcuts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates stereotypical and structural biases while preserving robust general reasoning capabilities. |
Structured Attention for Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Induction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using structured attention, a model can learn dialogue structure in unsupervised fashion. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate structured attention layers into a Variational Recurrent Neural Network model with discrete latent states to learn dialogue structure in an unsupervised fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns semantic structures similar to templates used to generate a dialogue corpus on two-party datasets and on multi-party dialogues, disentangling dialogues without human annotation. |
Everything Has a Cause: Leveraging Causal Inference in Legal Text Analysis (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on analyzing structured data, while mining causal relationship among factors from unstructured data is of great importance. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based causal inference framework which builds causal graphs from fact descriptions without much human involvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can capture nuance from fact descriptions among confusing charges and provide explainable discrimination in few-shot settings. |
Counterfactual Recipe Generation: Exploring Compositional Generalization in a Realistic Scenario (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to learn and use culinary knowledge in a compositional way, argues a new study. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that asks models to modify a base recipe according to the change of an ingredient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform compositional generalization in a realistic setting . existing models have difficulties in modifying ingredients while preserving original style . |
The Magic of IF: Investigating Causal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models of Code (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | entailment a) |
| Approach: | entailment : We want to explore whether Code-LLMs with code prompts are better . encoding a code prompt is better than text-only LLMs, they say . |
| Outcome: | entailment : Our results show that Code-LLMs with code prompts are better compared to text-only LLMs. |
Probing and Boosting Large Language Models Capabilities via Attention Heads (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying capabilities rely on external signals with limited structural grounding . emergence of specific capabilities remains poorly understood . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight approach that links LLM capabilities to internal components by identifying correspondences at the level of attention heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy on MMLU and BBH by 1 to 1.5 points over gradient-based method and 5 to 6 points over other intermediate-state baselines. |
Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models through Aligning Attention Distribution to Information Flow (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Decode-Only models propagate information from left to right, but the model's attention still focuses on the visual representations, resulting in hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the core information embedded in semantic representations to enhance the model's visual understanding by leveraging the attention distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations by 80% by aligning the attention distribution with the actual information flow. |
Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent work on unsupervised reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning using confidence-based endogenous rewards focuses on open-ended text generation, requiring either annotated data or powerful closed-source models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards the relative information gain between a specialist and a generalist reference policy, modulated by a probability-dependent correction mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on multiple writing benchmarks and model architectures without external supervision and validates generality across different generation tasks. |
Length-Adaptive Distillation: Customizing Small Language Model for Dynamic Token Pruning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to accelerate inference speed are model compression and dynamic computation (e.g., dynamic token pruning). |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that produces a customized small language model for dynamic token pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can make the small language model more customized for dynamic token pruning and achieve better speed-performance trade-off. |
An Intra-Class Relation Guided Approach for Code Comment Generation (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in code comment generation assumes that all information required to generate comments is encoded in the target function itself, yet in most realistic situations, it is hard to understand a function in isolation from the surrounding context. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based learning framework to capture various relations among functions in a class file. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on automatic and human evaluation metrics on a Java dataset collected from real-world projects. |
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. |
Transformation of Dense and Sparse Text Representations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to NLP to leverage sparsity have been limited due to the gap with dense representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Semantic Transformation method to bridge dense and sparse spaces and propose supervised NLP tasks to use both spaces. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with classification tasks and natural language inference tasks show that the proposed method is effective. |
How to Represent Context Better? An Empirical Study on Context Modeling for Multi-turn Response Selection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on building a conversational system for open domain human-machine conversation is attracting more attention . early models concatenate all utterances or independently encode each dialogue turn, which may lead to an inadequate understanding of dialogue status. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a turn-aware context modeling layer to adapt existing models . they propose to model multi-turn contexts from the perspective of sequential relationship, local relationship, and query-alike manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be adapted to several advanced response selection models. |
