Papers by Han Chen

Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang

Challenge:	Prompt Engineering (PE) is renowned for improving IE performance through prompt modifications, but the realm of sample design for downstream fine-tuning remains unexplored.
Approach:	They propose a methodical approach to enhancing LLMs’ post-tuning performance by refining input, output, and reasoning designs.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms heuristic design strategies on three complex IE tasks with four additional LLMs.

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Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Redundancy Optimization for Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities, but most of them have very unbalanced performance across different languages.
Approach:	They propose to use question translation data to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities by using mechanistic interpretability methods.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves multilingual alignment even with unannotated answers in English and a wide range of languages even with instruction-tuned LLMs.

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Tianle Chen, Pengyu Cheng, Qiyuan Zhu, Jiacheng Wang, Bei Liu, Hao Gu, Ruijie Shen, Xiaofeng Hou, Sirui Han, Jiacheng Liu

SafeSwitch: Steering Unsafe LLM Behavior via Internal Activation Signals (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing research to improve CoT efficiency falls into three categories, each with distinct limitations.
Approach:	They propose a training-free framework that addresses both dimensions of CoT reasoning by applying a progressive precision reduction strategy coupled with an entropy-based confidence mechanism for adaptive termination.
Outcome:	Empirical results show that the proposed framework achieves 11.3 efficiency gain without compromising accuracy.

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Peixuan Han, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang

Sequential LLM Framework for Fashion Recommendation (2024.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Existing safety mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate to fully leverage their internal cognitive processes.
Approach:	They propose a framework that regulates unsafe outputs by utilizing the prober-based internal state monitor that actively detects harmful intentions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces harmful outputs by approximately 80% while maintaining strong utility.

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Han Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Tianlang Chen, Jiapeng Liu, Indu Indu, Henry Zou, Peng Dai, Roberto Galan, Michael Porter, Dongmei Jia, Ning Zhang, Lian Xiong

ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing fashion recommendation systems struggle with the unique challenges of the fashion domain.
Approach:	They propose a sequential fashion recommendation framework that leverages a pre-trained large language model enhanced with recommendation-specific prompts.
Outcome:	The proposed framework significantly improves fashion recommendation performance on Amazon fashion.

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Yize Zhang, Tianshu Wang, Sirui Chen, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Chaochao Lu

CollabKG: A Learnable Human-Machine-Cooperative Information Extraction Toolkit for (Event) Knowledge Graph Construction (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but their application in open-ended, knowledge-intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is limited.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval-augmented generation within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art KAR methods by up to 23.10% and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by upto 25.37%.

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Xiang Wei, Yufeng Chen, Ning Cheng, Xingyu Cui, Jinan Xu, Wenjuan Han

Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing IE tools lack multi-task support and automatic updates for KG and EKG construction.
Approach:	They propose a human-machine-cooperative IE toolkit for KG and EKG construction that unifies different IE subtasks and integrates LLMs as the assistant machine.
Outcome:	The proposed tool improves annotation quality, efficiency, and stability simultaneously.

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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

All Languages Matter: Understanding and Mitigating Language Bias in Multilingual RAG (2026.acl-long)

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.

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Dan Wang, Guozhao Mo, Yafei Shi, Cheng Zhang, Bo Zheng, Boxi Cao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing mRAG systems suffer from a language bias during reranking, systematically favoring English and the query’s native language.
Approach:	They propose a language-agnostic utility-driven reranker alignment technique to mitigate language bias during re-ranking.
Outcome:	The proposed approach mitigates language bias and consistently improves mRAG performance across languages.

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Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jie Lou, Wei Jia, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Boxi Cao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

CPT-Agent: A Cognitive Process Theory-driven Framework for Student Simulation in Writing Development (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to recognize entities in text are limited by the diversity of entity types and the lack of high-quality annotations.
Approach:	They propose an in-context learning-based NER approach that can inject in-const NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts on 4 few-shot NER datasets and significantly outperformed the Plms+initialized extractors.

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Yuhan Chen, Zizhuo Shen, Miaomiao Cheng, Xu Han, Jiefu Gong, Shijin Wang, Wei Song

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

Challenge:	Existing LLMs model overly capable learners who over-apply feedback, resulting in pedagogically implausible behavior.
Approach:	They propose a framework that decouples cognitive ability from writing proficiency and models their interaction during writing and revision.
Outcome:	The proposed model produces distinguishable proficiency levels and is consistent with instructional theories.

Understanding the Difficulty of Training Transformers (2020.emnlp-main)

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Liyuan Liu, Xiaodong Liu, Jianfeng Gao, Weizhu Chen, Jiawei Han

Modality Adaption or Regularization? A Case Study on End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.acl-short)

Challenge:	Admin (Adaptive model initialization) is more stable, converges faster, and leads to better performance.
Approach:	They propose a model initialization algorithm to stabilize early training and unleash its full potential in the late stage.
Outcome:	The proposed model initialization method stabilizes early training and unleashes full potential in late stage.

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Yuchen Han, Chen Xu, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	End-to-end speech translation models have limited training data and are often inefficient due to the inconsistency of length and representation between speech and text.
Approach:	They find that the "modality gap" between speech and text data is not a major problem in E2E ST . they decouple the encoder to speech encoder and text encoder, and they find that there is a 'capacity gap'
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves 29.0 for en-de and 40.3 for fr on the MuST-C dataset.

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Xiaochong Lan, Zhiguang Han, Yiming Cheng, Li Sheng, Jie Feng, Chen Gao, Yong Li

REInstruct: Building Instruction Data from Unlabeled Corpus (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for analyzing social media data lack a systematic integration of medical knowledge, causing a critical treatment gap.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to integrate medical knowledge into social media data.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can be used to distinguish depression from transient mood changes.

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Shu Chen, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for annotating instruction data are expensive and difficult to scale.
Approach:	They propose a method to automatically build instruction data from an unlabeled corpus without heavy reliance on proprietary LLMs and human annotation.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing methods on AlpacaEval leaderboard and other open-source methods.

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Qiushi Sun, Chengcheng Han, Nuo Chen, Renyu Zhu, Jingyang Gong, Xiang Li, Ming Gao

MemSearcher: Iterative Memory Integration for Search Agent via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing power on NLP tasks. however, tuning these models for downstream tasks usually requires exorbitant costs.
Approach:	They propose a black-box tuning technique that optimizes task-specific prompts without accessing gradients and hidden representations.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves performance under few-shot learning scenarios.

