Papers by Furu Wei
WavLLM: Towards Robust and Adaptive Speech Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shujie Hu, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Lingwei Meng, Hongkun Hao, Jing Pan, Xunying Liu, Jinyu Li, Sunit Sivasankaran, Linquan Liu, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their scope to encompass multimodal functions. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and adaptive speech large language model with dual encoders . they validate the model on universal speech benchmarks and apply it to specialized speech-question-answer datasets based on a CoT approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size. |
Snapshot-Guided Domain Adaptation for ELECTRA (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing domain-specific knowledge of domain-related tasks is lacking in pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptation method which can dynamically select domain-specific tokens and guide the discriminator to emphasize them, without introducing new training parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture domain-specific knowledge of domain-related tasks without introducing new training parameters. |
Harvesting and Refining Question-Answer Pairs for Unsupervised QA (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research attempts to extend unsupervised question answering to settings with few or no labeled data available. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to improve unsupervised question answering . first, they harvest lexically and syntactically divergent Wikipedia questions to automatically construct a corpus of question-answer pairs . second, they take advantage of the QA model to extract more appropriate answers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous unsupervised approaches by a large margin and is competitive with early supervised models. |
Language Models as Inductive Reasoners (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to induce natural language rules from natural language facts using natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. |
Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization (2025.acl-long)
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Lingwei Meng, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Bing Han, Shujie Hu, Yanqing Liu, Jinyu Li, Sheng Zhao, Xixin Wu, Helen M. Meng, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | MELLE is a novel language modeling approach for text-to-speech synthesis that generates continuous tokens from text . authors demonstrate that it reduces the need for vector quantization and improves model robustness . |
| Approach: | They propose to autoregressively generate continuous mel-spectrogram frames directly from text condition, bypassing vector quantization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance across multiple metrics and is more streamlined. |
Two Pathways to Truthfulness: On the Intrinsic Encoding of LLM Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
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Wen Luo, Guangyue Peng, Wei Li, Shaohang Wei, Feifan Song, Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Xingxing Zhang, Jing Jin, Furu Wei, Houfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Previous work shows that large language models generate hallucinations, yet the origins and mechanisms of these signals remain unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to validate and disentangle two different pathways for truthfulness cues . they also propose to use the same mechanism to derive self-contained evidence from the generated answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed applications improve hallucination detection performance by integrating two different inputs. |
EdgeFormer: A Parameter-Efficient Transformer for On-Device Seq2seq Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show EdgeFormer can effectively outperform previous parameter-efficient Transformer baselines and achieve competitive results under both the computation and memory constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient Transformer for on-device seq2seq generation that uses two novel principles for cost-effective parameterization. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that EdgeFormer outperforms the previous parameter-efficient Transformers and achieves competitive results under both the computation and memory constraints. |
Distilled Dual-Encoder Model for Vision-Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed cross-modal attention distillation is crucial to the success of our framework. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that distills knowledge of fusion-encoder teacher into dual-encoding student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is competitive with the fusion-encoder teacher model in performance, but suffers from a lack of deep cross-modal interactions. |
CROP: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Multilingual Labeled Sequence Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jian Yang, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuwei Yin, Li Dong, Dongdong Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Zhoujun Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) suffers from the scarcity of annotated training data, especially for low-resource languages without labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual entity projection framework to enable zero-shot cross-linguistic NER with the help of a multilingual labeled sequence translation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline method on two benchmarks by a large margin of +3 7 F1 scores and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA (2022.acl-long)
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Zewen Chi, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Bo Zheng, Saksham Singhal, Payal Bajaj, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | ELECTRA-style tasks are used to pretrain cross-lingual models for NLP tasks . masked language modeling tasks require massive computation resources, rendering such models quite expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose to use ELECTRA-style tasks to pre-train a cross-lingual language model . they propose to pretrain the model on multilingual and parallel corpora . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cross-lingual understanding tasks with much less computation cost. |
Attention Temperature Matters in Abstractive Summarization Distillation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent progress of abstractive text summarization relies on large pre-trained sequence-to-sequence Transformer models, which are computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill large Transformer summarization models into smaller ones with minimal performance loss by manipulating attention temperatures in Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms vanilla pseudo-labeling based methods on three summarization datasets and is shorter and more abstractive. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Neural Machine Translation with Multilingual Pretrained Encoders (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on improving cross-lingual transferability of NMT model is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages a multilingual pretrained encoder to improve cross-lingual transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms mBART and m2m-100 on a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer task. |
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
ShifCon: Enhancing Non-Dominant Language Capabilities with a Shift-based Multilingual Contrastive Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Chenming Shang, Sizhe Wang, Dongdong Zhang, Yiyao Yu, Feng Yao, Renliang Sun, Yujiu Yang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Experiments show that ShifCon significantly enhances the performance of non-dominant languages due to the imbalance in training data across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a Shift-based multilingual Contrastive framework that aligns the internal forward process of other languages toward that of the dominant one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance of non-dominant languages, particularly for low-resource ones. |
XDoc: Unified Pre-training for Cross-Format Document Understanding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models target one document format at a time, making it difficult to combine knowledge from multiple document formats. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified pre-trained model which deals with different document formats in a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or even better performance on a variety of downstream tasks compared with the individual pre-trained models. |
Attention-Guided Answer Distillation for Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reading comprehension systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from an ensemble to a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the teacher on adversarial datasets and NarrativeQA benchmarks. |