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. |
Question Tells You Where the Answer Is: Intention-aware Long-Context KV Cache Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Liang Zhao, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Lei Huang, Kun Zhu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Recent methods to reduce the KV cache size fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user’s goal and determines which part of the context is relevant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting. |
RelCLIP: Adapting Language-Image Pretraining for Visual Relationship Detection via Relational Contrastive Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual relationship detection models only use numeric ids of relation labels for training, but ignore semantic correlation between labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual Relationship prediction framework that transfers natural language knowledge from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models to enhance the relationship prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves visual relationship prediction by matching semantic correlations with relation triplets. |
Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DPL significantly enhances LLM personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that emphasizes extracting inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
Keywords and Instances: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework Unifying Hybrid Granularities for Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Mingzhe Li, XieXiong Lin, Xiuying Chen, Jinxiong Chang, Qishen Zhang, Feng Wang, Taifeng Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Wei Chu, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on contrastive learning on the instance level without discriminating the contribution of each word. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism which can unify semantic meaning in the input text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on storytelling, paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Sequence-level Large Language Model Training with Contrastive Preference Optimization (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | a new method to improve the performance of large language models requires a small computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a CPO procedure that can inject sequence-level information into the model at any training stage without expensive human labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed objective surpasses the next token prediction in terms of win rate in instruction-following and text generation tasks. |
FAA: Fine-grained Attention Alignment for Cascade Document Ranking (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Contemporary document ranking methods focus on transforming documents into passages to handle long inputs, but intensive query-irrelevant content may lead to harmful distraction and high query latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained attention alignment approach to jointly optimize a cascade document ranking model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MS MARCO and TREC DL show that the proposed method is effective in document ranking tasks. |
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. |
Modeling discourse cohesion for discourse parsing via memory network (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to discourse parsing focus on studying the semantic and syntactic aspects of EDU pairs, but they do not address long span dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a new transition-based discourse parser that takes discourse cohesion into account by using memory networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms traditional features and improves performance on the RST discourse treebank. |
Do Charge Prediction Models Learn Legal Theory? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for charge prediction are sensitive, selective, and presumption of innocence . a recent study has shown that deep learning models can predict the charges accurately, but their reliability and interpretability are still underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose that trustworthy charge prediction models should take legal theories into consideration . they propose three principles for trustworthy models to follow in this task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates whether existing models learn legal theories . it shows that models meet selective and presumption of innocence principles . |
Why Machine Reading Comprehension Models Learn Shortcuts? (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that many MRC models learn shortcuts to outwit benchmarks, but the performance is unsatisfactory in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use shortcut questions to analyze learning difficulty of MRC models . they propose to analyze the learning difficulty regarding shortcut and challenging questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that a large proportion of shortcut questions in training data make models rely on shortcut tricks excessively. |
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)
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Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
Neighborhood Matching Network for Entity Alignment (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Structural heterogeneity between knowledge graphs is an outstanding challenge for entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for entity alignment that uses a neighborhood matching module to combine neighborhood differences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on three datasets. |
OpticE: A Coherence Theory-Based Model for Link Prediction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge representation learning is a key step required for link prediction tasks with knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a new embedding approach based on the physical phenomenon of optical interference to reduce the semantic ambiguity in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can compete with existing methods on KG benchmarks. |