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Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Debing Zhang, Xianpei Han

Towards Understanding and Improving Knowledge Distillation for Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent LLM-based search agents often concatenate the full interaction history into the context, producing long and noisy inputs and increasing compute cost and memory overhead.
Approach:	They propose an agent framework that maintains a compact memory during multi-turn interactions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms strong history-concatenation (ReAct-style) baselines on a range of public datasets while maintaining nearly constant token counts across multi-turn interactions.

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Songming Zhang, Yunlong Liang, Shuaibo Wang, Yufeng Chen, Wenjuan Han, Jian Liu, Jinan Xu

The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge distillation techniques for neural machine translation lack special treatment on the top-1 information, which is limiting the potential of KD.
Approach:	They propose a method to distill knowledge from top-1 predictions of teachers and a technique to infuse more additional knowledge by distilling on the data without ground-truth targets.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the vanilla word-level KD and outperfies the existing methods on three different students with different capacity gaps.

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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen

LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance.

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Chi Han, Qifan Wang, Hao Peng, Wenhan Xiong, Yu Chen, Heng Ji, Sinong Wang

Exploring Mode Connectivity for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Currently, large language models (LLMs) train on short text segments due to the computational overhead quadratic in the input lengths of their Transformer architectures.
Approach:	They propose a method that allows LLMs pre-trained with 2K or 4K-long segments to generalize to up to 200M length inputs while retaining perplexity.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves 2.7 decoding speed up and 7.5 memory saving over the original model.

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Yujia Qin, Cheng Qian, Jing Yi, Weize Chen, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific Discovery (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found.
Approach:	They investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path.
Outcome:	The proposed model can be used to find low-loss paths between two minima, and to understand how their mode connectivity affects their task knowledge.

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Yu Zhang, Xiusi Chen, Bowen Jin, Sheng Wang, Shuiwang Ji, Wei Wang, Jiawei Han

The Side Effects of Being Smart: Safety Risks in MLLMs’ Multi-Image Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing surveys on scientific LLMs focus on one or two fields or a single modality.
Approach:	They survey 260 scientific LLMs and examine their architectures and pre-training techniques . they also discuss commonalities and differences between LLM architectures .
Outcome:	The proposed model architectures and evaluation techniques are used to improve scientific discovery.

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Renmiao Chen, Yida Lu, Shiyao Cui, Xuan Ouyang, Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Shumin Zhang, Chengwei Pan, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang

MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances in multimodal reasoning may pose new safety risks . evaluators neglect reasoningbased safety, where harm emerges only through MLLMs .
Approach:	They introduce a benchmark for multi-image reasoning safety that includes 2,676 instances . they find that models with more advanced multi- image reasoning are more vulnerable .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark consists of 2,676 instances covering 9 multi-image relations . the results show that models with more advanced multi- image reasoning are more vulnerable .

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Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li

A Multi-Perspective Analysis of Memorization in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing datasets for event understanding have limited coverage due to complexity of tasks.
Approach:	They propose a dataset that augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations . they propose 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation .
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction, and event relation extraction.

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Bowen Chen, Namgi Han, Yusuke Miyao

Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate the same sequences contained in the pre-train corpus, known as memorization.
Approach:	They analyze the relationship between memorization and outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) they show a sudden drop and increase in the frequency of input tokens when generating memorized/unmemorized sequences .
Outcome:	The proposed model can generate the same sequences contained in the pre-train corpus, and it can predict unmemorized tokens.

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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin

A Unified Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Model Towards Interpolation and Extrapolation (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation"
Approach:	They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC)

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Kai Chen, Ye Wang, Yitong Li, Aiping Li, Han Yu, Xin Song

DeepPresenter: Environment-Grounded Reflection for Agentic Presentation Generation (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for temporal knowledge graphs de-emphasize temporal correlations between facts sequences and ignore inferring clues from missing facts.
Approach:	They propose a Temporal PAth-based reasoning model that is robust to ambiguous temporal data.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms SOTA methods on the link prediction task.

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Hao Zheng, Guozhao Mo, Xinru Yan, Qianhao Yuan, Wenkai Zhang, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Challenge:	Existing presentation agents rely on predefined workflows and fixed templates to generate presentations.
Approach:	They propose an agentic framework that adapts to diverse user intents and iterative refinement based on observation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can be used to generate presentations with environmental observations.

SAGE: Steerable Agentic Data Generation for Deep Search with Execution Feedback (2026.findings-eacl)

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Fangyuan Xu, Rujun Han, Yanfei Chen, Zifeng Wang, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Vishy Tirumalashetty, Eunsol Choi, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee

WIKIGENBENCH:Exploring Full-length Wikipedia Generation under Real-World Scenario (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	High-quality, complex question-answer pairs are pivotal for training and evaluating capable deep search agents.
Approach:	They propose a pipeline that generates high-quality, difficulty-controlled deep search question-answer pairs for a given corpus and a target difficulty level.
Outcome:	The proposed pipeline generates high-quality, difficulty-controlled deep search question-answer pairs for a given corpus and a target difficulty level.

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Jiebin Zhang, Eugene J. Yu, Qinyu Chen, Chenhao Xiong, Dawei Zhu, Han Qian, Mingbo Song, Weimin Xiong, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Sujian Li

Temporal Scaling Law for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing efforts to generate Wikipedia articles for new events fall short of real-world application.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to generate Wikipedia articles for new events under real-world scenarios . they use systematic metrics and LLM-based metrics to assess verifiability, organization, and other aspects aligned with real-life scenarios.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks show that hierarchical-based methods generate more comprehensive content while fine-tuned methods achieve better verifiability.

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Yizhe Xiong, Xiansheng Chen, Xin Ye, Hui Chen, Zijia Lin, Haoran Lian, Zhenpeng Su, Wei Huang, Jianwei Niu, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding

Out-of-Distribution Detection via LLM-Guided Outlier Generation for Text-attributed Graph (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies have found that the test loss of LLMs scales as power-laws with model size, computational budget, and dataset size.
Approach:	They propose a concept of Temporal Scaling Law to study test loss of LLMs . they break down test loss into fine-grained token positions and develop a dynamic hyperbolic-law .
Outcome:	The proposed model predicts the test loss of LLMs as the training steps scale up.

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Xiangwei Lv, Mengze Li, Jingyuan Chen, Zhiang Dong, Sirui Han, Beishui Liao

LoRA-Flow: Dynamic LoRA Fusion for Large Language Models in Generative Tasks (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are widely used in the real world.
Approach:	They propose to use Large Language Models to generate OOD-nodes with high quality . they also use LLMs to integrate existing nodes with LLM-generated edges .
Outcome:	The proposed method performs well on samples outside the In-Distribution (ID) data, but it is difficult to obtain high-quality OOD samples in the real world.