Pre-training for Abstractive Document Summarization by Reinstating Source Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive document summarization models are often trained on limited supervised data . authors present three objectives for pretraining abstractive summarizing models . |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a SEQ2SEQ based abstractive summarization model on unlabeled text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two benchmark summarization datasets with 19GB of text . the goal is sentence reordering, next sentence generation and masked document generation . |
Respond in my Language: Mitigating Language Inconsistency in Response Generation based on Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong instruction understanding ability across multiple languages, but are easily biased towards English in instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model with Pseudo-Inconsistent Penalization to prevent the model from generating English responses when given non-English language prompts during training and prior Enhanced decoding to improve the language consistency of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly improve the language consistency of the model without multilingual data. |
Multilingual Agreement for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that only use auxiliary languages to encourage multilingual agreement ignore the relationships between different language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual agreement-based method which explicitly models the agreement between different translation directions by randomly substituting some fragments of the source language with their counterpart translations of auxiliary languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the multilingual translation task of 10 language pairs. |
TableBank: Table Benchmark for Image-based Table Detection and Recognition (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for table detection and recognition are limited to document types and layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a table detection and recognition dataset with weak supervision from Word and Latex documents on the internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 417K high quality labeled tables and is publicly available. |
Beyond Preserved Accuracy: Evaluating Loyalty and Robustness of BERT Compression (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on compression of pretrained language models usually use preserved accuracy as the metric for evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose two new metrics that measure how closely a compressed model mimics the original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics measure how closely a compressed model (i.e., student) mimics the original model (e.g., teacher). |
Allocating Large Vocabulary Capacity for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models require a more expressive vocabulary to represent all languages . however, increasing the vocabulary size significantly slows down the pre-training speed . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm VoCap to determine the desired vocabulary capacity of each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves cross-lingual model pre-training while reducing side effects of increasing vocabulary size. |
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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Wentao Deng, Jiahuan Pei, Keyi Kong, Zhe Chen, Furu Wei, Yujun Li, Zhaochun Ren, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren
| Challenge: | Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models. |
| Approach: | They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. |
Can Monolingual Pretrained Models Help Cross-Lingual Classification? (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual pretrained language models have shown impressive results for cross-lingual transfer, but due to the constant model capacity, multilingual pre-training usually lags behind the monolingual competitors. |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer the knowledge from monolingual pretrained models to multilingual ones to improve zero-shot cross-lingual classification by using machine translation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform vanilla multilingual fine-tuning on two cross-lingual classification benchmarks. |
Revamping Multilingual Agreement Bidirectionally via Switched Back-translation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Current multilingual agreement (MA) methods require parallel data between multiple language pairs, which is not always realistic and optimize the agreement in an ambiguous direction, which hampers the translation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multilingual agreement framework that optimizes agreement bidirectionally with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves strong baselines on the task of multilingual neural machine translation with three benchmarks: TED Talks, News, and Europarl. |
Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive multilingual capability, but their performance varies substantially across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic template prompt that stimulates cross-lingual and logical reasoning skills to enhance task performance across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual capability across languages and covers high-resource and low-resourced languages. |
Blow the Dog Whistle: A Chinese Dataset for Cant Understanding with Common Sense and World Knowledge (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Cant is important for understanding advertising, comedies and dogwhistle politics . currently, there are very few resources available for the research of cant . |
| Approach: | They propose a large and diverse dataset for creating and understanding cant from a computational linguistics perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to test word embedding similarity and pretrained language models. |
HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a promising alternative to expensive human evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . they decompose a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . it decomposes a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . the framework is efficient to train and more explainable than relying solely on prompts . |
mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Saksham Singhal, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multilingual T5 pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on monolingual texts, but it has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a partially non-autoregressive objective for text-to-text pre-training and propose mT6 to improve cross-lingual transferability over multilingual T5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves cross-lingual transferability over existing models. |
Learning to Ask Unanswerable Questions for Machine Reading Comprehension (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive reading comprehension are not good at deciding whether no answer is presented in the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation technique by automatically generating relevant unanswerable questions according to an answerable question paired with its corresponding paragraph that contains the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset than the baseline model and the BERT-large model. |
CLIP Models are Few-Shot Learners: Empirical Studies on VQA and Visual Entailment (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Previously, CLIP was only regarded as a powerful visual encoder. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to boost CLIP's few-shot performance on a visual entailment task without introducing any additional pre-training procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy achieves competitive zero/few-shot results on visual question answering and visual entailment tasks without introducing any additional pre-training procedure. |
GanLM: Encoder-Decoder Pre-training with an Auxiliary Discriminator (2023.acl-long)
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Jian Yang, Shuming Ma, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Haoyang Huang, Yuwei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Liqun Yang, Furu Wei, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods underutilize the benefits of language understanding for generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a GAN-style model for encoder-decoder pre-training with an auxiliary discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing pre-trained models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Learning to Refine: Self-Refinement of Parallel Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qibin Wang, Pu Zhao, Shaohan Huang, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Furu Wei, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to test-time scaling are limited due to the quality of candidate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relative improvement of self-refinement beyond majority voting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmarks over other methods. |