Improving Slot Filling in Spoken Language Understanding with Joint Pointer and Attention (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show the effectiveness of our slot filling model at addressing the OOV problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative neural network model for slot filling based on a sequence-to-sequence model and a pointer network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to predict slot values on spoken language data. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
CoV: Chain-of-View Prompting for Spatial Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Zhao, Akide Liu, Zeyu Zhang, Weijie Wang, Feng Chen, Ruihan Zhu, Gholamreza Haffari, Bohan Zhuang
| Challenge: | Embodied question answering requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints . most recent vision–language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM-Match performance by 11.98% on four mainstream VLMs. |
Physics: Benchmarking Foundation Models on University-Level Physics Problem Solving (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a benchmark for university-level physics problem solving contains 1,297 expert-annotated problems . a proprietary model, o3-mini, achieves only 59.9% accuracy, highlighting fundamental weaknesses in scientific reasoning, conceptual understanding, and mathematical precision. |
| Approach: | They introduce Physics, a benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 59.9% accuracy on the most advanced model, o3-mini . the proposed model is a powerful tool for evaluating models on advanced problems . |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
AJ-Bench: Benchmarking Agent-as-a-Judge for Environment-Aware Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Wentao Shi, Yu Wang, Yuyang Zhao, Yuxin Chen, Fuli Feng, Xueyuan Hao, Xi Su, Qi GU, Hui Su, Xunliang Cai, Xiangnan He
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to verify agent behaviors in complex environments rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains . the benchmark covers search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces - with 155 tasks and 516 trajectories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in search, data systems, and GUI domains while revealing open challenges in agent-based verification. |
GLaRA: Graph-based Labeling Rule Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) models often need to be trained with many manual labels to perform well. |
| Approach: | They propose to train named entity recognition systems using heuristic labeling rules . they create a graph with nodes representing candidate rules extracted from unlabeled data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average improvement of +20% over the baseline on three NER datasets. |
Enhancing Large Vision-Language Models with Ultra-Detailed Image Caption Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines for generating high-quality, ultra-detailed image captions are limited by the scarcity of image caption data. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for generating high-quality, ultra-detailed image captions that integrates both pre-processing and post-processor stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves LVLMs' perception and cognitive abilities across multiple vision-language benchmarks. |
ViDoRAG: Visual Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dynamic Iterative Reasoning Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on image-based question answering (QA) but ignore the fundamental challenges of efficient retrieval, comprehension, and reasoning within dense visual documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-agent RAG framework tailored for complex reasoning across visual documents that employs a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based hybrid strategy to handle multi-modal retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by over 10% on the competitive ViDoSeek benchmark. |
Extract, Integrate, Compete: Towards Verification Style Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | VGaokao is a verification style reading comprehension dataset for Chinese language tests requiring advanced language understanding skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a new extract-integration-compete approach to extract complementary evidence from Chinese Language tests of Gaokao and a pairwise competition to push models to learn the subtle difference between similar text pieces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on VGaokao with retrieved complementary evidence while having the merits of efficiency and explainability. |
Exploring Distantly-Labeled Rationales in Neural Network Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on distantly-labeled rationales, ignoring the potential important non-rationale words and not distinguishing the importance of different rationale words. |
| Approach: | They propose two novel auxiliary loss functions to make better use of distantly-labeled rationales, which encourage models to maintain their focus on important words beyond labeled rationals (PINs) and alleviate redundant training on non-helpful rationale (NoIRs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods on two representative classification tasks while maintaining the ability to spread focus to other unlabeled important words. |
Cross-lingual Feature Extraction from Monolingual Corpora for Low-resource Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction models fail on low-resource language pairs due to insufficient initialization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn cross-lingual features from monolingual corpora for low-resource UBLI by integrating cross-linguistic representations with pre-trained word embeddings in a fully unsupervised initialization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on low-resource language pairs and improves representational ability and robustness of existing embedding models. |
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 Multimodal Entity Linking with Jaccard Distance-based Conditional Contrastive Learning and Contextual Visual Augmentation (2025.naacl-long)
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Cong-Duy T Nguyen, Xiaobao Wu, Thong Thanh Nguyen, Shuai Zhao, Khoi M. Le, Nguyen Viet Anh, Feng Yichao, Anh Tuan Luu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal entity linking use contrastive learning to align input sentences and entities, but are limited by their random negative sampling. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to match negative samples with similar attributes using JD-CCL . they also propose 'contextual visual-aid controllable patch transform' experimental results demonstrate the strong effectiveness of their method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to match negative samples with similar attributes on a multimodal knowledge graph. |