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Hanqing Wang, Bowen Ping, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Yun Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via Superposition Concept Discrimination (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	LoRA-Flow uses lightweight modules to customize large language models for downstream tasks . previous work on LoRA combination relied on task-level weights for each involved LoRA .
Approach:	They propose a LoRA-Flow approach that uses dynamic weights to adjust the impact of different LoRAs.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms baselines with task-level weights on six generative tasks.

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Jiawei Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Yaojie Lu, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun

Text Style Transfer with Contrastive Transfer Pattern Mining (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify entities of target types with limited number of illustrative instances.
Approach:	They propose a superposition concept discriminator which solves the intrinsic generalization problem by an active learning paradigm.
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly improves few-shot named entity recognition (FS-NER) with minimal additional efforts.

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Jingxuan Han, Quan Wang, Licheng Zhang, Weidong Chen, Yan Song, Zhendong Mao

Weakly-Supervised Temporal Article Grounding (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for text style transfer only focus on the transformation between styles, yet they do not take into account that this transformation can be achieved via different hidden transfer patterns.
Approach:	They propose a novel approach which automatically mines hidden transfer patterns to improve TST . they use a clustering module to automatically discover hidden transfer pattern from the data .
Outcome:	The proposed method can be applied in a plug-and-play manner to enhance other methods to further improve their performance.

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Long Chen, Yulei Niu, Brian Chen, Xudong Lin, Guangxing Han, Christopher Thomas, Hammad Ayyubi, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang

CSMCIR: CoT-Enhanced Symmetric Alignment with Memory Bank for Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing VG models make unrealistic assumptions about how to ground video segments . a recent study has shown that video grounding can be useful for downstream applications .
Approach:	They propose a new task: Weakly-Supervised temporal Article Grounding (WSAG) given an article and a relevant video, WSAG aims to localize all "groundable" sentences to the video.
Outcome:	The proposed method is simple but effective, and it can be used in real-world applications.

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Zhipeng Qian, Zihan Liang, Yufei Ma, Ben Chen, Huangyu Dai, Yiwei Ma, Jiayi Ji, Chenyi Lei, Han Li, Xiaoshuai Sun

A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to search for images using single-modality are limited by representation space fragmentation.
Approach:	They propose a unified representation framework that achieves efficient query-target alignment . they introduce a multi-level Chain-of-Thought prompting strategy that guides MLMs to generate discriminative, semantically compatible captions for target images .
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves efficient query-target alignment through synergistic components.

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Kiran Ramnath, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Xuan Qi, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Sangmin Woo, Sullam Jeoung, Yawei Wang, Haozhu Wang, Han Ding, Yuzhe Lu, Zhichao Xu, Yun Zhou, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Qiaojing Yan, Yueyan Chen, Haibo Ding, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong

Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances in prompt engineering have created impediments for end users to adopt . however, prompt engineering remains an impedance due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices.
Approach:	They propose to define APO as a 5-part unifying framework and categorize all relevant works based on their salient features.
Outcome:	The proposed framework aims to improve the performance of large language models on various tasks.

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Yifan Yang, Bing Han, Hui Wang, Wei Wang, Ziyang Ma, Long Zhou, Zengrui Jin, Guanrou Yang, Tianrui Wang, Xu Tan, Xie Chen

PaperRegister: Boosting Flexible-grained Paper Search via Hierarchical Register Indexing (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for fine-grained speaking styles are limited in terms of accuracy, coverage, and naturalness.
Approach:	They propose a model that pre-trains with coarse captions and annotates with a pipeline that grounds captions in audio.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models with fine-grained style annotations . it integrates global and fine-granular supervision, enabling unified representations based on the proposed model .

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Zhuoqun Li, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun

Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing paper search systems lack detailed information to support finer-grained queries.
Approach:	They propose a paper-based index that transforms abstract-based corpus index into hierarchical index tree and offline can support paper search queries.
Outcome:	The proposed system achieves the SOTA performance and excels in fine-grained scenarios.

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Zhaorui Yang, Tianyu Pang, Haozhe Feng, Han Wang, Wei Chen, Minfeng Zhu, Qian Liu

From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that fine-tuning of large language models for specific tasks can be challenging . distribution shift during fine-timing can lead to performance degradation in general task capabilities .
Approach:	They propose a new approach that bridges the distribution gap between task datasets and LLMs by guiding fine-tuning with a distilled dataset generated by the model itself.
Outcome:	The proposed approach achieves comparable or superior performance on downstream tasks compared to the vanilla approach.

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Shan Wu, Bo Chen, Chunlei Xin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weipeng Zhang, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Xunliang Cai

SEP-MLDC: A Simple and Effective Paradigm for Multi-Label Document Classification (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD) can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets.
Approach:	They propose an unsupervised method which solves the semantic gap and the structure gap by leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding.
Outcome:	The proposed method can solve the semantic gap and structure gap on multiple datasets.

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Han Liu, Shuqin Li, Xiaotong Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang, Feng Zhang, Hongyang Chen, Hong Yu

Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods focus on optimizing document features, overlooking the potential of high-quality label features to enhance classification performance.
Approach:	They propose a multi-label document classification paradigm that utilizes large language models to expand the label content and generate pseudo-samples for the tail categories.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Bo Chen, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies on semantic parsing use Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) to train discriminative semantic parses.
Approach:	They propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm improves on two standard datasets and gets state-of-the-art performance over existing methods.

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Xiao Wang, Tianze Chen, Qiming Ge, Han Xia, Rong Bao, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang

Sequence-to-Action: End-to-End Semantic Graph Generation for Semantic Parsing (P18-1)

Challenge:	Existing methods for continual learning in language models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks.
Approach:	They propose an orthogonal low-rank adaptation approach for continual learning in language models that uses orthogons to learn sequentially.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on continual learning benchmarks and preserves generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks.

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Bo Chen, Le Sun, Xianpei Han

Contrastive Token Learning with Similarity Decay for Repetition Suppression in Machine Translation (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for semantic parsing are difficult to design and learn, especially in wideopen domains.
Approach:	They propose a neural semantic parsing approach which models semantic par- sing as an end-to-end semantic graph generation process.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on Overnight dataset and gets competitive performance on Geo and Atis datasets.

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Huangyu Dai, Ben Chen, Kaidi Chen, Ying Han, Zihan Liang, Wen Jiang

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

Challenge:	Neural machine translation (NMT) is pivotal for crosslingual conversation and trade . traditional solutions that penalize text redundancy or token reoccurrence have shown limited efficacy .
Approach:	They propose an algorithm that modulates suppression of tokens dynamically, informed by attention weights and inter-token distances.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in precision and generalizability.