Tuna: Instruction Tuning using Feedback from Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLms like LLaMA have shown to be cost-effective for generating better responses . however, the instruction-tuned model has only seen one response per instruction . |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune an instruction-tuned LLM using probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking approaches to increase the likelihood of generating better responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Super Natural Instructions, LMentry and Vicuna QA. |
Se2: Sequential Example Selection for In-Context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has explored the selection of examples for in-context learning, neglecting the internal relationships between examples and exist an inconsistency between training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential-aware method that leverages the LLM’s feedback on varying context, aiding in capturing inter-relationships and sequential information among examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 23 NLP tasks show that Se2 surpasses baselines and achieves 42% relative improvement over random selection. |
Inspecting Unification of Encoding and Matching with Transformer: A Case Study of Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that unified model outperforms other models that treat encoding and matching separately. |
| Approach: | They evaluate a unified model with Transformer layers for machine reading comprehension . they find that the model learns different modeling strategies compared with previous models . |
| Outcome: | The unified model outperforms models with Transformer layers on the machine reading comprehension task. |
Rectified Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Sun, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Yuqing Xia, Jian Chen, Yizhao Gao, Shijie Cao, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency but suffer from KV cache misalignment, resulting in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines block-sparse attention with periodic dense rectification to bound error accumulation and preserve alignment with the pretraining distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning, language modeling, and retrieval tasks show that ReSA achieves near-lossless generation quality with significantly improved efficiency. |
Examining False Positives under Inference Scaling for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in language models have led to significant improvements in mathematical reasoning across benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They analyze the prevalence of false positives in language models by using heuristic evaluation methods . they find that false positive models produce correct final answers but with flawed deduction paths . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance improvements are based on the proposed model and its evaluation metrics. |
XFUND: A Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Visually Rich Form Understanding (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on multimodal pre-training for visually rich document understanding tasks has focused on the English domain while neglecting the importance of multilingual generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal pre-trained model for multilingual document understanding which bridges the language barriers for visually rich document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing cross-lingual pre-trained models on the XFUND dataset on visual document understanding tasks. |
Video Dialog via Progressive Inference and Cross-Transformer (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual dialog methods use RNN to encode the dialog history as a vector representation . a new method for video dialog is proposed, which progressively updates query information based on dialog history and video content until the agent think the information is sufficient and unambiguous. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which progressively updates query information based on dialog history and video content until the agent thinks it is sufficient and unambiguous. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to infer video dialog answers on large-scale datasets. |
Low-code LLM: Graphical User Interface over Large Language Models (2024.naacl-demo)
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Yuzhe Cai, Shaoguang Mao, Wenshan Wu, Zehua Wang, Yaobo Liang, Tao Ge, Chenfei Wu, WangYou WangYou, Ting Song, Yan Xia, Nan Duan, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Low-code LLM is a visual programming interface that allows users to incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-LLM interaction framework that incorporates low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables users to incorporate ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. |
Assessing Dialect Fairness and Robustness of Large Language Models in Reasoning Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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Fangru Lin, Shaoguang Mao, Emanuele La Malfa, Valentin Hofmann, Adrian de Wynter, Xun Wang, Si-Qing Chen, Michael J. Wooldridge, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | a study aims to assess the fairness and robustness of Large Language Models in dialectal queries . speakers of "non-standard" dialects are known to experience implicit and explicit discrimination . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to assess the fairness of large language models in dialects . they hire speakers with computer science backgrounds to rewrite seven popular benchmarks based on AAVE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that most models show significant brittleness and unfairness to queries in AAVE. |
GeAR: Generation Augmented Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Liu, Shaohan Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Furu Wei, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Document retrieval techniques are used to compute semantic similarity between a query and documents, but the scalar similarity fails to reflect enough information, hindering the interpretation of retrieval results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that pretrained language models are good at recalling factual knowledge without fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify neurons that express factual knowledge in pretrained Transformers by filling-in-the-blank cloze queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to edit, erase, and update factual knowledge without fine-tuning. |
TRIP: Accelerating Document-level Multilingual Pre-training via Triangular Document-level Pre-training on Parallel Data Triplets (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyuan Lu, Haoyang Huang, Shuming Ma, Dongdong Zhang, Wai Lam, Zhaochuan Gao, Anthony Aue, Arul Menezes, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual sequence-to-sequence pre-training rely on monolingual corpora and sometimes synthetic document-level bilingual corporata. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage document-level trilingual parallel corpora to improve sequence-to-sequence multilingual pre-training by using a novel method called Grafting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores on three multilingual document-level machine translation benchmarks and one cross-lingual abstractive summarization benchmark. |
Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Jiahai Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a tailored learning approach to distill the exclusive reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate democratization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability by leveraging the black-box model as a reasoning teacher. |
Textual Aesthetics in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on image aesthetics have focused on content correctness and helpfulness of responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual aesthetics-powered fine-tuning method that leverages textual visual aesthetics without compromising content correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves aesthetic scores and performs well on general evaluation datasets. |
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer of Prompt-based Tuning with a Unified Multilingual Prompt (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on monolingual prompts, but we study multilingual prompt for multilingual models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a unified prompt for all languages, called UniPrompt, to alleviate the effort of designing different prompts for multiple languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in the zero-shot cross-lingual setting. |
At Which Level Should We Extract? An Empirical Analysis on Extractive Document Summarization (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that extracting sentences at sentence level is not the best solution for document summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract sub-sentential units based on the constituency parsing tree and a neural extractive model which leverages the sub-sensential information and extracts them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs competitively compared to full sentence extraction under automatic and human evaluations. |