Concept-Based Label Embedding via Dynamic Routing for Hierarchical Text Classification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification focus on modeling the text, but the concept of sharing among classes has been ignored in previous work. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based method that explicitly represents the concept and model the sharing mechanism among classes for the hierarchical text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
AgentMove: A Large Language Model based Agentic Framework for Zero-shot Next Location Prediction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to apply large language models to zero-shot next location prediction tasks are limited due to their limited computational power. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic agentic prediction framework to achieve generalized next location prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the leading baseline by 3.33% to 8.57% across 8 out of 12 metrics. |
Correcting Language Model Bias for Text Classification in True Zero-Shot Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained language models outperform standard prompt learning in zero-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for annotating and filtering examples from unlabeled examples . they propose 'model bias validation' method that utilizes unlabed examples as validation set . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms standard prompt learning on six text classification tasks. |
From the One, Judge of the Whole: Typed Entailment Graph Construction with Predicate Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to construct entailment graphs suffer from severe sparsity issues due to limited corpora and the long-tail phenomenon of predicate distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage method to generate entailment graphs by generating new predicates and detecting enanglement relations among seed predicats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate high-quality graphs with high precision over state-of-the-art methods and boost the performance of down-stream inference tasks. |
CEAN: Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation for Event Extraction (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Event Extraction is a crucial yet arduous task in natural language processing (NLP), as its performance is hindered by laborious data annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation to promote low-resource learning and reduce data noise for event extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on the ACE2005 and ERE-EN datasets. |
Inductive Reasoning on Few-Shot Knowledge Graphs with Task-Aware Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current knowledge graph reasoning methods rely on extensive structural information to perform in these few-shot scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware language model that activates the language model’s in-context learning ability for structured KG tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in few-shot scenarios while reducing the inference time required by previous methods. |
Unlearning Backdoor Attacks for LLMs with Weak-to-Strong Knowledge Distillation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) can bridge the gap between large language models and downstream tasks, but is vulnerable to malicious attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a weak-to-strong unlearning algorithm based on feature alignment knowledge distillation to defend against backdoor attacks . they first train a small-scale language model through full-parameter fine-tuning to serve as the clean teacher model and then guide the large-scale poisoned student model in unlearning the backdoor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can unlearn backdoor features without compromising model performance. |
RoBGuard: Enhancing LLMs to Assess Risk of Bias in Clinical Trial Documents (2025.coling-main)
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Changkai Ji, Bowen Zhao, Zhuoyao Wang, Yingwen Wang, Yuejie Zhang, Ying Cheng, Rui Feng, Xiaobo Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to assess the risk of bias in RCTs focus on manually crafted prompts and a restricted set of simple questions, limiting their accuracy and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing Large Language Models to assess the risk of bias in RCTs by reformulation, document parsing and multi-expert collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the RoB-Item and RoB domains. |
Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness – Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for accessing information on the web. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments with 80 crowdworkers to compare LLMs with search engines . they ask LLM to provide contrastive information to reduce over-reliance on LLM . |
| Outcome: | The results show that LLMs can outperform search engines but not LLM explanations . the study shows that LMS explanations are not reliable replacements for reading retrieved passages compared to search engines alone. |
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. |
An Explicit-Joint and Supervised-Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Intent classification and slot filling are key building blocks in task-oriented dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit-joint and supervised-contrastive learning framework for few-shot intent classification and slot filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts intent and slot representations via bidirectional interactions and extends prototypical network to achieve explicit-joint learning. |
DIVE into MoE: Diversity-Enhanced Reconstruction of Large Language Models from Dense into Mixture-of-Experts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reconstruction of large language models overlook diversity among experts, leading to potential redundancy. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning-based expert reconstruction method that prunes a specific LLM and retrains it on routers, experts and normalization modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pruning and MoE reconstruction methods on Llama-style models with open-source training corpora. |