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

TACLR: A Scalable and Efficient Retrieval-based Method for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification (2025.acl-long)

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

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Yindu Su, Huike Zou, Lin Sun, Ting Zhang, Haiyang Yang, Chen Li Yu, David Lo, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Jufeng Chen

Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition: An Empirical Baseline Study (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for product attribute value identification face critical challenges . seller-provided attribute values are often incomplete or inaccurate .
Approach:	They propose a retrieval-based method that uses taxonomy-aware contrastive learning . they use product profiles and candidate values to encode and retrieve attributes based on similarity .
Outcome:	The proposed method is based on a taxonomy-aware, hard negative sampling and adaptive inference with dynamic thresholds.

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Jiaxin Huang, Chunyuan Li, Krishan Subudhi, Damien Jose, Shobana Balakrishnan, Weizhu Chen, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han

Navigating the Infinite Dynamic Web Space: Effective In-Context Exploration via Cognitive Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to build named entity recognition systems with limited labeled data are lacking.
Approach:	They propose three orthogonal schemes to build named entity recognition systems when labeled data is limited.
Outcome:	The proposed NER systems outperform existing methods on few-shot and training-free settings.

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Guozhao Mo, Yanjiang Liu, Yafei Shi, Jiawei Chen, Yang Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Bo Zheng, Xianpei Han

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for dynamic web navigation rely on greedy strategies or value estimation, struggle to achieve effective backtracking and are heavily dependent on proprietary models.
Approach:	They propose a cognitive multi-agent collaboration framework that enhances cyberspace exploration capability through In-Context Exploration.
Outcome:	The proposed framework surpasses the proprietary model Claude-3.5 Sonnet on the WebArena benchmark.

SheetDesigner: MLLM-Powered Spreadsheet Layout Generation with Rule-Based and Vision-Based Reflection (2025.emnlp-main)

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Qin Chen, Yuanyi Ren, Xiaojun Ma, Mugeng Liu, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang

CaMML: Context-Aware Multimodal Learner for Large Models (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing automated layout models are ill-suited for spreadsheets, authors say . existing layout models treat components as rectangles with continuous coordinates . authors: spreadsheets are powerful tools for organizing and analyzing data .
Approach:	They formalize a spreadsheet layout generation task and introduce a framework for spreadsheet layouts . they use multimodal large language models to combine rule and vision reflection .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines in a spreadsheet layout generation task by 22.6%.

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Yixin Chen, Shuai Zhang, Boran Han, Tong He, Bo Li

AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)

Challenge:	a lightweight module for tuning large multimodal models is introduced . CaMML integrates contextual samples into large models, enabling them to make inferences .
Approach:	They introduce a lightweight module for tuning large multimodal models . they have developed two models that have shown exceptional performance .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms LLaVA-1.5 on ten widely recognized datasets with a noticeable margin.

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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs.
Approach:	They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction.
Outcome:	The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI.

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Ning Ding, Guangwei Xu, Yulin Chen, Xiaobin Wang, Xu Han, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu

AdaMARP: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Interaction Framework for General Immersive Role-Playing (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to few-shot named entity recognition (NER) focus on coarse-grained entities with few examples, while most unseen entities are fine-grounded.
Approach:	They present a human-annotated few-shot named entity recognition dataset . they construct benchmark tasks to assess the generalization capability of models .
Outcome:	The proposed model is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER data set.

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Zhenhua Xu, Dongsheng Chen, Shuo Wang, Jian Li, Chengjie Wang, Meng Han, Yabiao Wang

Challenge:	Existing LLMs lack immersion and adaptability, resulting in limited character orchestration and on-the-fly character introduction.
Approach:	They propose an LLM-based framework that allows actors to interact with users in an ongoing narrative.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms commercial LLMs in character consistency, environment grounding, and narrative coherence.

T2DR: A Two-Tier Deficiency-Resistant Framework for Incomplete Multimodal Learning (2025.findings-acl)

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Han Lin, Xiu Tang, Huan Li, Wenxue Cao, Sai Wu, Chang Yao, Lidan Shou, Gang Chen

KBAlign: Efficient Self Adaptation on Specific Textual Knowledge Bases (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing incomplete multimodal learning frameworks are inadequate for integrating multimodal data.
Approach:	They propose a framework for incomplete multimodal learning that is deficiency-resistant and provides two modules to address fine-grained deficiencies.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms the SOTA models on two well-known multimodal benchmarks.

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Zheni Zeng, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu, Ruobing Wang, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Self-describing Networks (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are limited and fine-tuning incurs prohibitive costs of external signals.
Approach:	They propose a self-supervised framework that enhances RAG systems through efficient model adaptation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves 90% of the performance gain obtained through GPT-4-supervised adaptation while relying entirely on self-annotation of much smaller models.

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Jiawei Chen, Qing Liu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

ConsistentChat: Building Skeleton-Guided Consistent Multi-Turn Dialogues for Large Language Models from Scratch (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing few-shot named entity recognition (NER) models capture information from limited instances while transferring useful knowledge from external resources.
Approach:	They propose a self-describing mechanism for few-shot NER which can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts.
Outcome:	The proposed model can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts and adaptively recognize entities on-demand.

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Jiawei Chen, Xinyan Guan, Qianhao Yuan, Mo Guozhao, Weixiang Zhou, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Xianpei Han

Language Model is Suitable for Correction of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions Recognition (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing instruction data synthesis methods focus on single-turn instructions and neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates.
Approach:	They propose a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing models trained on single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets.

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Zui Chen, Jiaqi Han, Chaofan Yang, Yi Zhou

Improving Arabic Diacritization with Regularized Decoding and Adversarial Training (2021.acl-short)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to handwritten mathematical expression recognition are limited by CFGs and pre-generated triplet data.
Approach:	They propose an architecture that integrates recognition and language features to output corrected sequences while optimizing with a string decoder recognition model.
Outcome:	The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CROHME datasets.

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Han Qin, Guimin Chen, Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song

InsightEval: An Expert-Curated Benchmark for Assessing Insight Discovery in LLM-Driven Data Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies regard auto-generated knowledge instances as gold references, which limits their effectiveness since they are not always accurate and inferior instances can lead to incorrect predictions.
Approach:	They propose to use regularized decoding and adversarial training to appropriately learn from noisy knowledge instances for Arabic diacritization.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models on two benchmark datasets even with flawed auto-generated knowledge.