Neural Open Information Extraction (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing Open IE systems are built on hand-crafted patterns from syntactic parsing, yet they face errors in propagation and compounding at each stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural Open IE approach with an encoder-decoder framework . they propose to learn highly confident arguments and relation tuples bootstrapped from a state-of-the-art Open ie system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods while maintaining comparable computational efficiency. |
VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, yet most remain English-centric . scaling multilingual multimodal instruction tuning is limited by the scarcity and high cost of non-English image–text supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment by composing complementary task vectors over a shared LLM backbone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with a fully multimodally trained model using less than 2% of the text data. |
Pre-training Language Model as a Multi-perspective Course Learner (2023.findings-acl)
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Beiduo Chen, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Wu Guo, Zhenhua Ling, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA’s average performance by 2.8% and 3.2% absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective course learning method to fetch many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ELECTRA's performance on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks and overshadows recent advanced ELECL-style models under the same settings. |
Instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction with Shallow Aggressive Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve online inference efficiency of the Transformer for instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) are sequenceto-sequence (seq2sequ) and sequenceto sequence (saq2eq) |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to improve the online inference efficiency of the Transformer model for instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) it aggressively decodes as many tokens as possible in parallel instead of always decoding only one token in each step to improve computational parallelism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results in English and Chinese benchmarks with 10x speedup over the Transformer-big model. |
xMoCo: Cross Momentum Contrastive Learning for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to find relevant passages using sparse keywords are not effective for open domain question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a new contrastive learning method for learning a dual-encoder model for question-passage matching using a large pool of negative samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maintains large pool of negative samples and optimizes question-to-passage and passage-to question matching tasks. |
Improving the Efficiency of Grammatical Error Correction with Erroneous Span Detection and Correction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the efficiency of GEC are not efficient enough for GEC. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-independent approach to improve the efficiency of GEC by dividing the task into two subtasks: ESD and ESC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs comparably to conventional seq2seq approaches in English and Chinese GEC benchmarks with less than 50% time cost for inference. |
Memory-Efficient Differentiable Transformer Architecture Search (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current neural architecture search methods suffer from huge computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible recursive backpropagation algorithm that uses the last layer to store the outputs of the network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms standard Transformers on three sequence-to-sequence datasets. |
Neural Latent Extractive Document Summarization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization paradigms focus on extractive summarizing based on sentence level labels . |
| Approach: | They propose a latent variable extractive model where sentences are viewed as latent variables and sentences with activated variables are used to infer gold summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a strong extractive baseline trained on rule-based labels and performs competitively with several recent models. |
Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training for Neural Response Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dialogue systems are labor-intensive and difficult to scale up. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training method for neural response generation that leverages an adversarial training paradigm while taking advantage of N-best response candidates from a retrieval-based system to construct the discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the vanilla Seq2Seq model and conventional adversarial training approach on a large scale dataset. |
Unleashing the Emergent Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs that only enhance reasoning abilities, but which lack factual hallucination and slow-thinking capabilities, argues that SPP is a cognitive synergist. |
| Approach: | They propose a Solo Performance Prompting (SPP) that transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces factual hallucination and maintains strong reasoning abilities on three challenging tasks . |
HIBERT: Document Level Pre-training of Hierarchical Bidirectional Transformers for Document Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural extractive summarization models employ hierarchical encoders with inaccurate sentence-level labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train a hierarchical encoder with unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms its initialized counterpart by 1.25 ROUGE on CNN and 2.0 ROUGEE on a version of New York Times dataset. |
SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training text and speech are based on unlabeled audio data. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model that connects speech encoders and text decoders with a shared unit encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on automatic speech recognition and speech translation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the LibriSpeech ASR and MuST-C ST tasks. |
Neural Label Search for Zero-Shot Multi-Lingual Extractive Summarization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to translate sentences to other languages using heuristics are challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that learns hierarchical weights for different sets of labels and applies them to other languages to translate them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate English datasets to other languages and obtain different sets of labels again using heuristics. |
LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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Yang Xu, Yiheng Xu, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Furu Wei, Guoxin Wang, Yijuan Lu, Dinei Florencio, Cha Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Min Zhang, Lidong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training tasks for text and layout are effective in visually-rich document understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine pre-training tasks with a multi-modal model to model interaction between text, layout and image in a single multi-module framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin on visual-rich document understanding tasks. |
LayoutReader: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Reading Order Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reading order detection are too laborious to annotate large datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale dataset to annotate reading order information for document images . they use XML metadata to capture the reading order of WORD documents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs almost perfectly in reading order detection and improves both open-source and commercial OCR engines in ordering text lines in their results. |
DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for document layout analysis are based on rule-based or machine learning methods that ignore textual information. |
| Approach: | They present a benchmark document layout analysis dataset using a computer vision model . they build strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model trains on DocBank accurately recognize layout information for a variety of documents. |
Controllable Natural Language Generation with Contrastive Prefixes (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on controllable natural language generation has focused on fine-tuning existing models or using attribute discriminators. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework for controllable GPT2 generation that utilizes attribute-specific vectors to steer natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can guide generation towards desired attributes while keeping high linguistic quality. |