Entailment Graph Learning with Textual Entailment and Soft Transitivity (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Typed entailment graphs suffer from severe sparsity and unreliability of distributional similarity . enlargement relation is critical to semantic understanding and natural language inference . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn local entailment relations by recognizing textual enanglement between template sentences formed by typed CCG-parsed predicates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can model transitivity in entailment graphs to alleviate sparsity and improve performance over current methods. |
Beyond Scaling: Predicting Patent Approval with Domain-specific Fine-grained Claim Dependency Graph (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Scaling up language models has demonstrated predictable improvement and unprecedented abilities in many language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained cLAim depeNdency graph that captures the dependencies within the patent data and extends the embedding-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) they then explore prompt-based methods to harness proprietary LLMs' potential, but find the best results close to random guessing, underlining the ineffectiveness of model scaling-up. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph methods outperform the standard model scaling methods in the patent approval prediction task and show that they are cost-effective. |
SEA: Supervised Embedding Alignment for Token-Level Visual-Textual Integration in MLLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuanyang Yin, Yaqi Zhao, Yajie Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ke Lin, Jiahao Wang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Wentao Zhang, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most. |
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yichen Ouyang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chenghua Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Bochen Pang, Yaming Yang, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
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. |
CreditDecoding: Accelerating Parallel Decoding in Diffusion Large Language Models with Trace Credit (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Diffusion large language models generate text through iterative denoising with bidirectional attention, enabling richer contextual dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free parallel decoding method that fuses Trace Credit with current logits to boost the confidence of correct but underconfident tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 5.48 times speedup with +0.48 accuracy on LLaDA-8B and is orthogonal to mainstream inference optimizations. |
Breaking Block Boundaries: Anchor-based History-stable Decoding for Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Semi-autoregressive (Semi-AR) decoding suffers from inherent block constraints . naive lookahead decoding is unreliable, token stability closely correlates with convergence trend, and historical information is isolated. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, plug-and-play dynamic decoding strategy that monitors the stability of tokens in real time through dynamic anchors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces decoding steps by 80% while improving performance by 3.67% on the BBH benchmark. |
MeasHalu: Mitigation of Scientific Measurement Hallucinations for Large Language Models with Enhanced Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruijun Huang, Zhiqiao Kang, Yuxuan Zhu, Junxiong Li, Jiahao Zhao, Minghuan Tan, Feng Jiang, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit severe hallucinations, which undermine reliability of automated scientific document understanding systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for mitigating scientific measurement hallucinations through enhanced reasoning and targeted optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces hallucination rates and improves overall accuracy on the MeasEval benchmark. |
Thinking Traps in Long Chain-of-Thought: A Measurable Study and Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart (2026.findings-acl)
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null Chenkang, Fan Yu, Junjie Nian, Sihan Zhao, Zhuoka Feng, Zijun Yao, Wang Heng, Yu Minshen, Yixin Cao
| Challenge: | Experiments show that extended generation does not guarantee correctness . a recurring pattern in Long-CoT failures is a problem for large reasoning models . |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time control framework that truncates the trajectory before the trap segment and adaptively restarts decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TAAR improves reasoning performance without fine-tuning model parameters. |
Machine Reading Comprehension Using Structural Knowledge Graph-aware Network (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent large-scale datasets specify that external knowledge is required to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages external knowledge to construct sub-graphs for entities in machine comprehension context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ReCoRD dataset. |
“Is Whole Word Masking Always Better for Chinese BERT?”: Probing on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a Chinese model with whole word masking has no subword because each token is an atomic character. |
| Approach: | They propose to use whole word masking to mask all subwords corresponding to a word at once . they ask models to revise or insert tokens in a masked language modeling manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better when one character is inserted or replaced . the model trained with standard character-level masking performs best when one token is masked . |
PlaM: Training-Free Plateau-Guided Model Merging for Better Visual Grounding in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Zijing Wang, YongKang Liu, Mingyang Wang, Ercong Nie, Deyuan Chen, Zhengjie Zhao, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Yifei Zhang, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Multimodal instruction fine-tuning degrades textual reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs to mitigate this degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces multimodal instruction fine-tuning degradation by incorporating a plateau-guided model merging method into MLLMs. |
Dynamic Graph Navigation via Triplet Chains for Structure-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a strategy to mitigate hallucination and factual errors in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware RAG which achieves noise removal in retrieval through multi-chain graph navigation reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves noise removal in retrieval through multi-chain graph navigation reasoning (Trig-Nav) compared to baseline methods, it significantly improves the model’s performance, validating the effectiveness of this approach. |