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Zhenghao Zhu, Yuanfeng Song, Xing Chen, Chengzhong Liu, Cui Yakun, Caleb Chen Cao, Sirui Han, Yike Guo

Challenge:	Existing frameworks for data analysis and insight exploration are lacking in terms of benchmarks . existing frameworks suffer from format inconsistencies, poorly conceived objectives, and redundant insights.
Approach:	They propose a data-curation pipeline to construct a new dataset named InsightEval.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks highlight prevailing challenges in automated insight discovery and raise key findings to guide future research.

GSID: Generative Semantic Indexing for E-Commerce Product Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Haiyang Yang, Qinye Xie, Qingheng Zhang, Chen Li Yu, Huike Zou, Chengbao Lian, Shuguang Han, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen, Bo Zheng

LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application (2023.acl-demo)

Challenge:	Structured product information is a major bottleneck for the efficiency of e-commerce platforms.
Approach:	They propose a data-driven approach to generate product structured representations using product metadata.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that GSID can generate better product representations on real-world e-commerce platforms.

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Rindra Ramamonjison, Timothy Yu, Linzi Xing, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Xiaorui Li, Xiaojin Fu, Xiongwei Han, Yuanzhe Chen, Ren Li, Kun Mao, Yong Zhang

DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing systems that translate optimization formulas manually are cumbersome and time-consuming.
Approach:	They propose a system that converts optimization formulas from TeX document to solver language.
Outcome:	The proposed system helps operations research practitioners convert optimization formulations into solver modeling languages.

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Weijie Shi, Jipeng Zhang, Yaguang Wu, Jingzhi Fang, Shibo Zhang, Yao Zhao, Hao Chen, Ruiyuan Zhang, Yue Cui, Jia Zhu, Sirui Han, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou

Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact.
Approach:	They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency.

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Zhuoyun Du, Chen Qian, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Rennai Qiu, Yufan Dang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted various domains, especially through organized LLM-driven autonomous agents.
Approach:	They propose a framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various task-oriented solutions and interact with their insights in a self-independence while cross-team collaboration environment for superior solutions generation.
Outcome:	Experiments show that the framework can generate better software quality compared to state-of-the-art frameworks.

DialMed: A Dataset for Dialogue-based Medication Recommendation (2022.coling-1)

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Zhenfeng He, Yuqiang Han, Zhenqiu Ouyang, Wei Gao, Hongxu Chen, Guandong Xu, Jian Wu

To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies on medication recommendation mainly rely on EHRs, but some details of interactions between doctors and patients may be ignored or omitted in EHR.
Approach:	They propose to use medical dialogues to recommend medications with medical dialogue data . they propose to model dialogue structure and disease knowledge aware network .
Outcome:	The proposed method is a promising solution to recommend medications with medical dialogues.

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Rui Li, Xu Chen, Chaozhuo Li, Yanming Shen, Jianan Zhao, Yujing Wang, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie

Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy.
Approach:	They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier.

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Justin Chen, Zifeng Wang, Hamid Palangi, Rujun Han, Sayna Ebrahimi, Long Le, Vincent Perot, Swaroop Mishra, Mohit Bansal, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister

Teaching LLMs to Plan, Not Just Solve: Plan Learning Boosts LLMs Generalization in Reasoning Tasks (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Reverse-Enhanced Thinking (RevThink) is a framework for large language models to perform reverse thinking.
Approach:	They propose a framework for enhancing forward-backward reasoning by collecting data from a teacher model and employing three objectives to train a student model in a multi-task learning fashion.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms a fine-tuning method trained on 10x more forward reasoning on 12 datasets covering commonsense, math, and logical reasoning.

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Tianlong Wang, Junzhe Chen, Weibin Liao, Xueting Han, Jing Bai

In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for reinforcement learning (RL) on self-generated data are limited in many domains.
Approach:	a new framework combines plan-based search with Step-level Advantage Preference Optimization to optimize plan learning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves in-domain performance and out-of-domain benchmarks.

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Zhen Tan, Jun Yan, I-Hung Hsu, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Long Le, Yiwen Song, Yanfei Chen, Hamid Palangi, George Lee, Anand Rajan Iyer, Tianlong Chen, Huan Liu, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister

Response-G1: Explicit Scene Graph Modeling for Proactive Streaming Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to long-term dialogue memory management fail to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations.
Approach:	They propose a mechanism that integrates forward- and backward-looking reflections into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval.
Outcome:	The proposed mechanism outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on a long-term dialogue memory model.

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Ke Ma, Jiaqi Tang, Bin Guo, Xueting Han, Ruonan Xu, Qingfeng He, Ziheng Wang, Xu Wang, Qifeng Chen, Zhiwen Yu, Yunhao Liu

A Holistic Approach to Reference-Free Evaluation of Machine Translation (2023.acl-short)

Challenge:	Existing methods for streaming video understanding are query-agnostic and implicitly model video evidence.
Approach:	They propose a framework that establishes explicit, structured alignment between the accumulated video evidence and the query’s expected response conditions via scene graphs.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves more interpretable and accurate response timing decisions on both proactive and reactive tasks.

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Hanming Wu, Wenjuan Han, Hui Di, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu

TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)

Challenge:	Traditional machine translation evaluation relies on reference written by humans . reference-free evaluation gets rid of labor-intensive annotations, which can pivot easily to new domains .
Approach:	They propose a reference-free evaluation approach that characterizes evaluation as two aspects: fluency and faithfulness.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms SOTA reference-fee metrics on machine translation datasets.

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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan

RouteMoA: Dynamic Routing without Pre-Inference Boosts Efficient Mixture-of-Agents (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures.
Approach:	They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities.
Outcome:	The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks.

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Jize Wang, Han Wu, Zhiyuan You, Yiming Song, Yijun Wang, Zifei Shan, Yining Li, Songyang Zhang, Xinyi Le, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan, Dacheng Tao

Corrupted but Not Broken: Understanding and Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Corrupted Data in Visual Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for mixing-of-agents (MoA) lack model selection criteria and struggle with large model pools.
Approach:	They propose a mixture-of-agents framework with dynamic routing that uses a lightweight scorer to perform initial screening and refines the model scores through self- and cross-assessment.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for large model pools and tasks . it reduces cost by 89.8% and latency by 63.6% in the large-scale model pool.

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Yunhao Gou, Hansi Yang, Zhili Liu, Kai Chen, Yihan Zeng, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Qun Liu, Bo Han, James Kwok, Yu Zhang

Honey or Poison? Solving the Trigger Curse in Few-shot Event Detection via Causal Intervention (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) aims to enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but its effectiveness is often compromised by corrupted datasets with issues such as hallucinated content and poor OCR quality.
Approach:	They propose a corruption-robust training paradigm that surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data.
Outcome:	The proposed training paradigm surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data.