Retrieve, Rerank and Rewrite: Soft Template Based Neural Summarization (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization systems rely on the source text to generate summaries, which tends to work unstably. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing summaries as soft templates to guide the seq2seq model . they use a popular IR platform to Retrieve proper summary as candidate templates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of informativeness and readability. |
Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Machine Translation Pairs (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate error-corrected sentence pairs for improving grammatical error correction are not available. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate error-corrected sentence pairs for improving grammatical error correction based on machine translation models of different qualities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate multiple error-corrected sentence pairs from Chinese to English text. |
Jointly Learning to Repair Code and Generate Commit Message (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work performs code repair and commit message generation independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a cascaded method to repair program codes and generate commit messages in a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baselines on a buggy-fixed-commit dataset. |
NL2Lean: Translating Natural Language into Lean 4 through Multi-Aspect Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yue Fang, Shaohan Huang, Xin Yu, Haizhen Huang, Zihan Zhang, Weiwei Deng, Furu Wei, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Existing formal proof assistants rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to translate natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 . they use a model with basic translation ability to refine the model's reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks. |
THE-X: Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference with Homomorphic Encryption (2022.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Chen, Hangbo Bao, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Haoyi Zhou, Jianxin Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | enabling pre-trained models inference on ciphertext data is difficult due to the complex computations in transformer blocks. |
| Approach: | They propose an approximation approach for transformers which enables inference on ciphertext data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can infer pre-trained models on encrypted data with negligible performance drop but enjoy theory-guaranteed privacy-preserving advantage. |
Grammar-Based Patches Generation for Automated Program Repair (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Automated program repair (APR) aims to find an automatic solution to program language bugs without human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose a grammar-based rule-rule model which regards the repair process as the transformation of grammar rules and employs a tree-based self-attention approach to guarantee grammar correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a Java dataset in terms of generated code accuracy. |
PromptBERT: Improving BERT Sentence Embeddings with Prompts (2022.emnlp-main)
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Ting Jiang, Jian Jiao, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Furu Wei, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing research shows that BERT and RoBERTa are poor in sentence embeddings due to static token embeddable bias and ineffective BERT layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel contrastive learning method for better sentence embeddings by using a template denoising technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement compared to SimCSE and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting. |
Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning ability . despite the great success in performance, its working mechanism remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They explain language models as meta-optimizers and understand in-context learning as implicit finetuning . they find that Transformer attention has a dual form of gradient descent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict labels for unseen inputs without parameter updates . the proposed model outperforms smaller models with a single parameter update . |
MMLU-CF: A Contamination-free Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Qinzheng Sun, Shaoguang Mao, Xin Zhang, Ying Xin, Qiufeng Yin, Scarlett Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a contamination-free MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF which reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed MMLU-CF reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding (2023.acl-long)
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Ziheng Li, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Qiang Lou, Haizhen Huang, Jian Jiao, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-alignment pre-training framework that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-lingual sentence embedding on three cross-linguistic benchmarks. |
BERT-of-Theseus: Compressing BERT by Progressive Module Replacing (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel approach to compress neural networks by progressive module replacement is proposed . a number of techniques have been proposed to compress pretraining and fine-tuning models . |
| Approach: | They propose a model compression approach that divides BERT into modules and builds their compact substitutes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing knowledge distillation approaches on GLUE benchmark . it is based on a model that divides the original BERT into several modules and builds their substitutes . |
StableMoE: Stable Routing Strategy for Mixture of Experts (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing learning-to-route methods suffer from the routing fluctuation issue . with the model scale growing, training speed will go slower and memory requirements are heavy . |
| Approach: | They propose a Mixture-of-Experts technique that can scale up the model size of Transformers with an affordable computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing learning-to-route methods on language modeling and multilingual machine translation. |
Investigating Learning Dynamics of BERT Fine-Tuning (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that the fine-tuning process improves performance on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose two new pre-training tasks to improve the model performance on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a wide array of NLP tasks. |
Unsupervised Extractive Summarization by Pre-training Hierarchical Transformers (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document summarization use graphs and unlabeled documents . Existing models require labeled data, and it is expensive to create summarized documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to rank sentences using transformer attentions and pre-training objectives by unlabeled documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on unsupervised summarization and is less dependent on sentence positions. |
Pre-Training to Learn in Context (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are not explicitly trained to learn in context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance in-context learning by pre-training language models on a large collection of "intrinsic tasks" they evaluate the in-constitution learning performance of the model trained with PICL on seven widely-used text classification datasets and the Super-NaturalInstrctions benchmark . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms larger language models with nearly 4x parameters on seven widely-used datasets and the Super-NaturalInstrctions benchmark. |
Unsupervised Fine-tuning for Text Clustering (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text clustering fine-tune pre-trained models have been limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune pre-trained models unsupervisedly for text clustering by learning text representations and cluster assignments using a clustering oriented loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art results on three text clustering datasets. |
Automatic Grammatical Error Correction for Sequence-to-sequence Text Generation: An Empirical Study (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models have a weakness: they cannot always generate sentences without grammatical errors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use automatic grammatical error correction to improve seq2seq models . they conduct experiments on machine translation, formality style transfer, sentence compression and simplification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can improve grammaticality of generated text and improve formal style tasks. |
Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training via Sequence Span Rewriting (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text infilling objectives for pretrained language models require self-supervision by masking out tokens or spans in text. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend text infilling to a self-supervised sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Sequen) task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves the model's performance on various natural language generation tasks. |