Learning Dynamic Representations for Discourse Dependency Parsing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models characterize transition states by examining a certain number of elementary discourse units (EDUs) Existing work neglects the arcs obtained from the transition history. |
| Approach: | They propose to employ GAT-based encoder to learn dynamic representations for sub-trees constructed in previous transition steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains access to parsed EDUs through the obtained arcs, especially when handling lengthy text spans with complex structures. |
Jointly Learning Entity and Relation Representations for Entity Alignment (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment is a viable method for integrating heterogeneous knowledge among different knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Graph Convolutional Network-based framework for learning relation representations by embedding relation seeds into entities and incorporating relation approximation into entities to iteratively improve alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three real-world cross-lingual datasets. |
LGA: LLM-GNN Aggregation for Temporal Evolution Attribute Graph Prediction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on 1-hop neighborhood aggregation, lacking capability to capture complex structural interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates structural information into attribute embeddings through an attribute embedded loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvements over existing methods on real-world datasets. |
Things not Written in Text: Exploring Spatial Commonsense from Visual Signals (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models fail in many NLP tasks, but are ineffective in spatial commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a spatial commonsense benchmark that focuses on relative scales of objects and the positional relationship between people and objects under different actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms pretrained models in answering spatial questions. |
Agent-FLAN: Designing Data and Methods of Effective Agent Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on prompt engineering or framework scheduling of one/multiple LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate LLMs as agents into their training corpus by decomposition and redesigning the training corpu . they propose to use LLM-FLAN to effectively fine-tune LANguage models for Agents by reducing hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prior best models by 3.5% across agent evaluation datasets. |
Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference framework that introduces a neutral prosody bias and a uniform Classifier-Free Guidance that distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior linguistic accuracy and expressiveness without model retraining. |
SafeKey: Amplifying Aha-Moment Insights for Safety Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce a new paradigm of explicitly reasoning before answering, but they pose great safety risks against harmful queries and adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety aha moment that activates safety reasoning and leads to a safe response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to unseen jailbreak prompts while maintaining general abilities. |
A Pretraining Numerical Reasoning Model for Ordinal Constrained Question Answering on Knowledge Base (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases (KBs) can explicitly facilitate the QA process. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical reasoning model pretraining NumGNN and NumTransformer, guided by explicit self-supervision signals, to enhance numerical reasoning ability for IR-based KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two KBQA benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
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. |
Towards Reverse Engineering of Language Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Due to the vast amounts of data and computational resources required for model development, protecting the model’s parameters and training data has become an urgent and crucial concern. |
| Approach: | They define "reverse engineering" techniques as attacks on large language models and provide an in-depth analysis of them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks are described as “reverse engineering” techniques on LMs and provide an introduction to existing protective strategies. |
My Words Imply Your Opinion: Reader Agent-Based Propagation Enhancement for Personalized Implicit Emotion Analysis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current studies personalize emotion analysis by focusing on the author but neglect the impact of the intended reader on implicit emotional feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which incorporates reader feedback into implicit emotion analysis (IEA) they use large language models to create reader agents to simulate reader feedback . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in a text-centric environment. |
Does Recommend-Revise Produce Reliable Annotations? An Analysis on Missing Instances in DocRED (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction is a challenging task as it requires reasoning across multiple sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a recommend-revise scheme to reduce the workload of annotators by providing them with candidate relation instances from distant supervision to supplement and remove relational facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first large-scale and human-annotated dataset for relation extraction. |
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). |
Large Language Models are Complex Table Parsers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments and results on Complex Table QA datasets, i.e., the open-domain dataset HiTAB and the aviation domain dataset AIT-QA show that our approach significantly outperforms previous work on both datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 to address the specific challenges posed by Complex Table QA by reconstructing tables into tuples and using prompt templates to create dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous work on complex table parsing datasets and leads to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. |