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Jiawei Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent supervised ED approaches have achieved promising performance but require large number of manually annotated event data.
Approach:	They propose to overfit the trigger confounder of the context and the result . they propose to intervene on the context via backdoor adjustment during training .
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves the FSED on ACE05 and MAVEN datasets.

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Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He

RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps.
Approach:	They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT.

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Bowen Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Liwen Shi, Chen Yang, Peng He, Yue Ma, Haochen Han, Wenhao Li, Tiao Tan, Yongjian Li, Fangming Liu, Gong Yifan, Sheng Zhang

LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting.
Approach:	They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios.

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Pei Chen, Hongye Jin, Cheng-Che Lee, Rulin Shao, Jingfeng Yang, Mingyu Zhao, Zhaoyu Zhang, Qin Lu, Kaiwen Men, Ning Xie, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Han Li, Lingyun Wang

Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	LongLeader aims to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . long-constext comprehension is a key bottleneck for many use cases .
Approach:	They propose a leaderboard to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . they offer open-source access to the benchmarks and maintain a dedicated website .
Outcome:	The proposed model assesses different LLMs on selected benchmarks and provides open-source access to the benchmarks.

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Boxi Cao, Qiaoyu Tang, Hongyu Lin, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han, Jiawei Chen, Tianshu Wang, Le Sun

MM-Align: Learning Optimal Transport-based Alignment Dynamics for Fast and Accurate Inference on Missing Modality Sequences (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memory formation, but vanilla networks without pre-training suffer catastrophic forgetting problem.
Approach:	They conduct experiments to investigate the retentive-forgetful contradiction between vanilla and pre-trained language models by controlling the target knowledge types, learning strategies and learning schedules.
Outcome:	The results show that pre-trained language models are forgetful and pre-training leads to retentive models .

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Wei Han, Hui Chen, Min-Yen Kan, Soujanya Poria

VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to multimodal learning assume a complete input modality setting, i.e., each modality is either complete or completely missing in both training and test sets.
Approach:	They propose an alignment dynamics learning module based on the theory of optimal transport for missing data imputation and a denoising training algorithm to enhance the quality of iputation and accuracy of model predictions.
Outcome:	The proposed method performs faster and more accurate inferences under different missing conditions and alleviates the overfitting issue.

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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang

Stochastic Bridges as Effective Regularizers for Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query.
Approach:	They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks.

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Weize Chen, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

Across Programming Language Silos: A Study on Cross-Lingual Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for tuning pre-trained language models ignore the running cost and only optimize the terminal cost.
Approach:	They propose to use stochastic bridges to regularize intermediate states and use regularization as running cost of PETs.
Outcome:	The proposed methods can be used to tune large pre-trained language models . they can be compared to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a small number of parameters .

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Qiming Zhu, Jialun Cao, Xuanang Chen, Weili Zhang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Shing-Chi Cheung

Semi-Supervised Lexicon Learning for Wide-Coverage Semantic Parsing (C18-1)

Challenge:	Current research on large language models with retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) has focused on single-language settings, leaving their cross-lingual effectiveness underexplored.
Approach:	They construct a dataset covering 13 PLs with nearly 14K instances to study cross-lingual code knowledge transfer in RACG.
Outcome:	The proposed model shows unequal cross-lingual knowledge transfer even with direct injection and shows limited reliance on natural language information embedded in code when equipped with a code-specific retriever.

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Bo Chen, Bo An, Le Sun, Xianpei Han

Debate-to-Detect: Reformulating Misinformation Detection as a Real-World Debate with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Semantic parsers rely on accurate and high-coverage lexicons, but they often use annotated logical forms to learn the lexic.
Approach:	They propose a semi-supervised learning framework that makes use of large text corpora and lexical resources.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves on two benchmarks: Webquestions and Free917.

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Chen Han, Wenzhen Zheng, Xijin Tang

RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)

Challenge:	Despite advances in large language models, their application to misinformation detection remains hindered by issues of logical inconsistency and superficial verification.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent debate framework that reformulates misinformation detection as a structured adversarial debate based on fact-checking workflows .
Outcome:	The proposed framework enables iterative refinement of evidence while improving decision transparency.

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Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji

EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents.
Approach:	They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction .
Outcome:	The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities.

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Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji

GraphCheck: Breaking Long-Term Text Barriers with Extracted Knowledge Graph-Powered Fact-Checking (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels.

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Yingjian Chen, Haoran Liu, Yinhong Liu, Jinxiang Xie, Rui Yang, Han Yuan, Yanran Fu, Peng Yuan Zhou, Qingyu Chen, James Caverlee, Irene Li

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing fact-checking methods that use large language models often generate subtle factual errors.
Approach:	They propose a fact-checking framework that uses extracted knowledge graphs to enhance text representation.
Outcome:	GraphCheck outperforms existing specialized fact-checkers on seven benchmarks spanning general and medical domains . Graph Neural Networks process extracted knowledge graphs as a soft prompt, enabling efficient fact- checking in a single inference call.

Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li

SciMDR: Advancing Scientific Multimodal Document Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization .
Approach:	They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume.
Outcome:	Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency.

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Ziyu Chen, Yilun Zhao, Chengye Wang, Rilyn R. Han, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan

RuleR: Improving LLM Controllability by Rule-based Data Recycling (2025.naacl-short)

Challenge:	Current models struggle to provide reliable assistance in real-world scientific workflows because evidence is distributed across long, multimodal documents.
Approach:	They propose a framework for QA Synthesis and document-scale regrounding that generates faithful, isolated QA pairs and reasoning on focused segments.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves significant improvements across multiple QA benchmarks, particularly in tasks requiring complex document-level reasoning.

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Ming Li, Han Chen, Chenguang Wang, Dang Nguyen, Dianqi Li, Tianyi Zhou

Challenge:	Existing supervised fine-tuning datasets are composed of general instructions without userspecified constraints.
Approach:	They propose a data augmentation method incorporating multiple constraints into the original data samples according to predefined rules to create new training tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves LLM controllability while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities.

DoubleMix: Simple Interpolation-Based Data Augmentation for Text Classification (2022.coling-1)

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Hui Chen, Wei Han, Diyi Yang, Soujanya Poria

What is Stigma Attributed to? A Theory-Grounded, Expert-Annotated Interview Corpus for Demystifying Mental-Health Stigma (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to improve the robustness of text classification models are token-, sentence-, and hiddenlevel augmentation.
Approach:	They propose an interpolation-based data augmentation approach called DoubleMix to improve the robustness of text classification models by learning the “shifted” features in hidden space.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms several popular methods on six text classification benchmark datasets and visual analysis shows that the model features are highly interpretable.