Towards Making the Most of Cross-Lingual Transfer for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised neural machine translation systems can degrade when labeled data is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual pretraining and multilingual fine-tuning for facilitating cross-lingual transfer in zero-shot translation using a parallel dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on many-to-English translation by over 7.2 and 5.0 BLEU. |
On the Off-Target Problem of Zero-Shot Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite its success, multilingual neural machine translation suffers from the off-target issue, where the translation is in the wrong language. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-aware vocabulary sharing algorithm that can be used to increase the lexical distance between languages by isolating the vocab of different languages in the decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces off-target rate for 90 translation tasks from 29% to 8%, while improving overall BLEU score by an average of 1.9 points without extra training cost or sacrificing the supervised directions’ performance. |
Language Generation with Multi-Hop Reasoning on Commonsense Knowledge Graph (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches that integrate commonsense knowledge into pre-trained language models simply transfer relational knowledge while ignoring rich connections within the knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages structural and semantic information of the knowledge graph to generate commonsense-aware text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three text generation tasks that require reasoning over commonsense knowledge. |
Plug and Play Knowledge Distillation for kNN-LM with External Logits (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Despite the promising evaluation results by knowledge distillation (KD) in natural language understanding (NLU) and sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) tasks, KD for causal language modeling (LM) remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use external logits to improve a student's kNN-LM by leveraging teacher's knowledge at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves a student's kNN-LM in multiple language modeling datasets and improves perplexity. |
ResLoRA: Identity Residual Mapping in Low-Rank Adaption (2024.findings-acl)
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Shuhua Shi, Shaohan Huang, Minghui Song, Zhoujun Li, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method that adds residual paths during training and merges them together during inference to achieve better results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.5x faster convergence speed and improves performance by 14.3% on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks. |
Generating Commonsense Explanation by Extracting Bridge Concepts from Reasoning Paths (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks that use commonsense reasoning as multi-choice reading comprehension lack direct assessment to machine commonsence and impede its practicability to realistic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that first extracts the underlying concepts which are served as bridges in the reasoning chain and then integrates these concepts to generate the final explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in automatic and human evaluation. |
Shorten After You’re Right: Lazy Length Penalties for Reasoning RL (2026.findings-acl)
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Danlong Yuan, Tian Xie, Shaohan Huang, Huishuai Zhang, Zhuocheng Gong, Chong Luo, Furu Wei, Dongyan Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing shortening methods for long reasoning models rely on additional supervision or multi-stage post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a lazy length penalty that imposes length pressure on models without extra training stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces response length without extra training stages while maintaining or improving performance. |
ALYMPICS: LLM Agents Meet Game Theory (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Alympics provides a framework for simulating human-like strategic interactions with Large Language Model (LLM) agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework utilizing Large Language Models (LLM) agents for empirical game theory research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to study human-like strategic interactions with large language model (LLM) agents in a game on the multi-round auction of scarce survival resources. |
SemFace: Pre-training Encoder and Decoder with a Semantic Interface for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using pre-training methods for NMT models is difficult because of the cross-attention module . cross-linguistic embeddings are not used to pretrain a decoder . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic interface between pre-trained encoder and pre-train decoder to improve NMT performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on translation and unsupervised translation tasks. |
Little Giants: Synthesizing High-Quality Embedding Data at Scale (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Synthetic data generation is an increasingly popular way of training models without the need for large, manually labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns open-source small models to efficiently generate large-scale embedding data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models by using only 1/10 of the GPT API calls. |
Towards Stable and Effective Reinforcement Learning for Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) training with Mixture-of-Experts policies remains fragile and prone to reward collapse. |
| Approach: | They propose a router shift-based policy optimization method that computes a per-token router-shift ratio conditioned on the previously activated experts and applies stop-gradient and a lower-bound floor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance and greater stability than previous methods. |
Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for obtaining text embeddings require complex training pipelines . authors leverage proprietary LLMs to generate diverse synthetic data for text embeds based on 93 languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for obtaining high-quality text embeddings using only synthetic data and less than 1k training steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong performance on competitive text embedding benchmarks without using any labeled data. |
Instruction Pre-Training: Language Models are Supervised Multitask Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised multitask pre-training has been the key to the success of language models (LMs) however, scaling it in the post-training stage trends towards better generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments massive raw corpora with instruction-response pairs to pre-train LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework augments massive raw corpora with instruction-response pairs to pre-train LMs. |
Language-Specific Neurons: The Key to Multilingual Capabilities in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Wenyang Luo, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Furu Wei, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities demonstrated by LLMs, the understanding of how these abilities develop and function remains nascent. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel detection method to pinpoint language-specific neurons within LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating these neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can “steer” the output language of LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating language-specific neurons. |
Beyond English-Centric Bitexts for Better Multilingual Language Representation Learning (2023.acl-long)
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Barun Patra, Saksham Singhal, Shaohan Huang, Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song
| Challenge: | XY-LENT: X-Y bitext enhanced Language ENcodings achieves state-of-the-art performance over 5 cross-lingual tasks within all model size bands. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for building multilingual representation models that are competitive with existing models and more parameter efficient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms XLM-R XXL and is 5x and 6x smaller respectively. |
SimLM: Pre-training with Representation Bottleneck for Dense Passage Retrieval (2023.acl-long)
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Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Xiaolong Huang, Binxing Jiao, Linjun Yang, Daxin Jiang, Rangan Majumder, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | SimLM uses a simple bottleneck architecture that learns to compress the passage information into a dense vector through self-supervised pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective pre-training method for dense passage retrieval that learns to compress the passage information into a dense vector through self-supervised pre-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms multi-vector approaches on large-scale passage retrieval datasets and shows significant improvements over baselines. |