Exploring the Hidden Reasoning Process of Large Language Models by Misleading Them (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Guanyu Chen, Peiyang Wang, Yizhou Jiang, Yuqian Liu, Chujie Zhao, Ying Fang, Tianren Zhang, Feng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing large language models can perform abstract reasoning tasks but are they actually engaging in rule-based reasoning beyond mere memorization? |
| Approach: | They propose a method to examine whether large language models perform abstract reasoning . they fine-tune the model to learn those contradictory rules and assess its generalization ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach examines whether large language models perform abstract reasoning by altering their original understanding of fundamental rules. |
Minimal, Local, and Robust: Embedding-Only Edits for Implicit Bias in T2I Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | EmbEdit is a text-to-image editing method that only fine-tunes the word token embedding (WTE) of the target object. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to edit implicit assumptions and priors in text-to-image models without affecting unrelated objects or degrading overall performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods in various models, tasks, and editing scenarios. |
Attend, Select and Eliminate: Accelerating Multi-turn Response Selection with Dual-attention-based Content Elimination (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models can be used to perform multi-turn response selection, but they can be expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework and a strategy that progressively selects and eliminates unimportant content under context-response dual-attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can effectively speed-up SOTA models without much performance degradation and shows a better trade-off between speed and performance than previous methods. |
SportReason: Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning across Tables and Text for Sports Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for retrieval-augmented reasoning on numerical sports questions focus on one or two evidence units. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for retrieval-augmented reasoning on numerical sports questions . they evaluate existing retrievers and rerankers, along with agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks focus on the sports domain because it offers rich multi-modal resources. |
Counter-Interference Adapter for Multilingual Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual machine translation suffer from performance degradation, resulting in a single model being inferior to separately trained bilingual models on resource-rich languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based model with a small parameter overhead for multilingual machine translation that outperforms strong multilingual baselines on 64 of 66 language directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong multilingual baselines on 64 of 66 language directions, 42 of which have above 0.5 BLEU improvement. |
ChildEval:WHEN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS MEET CHILDREN’S PERSONALITIES (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in effectively understanding and generating human language, leading to a revolutionary era in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to infer and follow child-centered preferences in long-context conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark spans five top-level and fourteen sub-level categories covering children’s daily lives and development. |
Lattice-BERT: Leveraging Multi-Granularity Representations in Chinese Pre-trained Language Models (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models process text as a sequence of characters, ignoring more coarse granularity, e.g., words. |
| Approach: | They propose a new pre-training paradigm for Chinese that incorporates word representations along with characters and can model a sentence in a multi-granular manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can bring an average increase of 1.5% under the 12-layer setting, which achieves new state-of-the-art among base-size models on the CLUE benchmarks. |
CBP-Tuning: Efficient Local Customization for Black-box Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Customized black-box prompt tuning is a new approach to customize large language models . however, as models grow, the resources required for training and deployment become increasingly expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates efficient local customization while preserving bidirectional privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework facilitates efficient local customization while preserving bidirectional privacy. |
T-Eval: Evaluating the Tool Utilization Capability of Large Language Models Step by Step (2024.acl-long)
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Zehui Chen, Weihua Du, Wenwei Zhang, Kuikun Liu, Jiangning Liu, Miao Zheng, Jingming Zhuo, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing studies evaluate the tool utilization ability of large language models based on the final output or only consider the single-step tool calling. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to evaluate the tool utilization capability of large language models (LLMs) they decompose the tool usage into multiple sub-processes, including instruction following, planning, reasoning, retrieval, understanding, and review. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits consistency with the outcome-oriented evaluation and provides a more fine-grained analysis of the capabilities of LLMs. |
Learning to Look at the Other Side: A Semantic Probing Study of Word Embeddings in LLMs with Enabled Bidirectional Attention (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in language understanding and generation tasks, but their application in text embedding tasks has been relatively slow due to the constraints of the unidirectional attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose to enable bidirectional attention in LLMs to improve their ability to represent subsequent context but weaken their utilization of preceding context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the LLMs’ ability to represent subsequent context but weakens their utilization of preceding context, while contrastive learning training can help to maintain both abilities. |