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Han Meng, Yancan Chen, Yunan Li, Yitian Yang, Jungup Lee, Renwen Zhang, Yi-Chieh Lee

Linguistic Theories

Challenge:	Existing resources for training neural models to finely classify mental-health stigma are limited, relying primarily on social media or synthetic data without theoretical underpinnings.
Approach:	They propose to use an expert-annotated corpus of human-chatbot interviews to finely classify mental-health stigma.
Outcome:	The proposed corpus can facilitate research on computationally detecting, neutralizing, and counteracting mental-health stigma.

Do We Need Distinct Representations for Every Speech Token? Unveiling and Exploiting Redundancy in Large Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Bajian Xiang, Tingwei Guo, Xuan Chen, Yang Han

Praetor: A Fine-Grained Generative LLM Evaluator with Instance-Level Customizable Evaluation Criteria (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Speech Language Models (LSLMs) typically operate at high token rates to ensure acoustic fidelity, yet this results in sequence lengths that exceed the underlying semantic content, incurring prohibitive inference costs.
Approach:	They propose a token-based token merging mechanism that uses a training-free token pooling mechanism to reduce prefilling FLOPs by 27.48% while maintaining competitive accuracy.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces prefilling FLOPs by 27.48% while maintaining competitive accuracy.

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Yongqi Leng, Renren Jin, Yue Chen, Zhuowen Han, Ling Shi, Jianxiang Peng, Lei Yang, Juesi Xiao, Deyi Xiong

Challenge:	Existing evaluation methods are inadequate to evaluate large language models (LLMs).
Approach:	They propose a fine-grained generative LLM evaluator with instance-level customazable evaluation criteria that can be used to evaluate large language models.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing LLM evaluators and instruction-tuned LLMs on multiple benchmarks and sets new SOTA results.

DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)

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Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun

Challenge:	Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions.
Approach:	They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions.
Outcome:	Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications.

Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Han Weng, Puzhen Wu, Cui Longjie, Yi Zhan, Boyi Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Dun Zeng, Yingxiang Yang, Qianru Zhang, Dong Huang, Xiaoming Yin, Yang Sun, Xing Chen

From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models.
Approach:	They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model.
Outcome:	The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD.

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Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang, Yue Chen, Ling Shi, Jiang Zhou, Junru Wu, Zhen Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Juesi Xiao, Tianyu Dong, Zhuowen Han, Zhuo Chen, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong

OSCBench: Benchmarking Object State Change in Text-to-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages.
Approach:	They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks.

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Xianjing Han, Bin Zhu, Shiqi Hu, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Patrick Carrington, Roger Zimmermann, Jingjing Chen

Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks focus on perceptual quality, text–video alignment, or physical plausibility, leaving a critical aspect of action understanding unexplored.
Approach:	They introduce a benchmark specifically designed to assess OSC performance in T2V models.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of open-source and proprietary T2V models on object state change (OSC) in the context of novel and compositional scenarios.

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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Compositional Data Augmentation for Abstractive Conversation Summarization (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing retrieval methods aim to gather relevant passages but fail to prioritize consistent and useful information for the reader.
Approach:	They propose a novel method which re-ranks passages based on the reader's prediction probability distribution and clusters passage according to the predicted answers.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the quality of evidence passages under zero-shot scenarios.

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Siru Ouyang, Jiaao Chen, Jiawei Han, Diyi Yang

VizoMem: A Visual-Textual Memory Framework for Efficient Long-Horizon Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Abstractive conversation summarization systems rely on large-scale annotated summaries, but collecting and annotating these conversations can be time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Approach:	They propose a method for generating diverse and high-quality pairs of conversations and summaries by extracting conversation structures and organizing meaningful conversation snippets.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on SAMSum and DialogSum datasets and achieves a 10% increase in ROUGE scores with limited data.

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Weijie Liang, Yuanfeng Song, Xing Chen, Caleb Chen Cao, Sirui Han, Yike Guo

SafeMT: Multi-turn Safety for Multimodal Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing systems that use long-context modeling incur computational and memory overhead.
Approach:	They propose a visual memory framework that pre-rendered text into structured images and stored as visual notes for agentic systems.
Outcome:	The proposed system reduces token consumption while preserving effective long-term memory recall.

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Han Zhu, Juntao Dai, Jiaming Ji, Haoran Li, Chengkun Cai, Pengcheng Wen, Chi-Min Chan, Boyuan Chen, Yaodong Yang, Sirui Han, Yike Guo

DeepNote: Note-Centric Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Multi-turn dialogues pose a greater risk than single prompts, but existing safety benchmarks do not account for this situation.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark that features dialogues of varying lengths generated from harmful queries accompanied by images.
Outcome:	The proposed model reduces multi-turn Attack Success Rate (ASR) compared to existing guard models.

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Ruobing Wang, Qingfei Zhao, Yukun Yan, Daren Zha, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Yixuan Wang, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	. - (EN)
Approach:	. - (EN)
Outcome:	. - (EN)

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Haoliang Liu, Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Han Zhu, Shizhou Huang, Xinglin Zhang, Tao Chen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Zhang Huaping, Lei Li

Guardian-as-an-Advisor: Advancing Next-Generation Guardian Models for Trustworthy LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing information extraction (IE) tasks rely on in-context learning with large language models.
Approach:	They propose a Bayesian-based in-context learning framework that refines label representations across IE tasks using particle filtering and Bayes updates.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves performance over existing methods (up to 30%) it underperforms one-shot prompting by a substantial margin on NER tasks and CodeIE fails on RE tasks with near-zero micro-F1.

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Yue Huang, Haomin Zhuang, Jiayi Ye, Han Bao, Yanbo Wang, Hang Hua, Siyuan Wu, Pin-Yu Chen, Xiangliang Zhang

Incorporating Instructional Prompts into a Unified Generative Framework for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)

Challenge:	prevailing taxonomies neglect robustness and honesty, yielding safer-on-paper but less useful systems.
Approach:	They propose a soft-gating pipeline where a guardian predicts a binary risk label plus a concise explanation and prepends this advice to the original query for re-inference.
Outcome:	The proposed model maintains safety while reducing over-refusal.