SCALE: Synergized Collaboration of Asymmetric Language Translation Engines (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a collaborative framework that connects a compact Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework that connects a Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both LLMs and supervised models in high-resource or challenging low-resourced settings. |
K-Level Reasoning: Establishing Higher Order Beliefs in Large Language Models for Strategic Reasoning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Strategic reasoning requires Large Language Model (LLM) agents to adapt their strategies dynamically in multi-agent environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables Large Language Models to achieve varying levels of strategic depth by recursive mechanisms that allow agents to form higher order beliefs about others' beliefs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to achieve varying levels of strategic depth, allowing agents to form higher order beliefs—beliefs about others’ beliefs. |
Scheduled DropHead: A Regularization Method for Transformer Models (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | DropHead is a structured dropout method for regularizing multi-head attention . DropHed drops entire attention heads during training to prevent overfitting . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured dropout method specifically designed for regularizing multi-head attention mechanism . DropHead drops entire attention heads during training to prevent overfitting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve transformer models by 0.9 BLEU score on translation task and around 1.0 accuracy for various text classification tasks. |
EventWiki: A Knowledge Base of Major Events (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases focus on static entities such as people, locations and organizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a new knowledge base resource called EventWiki which concentrates on major events . they show that EventWiki is a very useful resource for information extraction regarding events in NLP . |
| Outcome: | The proposed resource is the first knowledge base resource of major events. |
Multiview Identifiers Enhanced Generative Retrieval (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches use a numeric ID or text piece as the identifier, but these identifieres cannot cover a passage’s content well. |
| Approach: | They propose a new type of identifier that is generated based on the content of a passage and could integrate contextualized information that text pieces lack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs the best in generative retrieval on three public datasets. |
Fine-grained Coordinated Cross-lingual Text Stream Alignment for Endless Language Knowledge Acquisition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel information network decipherment paradigm is proposed for fine-grained coordinated cross-lingual text stream alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Burst Information Networks as media to represent text streams . they propose a simple yet effective information network decipherment algorithm with diverse clues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on bilingual lexicon extraction from coordinated text streams and can harvest high-quality alignments from large amounts of streaming data for endless language knowledge mining. |
Learning to Sample Replacements for ELECTRA Pre-Training (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that ELECTRA pretrains a discriminator to detect replaced tokens . despite compelling performance, there is no direct feedback loop from discriminator and generator to generator, making replacements biased to correct tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment sampling with a hardness prediction mechanism to encourage the discriminator to learn what it has not acquired. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ELECTRA pre-training on various downstream tasks. |
A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer (2023.acl-long)
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Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Barun Patra, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Alon Benhaim, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing Transformers can only deal with the in-distribution size of inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a relative position embedding to explicitly maximize attention resolution . they also use blockwise causal attention during inference for better resolution a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance in interpolation and extrapolation settings. |
Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation . yet, they struggle with translating low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that chained multilingual dictionaries to elicit translation abilities for LLMs . they show that CoD can significantly improve LLM translation by evoking more information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on ChatGPT and InstructGPT's translation abilities. |
mmE5: Improving Multimodal Multilingual Embeddings via High-quality Synthetic Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal embedding models encode multimedia inputs into latent vector representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize multimodal multilingual data using a multimodal large language model . they identify three criteria for high-quality synthetic multimodal data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on the MMEB Benchmark and the XTD benchmark. |
Neural Document Summarization by Jointly Learning to Score and Select Sentences (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Sentence scoring and sentence selection are two main steps in extractive document summarization systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural network framework for extractive document summarization by jointly learning to score and select sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art summarization models on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset. |
Visualizing and Understanding the Effectiveness of BERT (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has achieved strong performance in many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to visualize loss landscapes and optimization trajectories of fine-tuning BERT on specific datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance and generalization capability across tasks. |
Not All Metrics Are Guilty: Improving NLG Evaluation by Diversifying References (2024.naacl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Hongyuan Lu, Yuchen Jiang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tom Kocmi, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks with limited references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model’s hypotheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enrich evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of a single reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)
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Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks. |
Consistency Regularization for Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning (2021.acl-long)
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Bo Zheng, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Wenhui Wang, Zewen Chi, Saksham Singhal, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that consistency regularization improves cross-lingual fine-tuning . pre-trained cross-linguistic models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the other . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization . they use example consistency regularized to penalize prediction sensitivity to four types of data augmentations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves cross-lingual fine-tuning across tasks . it can be generalized to other target languages without additional training . |
MarkupLM: Pre-training of Text and Markup Language for Visually Rich Document Understanding (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing layout-based pre-training approaches are not easy to apply to VRDU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use markup languages as the backbone for document understanding tasks where text and markup information are jointly pre-trained. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on document understanding tasks. |
Calibrating LLM-Based Evaluator (2024.lrec-main)
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Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for large language models lack the ability to calibrate their outputs towards human preference. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage, gradient-free approach to calibrate an LLM-based evaluator toward human preference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves correlation with expert evaluation on multiple text quality evaluation datasets. |
Improving Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Models via Self-Labeled Word Alignment (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that denoising word alignment improves cross-lingual transferability . most applications and resources are still English-centric, making non-English users hard to access. |
| Approach: | They propose to denoise word alignment as a cross-lingual pre-training task . they first self-label word alignments for parallel sentences and then mask tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves cross-lingual transferability on token-level tasks, especially on question answering, and structured prediction. |
UPRISE: Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving Zero-Shot Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Junyu Bi, Yuefeng Zhan, Jianfeng Liu, Yujing Wang, Hao Sun, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but need for task-specific prompt engineering can hinder their generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and versatile retriever that automatically retrieves prompts for a given zero-shot task input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is universally applicable across tasks and models . it mitigates hallucination problem in chatGPT, and it improves even the strongest LLMs. |
MiniLMv2: Multi-Head Self-Attention Relation Distillation for Compressing Pretrained Transformers (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on deep self-attention distillation for natural language processing tasks is limited by computational resources and latency. |
| Approach: | They generalize deep self-attention distillation in MINILM by using only self- attention relation distillation for taskagnostic compression of pretrained Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art in a multilingual and multilingual teacher model. |
Chain-of-Reasoning: Towards Unified Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via a Multi-Paradigm Perspective (2025.acl-long)
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Yiyao Yu, Yuxiang Zhang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiao Liang, Hengyuan Zhang, Xingxing Zhang, Mahmoud Khademi, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Junjie Wang, Yujiu Yang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that LLMs rely on single-paradigm reasoning that limits their effectiveness across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that integrates multiple reasoning paradigms to enable synergistic collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current SOTA models in theorem proving tasks and the MATH benchmark in arithmetic tasks. |
Speculative Decoding: Exploiting Speculative Execution for Accelerating Seq2seq Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show draft-then-verify paradigm can achieve around 5x speedup for the popular Transformer architectures with comparable generation quality to beam search decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Spec-Drafter and Spec Verification to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding by combining a model optimized for efficient and accurate drafting and a reliable method for verifying the drafted tokens efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 5x speedup on seq2seq tasks with comparable generation quality to beam search decoding, refreshing the impression that draft-then-verify paradigm introduces only 1.4x2x speed up. |
Adapt-and-Distill: Developing Small, Fast and Effective Pretrained Language Models for Domains (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained models suffer from domain shift and are not optimal for specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a general approach to developing small, fast and effective pretrained models for specific domains by adapting off-the-shelf general pretrained model and performing task-agnostic knowledge distillation in target domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves better performance over the BERT BASE model in domain-specific tasks while 3.3 smaller and 5.1 faster than the BRT BASE. |
LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing embedding models support only 512 input tokens, hindering their application in scenarios requiring long inputs. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the performance of existing embedding models by using a new benchmark and a training-free context window extension strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extends the input window of existing models by several folds. |
Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sparse and dense retrieval have limited success on popular datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a query expansion approach that generates pseudo-documents by few-shot prompting large language models and then expands the query with generated pseudo-docs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the performance of BM25 on ad-hoc IR datasets by 3% to 15% without any model fine-tuning. |
UnihanLM: Coarse-to-Fine Chinese-Japanese Language Model Pretraining with the Unihan Database (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese and Japanese share many characters with similar surface morphology. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-Japanese pretrained masked language model with a coarse-to-fine training approach to exploit the shared knowledge across the languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective on mono- and cross-lingual Chinese and Japanese tasks. |
Bitnet.cpp: Efficient Edge Inference for Ternary LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Jinheng Wang, Hansong Zhou, Ting Song, Shijie Cao, Yan Xia, Ting Cao, Jianyu Wei, Shuming Ma, Hongyu Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | 1-bit large language models have spurred interest in ternary LLMs, but efficient edge inference is still scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference system optimized for 1-bit large language models . they propose a new library that facilitates sub-2-bits-per-weight inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed inference system achieves 6.25x speed increase over full-precision baselines and 2.32x over low-bit baselines. |
Learning to Retrieve In-Context Examples for Large Language Models (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve in-context learning performance are highly sensitive to the quality of the incontext examples provided. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to iteratively train dense retrievers that can identify high-quality in-context examples for large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance by retrieving examples with similar patterns, and the gains are consistent across LLMs of varying sizes. |
MoCa: Modality-aware Continual Pre-training Makes Better Bidirectional Multimodal Embeddings (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to embed multimodal models face limitations such as suboptimal causal attention in VLMs and limited diversity in training objectives and data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for transforming pre-trained VLMs into bidirectional multimodal embedding models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance across MMEB and ViDoRe-v2 benchmarks and exhibits strong scalability with both model size and training data on MMEF. |
Fluency Boost Learning and Inference for Neural Grammatical Error Correction (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Seq2seq models for grammatical error correction (GEC) have two limitations: (1) a seq2q model may not be well generalized with only limited error-corrected data; (2) a model may fail to completely correct a sentence with multiple errors through normal seq1sequeq inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a fluency boost learning and inference mechanism to improve the performance of seq2seq models for grammatical error correction (GEC) by generating fluency-boost sentence pairs during training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model improves on both CoNLL-2014 and JFLEG benchmark datasets. |
BERT-based Lexical Substitution (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lexical substitution tend to overlook good substitute candidates that are not the synonyms of the target words in the lexicals and fail to take into account the substitution’s influence on the global context of the sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end BERT-based lexical substitution approach which proposes and validates substitute candidates without using annotated data or manually curated resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs well in proposing and ranking substitute candidates, achieving the state-of-the-art results in both LS07 and LS14 benchmarks. |
InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.naacl-main)
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Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Nan Yang, Saksham Singhal, Wenhui Wang, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning cross-lingual representations are lacking in the field of NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves cross-lingual transferability on benchmarks. |