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Yangjun Wu, Han Wang, Dongxiang Zhang, Gang Chen, Hao Zhang

InfiMM: Advancing Multimodal Understanding with an Open-Sourced Visual Language Model (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to multiple intent detection and slot filling focus on task-specific components to capture the relationships between intents and slots.
Approach:	They propose a Unified Generative framework that captures the relationships between intents and slots in an utterance and formulates the task as a question-answering problem.
Outcome:	The proposed framework surpasses baselines on full-data and multi-intent benchmarks on 5-shot and 10-shot scenarios.

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Haogeng Liu, Quanzeng You, Yiqi Wang, Xiaotian Han, Bohan Zhai, Yongfei Liu, Wentao Chen, Yiren Jian, Yunzhe Tao, Jianbo Yuan, Ran He, Hongxia Yang

Mitigating Hallucinations in Multi-modal Large Language Models via Image Token Attention-Guided Decoding (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	InfiMM is a multimodal large language model that adapts to complex vision-language tasks.
Approach:	They present a Multimodal Large Language Model that adapts to intricate vision-language tasks using large-scale training data and comprehensive training strategies.
Outcome:	Empirical evaluations across a variety of benchmarks underscore InfiMM’s remarkable capability in multimodal understanding.

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Xinhao Xu, Hui Chen, Mengyao Lyu, Sicheng Zhao, Yizhe Xiong, Zijia Lin, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding

VideoQA-TA: Temporal-Aware Multi-Modal Video Question Answering (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) generate plausible but incorrect content, resulting in hallucinations . recent advances in MLLM technology have demonstrated their outstanding performance in a variety of visual tasks, such as object detection.
Approach:	They propose a plug-and-play method which leverages MLLMs’ internal representations to mitigate hallucinations by analyzing input and output tokens.
Outcome:	The proposed method exploits MLLMs’ internal representations to mitigate hallucinations.

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Zhixuan Wu, Bo Cheng, Jiale Han, Jiabao Ma, Shuhao Zhang, Yuli Chen, Changbo Li

TLM: Token-Level Masking for Transformers (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for video question answering align visual or textual features directly with large language models, limiting the deep semantic association between modalities and hindering a comprehensive understanding of interactions within spatial and temporal contexts.
Approach:	They propose a temporal-aware framework for multi-modal video question answering that aligns videos and questions at fine-grained levels.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves reasoning ability and accuracy of videoQA by aligning videos and questions at fine-grained levels.

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Yangjun Wu, Kebin Fang, Dongxiang Zhang, Han Wang, Hao Zhang, Gang Chen

ChipSeek: Optimizing Verilog Generation via EDA-Integrated Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Structured dropout approaches have been investigated to regularize the multi-head attention mechanism in Transformers.
Approach:	They propose a new regularization scheme based on token-level rather than structure-level to reduce overfitting by manipulating the connections between tokens in the multi-head attention via masking.
Outcome:	The proposed regularization scheme outperforms attention dropout and DropHead on 18 datasets and can establish a new record on the data-to-text benchmark Rotowire (18.93 BLEU).

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Zhirong Chen, Kaiyan Chang, Zhuolin Li, Cangyuan Li, Xinyang He, Chujie Chen, Mengdi Wang, Haobo Xu, Yinhe Han, Huawei Li, Ying Wang

CoMM: Collaborative Multi-Agent, Multi-Reasoning-Path Prompting for Complex Problem Solving (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to optimize Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code fail to simultaneously optimize functional correctness and hardware efficiency metrics such as Power, Performance, and Area (PPA).
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework that integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a reward mechanism.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework.

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Pei Chen, Shuai Zhang, Boran Han

Meta-Reasoner: Dynamic Guidance for Optimized Inference-time Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great ability in solving traditional natural language tasks and elementary reasoning tasks with appropriate prompting techniques.
Approach:	They propose a collaborative multi-agent, multi-reasoning-path prompting framework that prompts LLMs to play different roles in a problem-solving team and encourages different role-play agents to collaboratively solve the target task.
Outcome:	The proposed framework is applied to two college-level science problems over competitive baselines.

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Yuan Sui, Yufei He, Tri Cao, Sophia Simeng Han, Yulin Chen, Bryan Hooi

Dashboard2Code: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Reconstructing Interactive Dashboards (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning tasks, but they tend to explore unproductive solution paths without effective backtracking or strategy adjustment.
Approach:	They propose a framework that empowers LLMs to “think about how to think” and dynamically adapts reasoning strategies in real-time.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms previous SOTA methods by 9-12% in accuracy while reducing inference time by 28-35% under the same compute budget.

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Tianhao Niu, Ziyu Han, Qiguang Chen, Shiqi Zhou, Baocai Shan, Hengjie Fang, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che

Cross-Lingual Contrastive Learning for Fine-Grained Entity Typing for Low-Resource Languages (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing efforts to generate static visualizations focus on static charts and interactive dashboards.
Approach:	They propose a dashboard2code task that requires a model to explore an interactive dashboard, acquire feedback from its own interactions and generate code that reproduces the target dashboard.
Outcome:	The proposed task is based on 180 carefully designed and manually verified dashboard–code pairs spanning three difficulty levels and covering eight common real-world interaction patterns.

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Xu Han, Yuqi Luo, Weize Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Zhou Botong, Hao Fei, Suncong Zheng

DyERNIE: Dynamic Evolution of Riemannian Manifold Embeddings for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that by applying our framework, we can easily learn effective FGET models for low-resource languages.
Approach:	They propose a cross-lingual contrastive learning framework to learn FGET models for low-resource languages.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can learn effective FGET models for low-resource languages even without human-labeled data.

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Zhen Han, Peng Chen, Yunpu Ma, Volker Tresp

CoCoNUTS: Concentrating on Content while Neglecting Uninformative Textual Styles for AI-Generated Peer Review Detection (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing embedding approaches for temporal knowledge graphs typically learn entity representations and their dynamic evolution in the Euclidean space.
Approach:	They propose a non-Euclidean embedding approach that learns evolving entity representations in a product of Riemannian manifolds.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on three real-world datasets showing that the embeddings on Riemannian manifolds can capture the evolution of temporal KGs.

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Yihan Chen, Jiawei Chen, Guozhao Mo, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Challenge:	Existing detectors rely on stylistic cues to distinguish between surface-level language refinement and genuine content generation.
Approach:	They propose a content-based detection paradigm to detect substantive AI-generation . they propose 'CoCoDet' detector that can detect surface-level language refinement .
Outcome:	The proposed detector achieves a macro F1 score of 98.24% on permissible machine-polished reviews and maintains 3.89% false positive rate on real-world reviews.

UBench: Benchmarking Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Multiple Choice Questions (2025.findings-acl)

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Xunzhi Wang, Zhuowei Zhang, Gaonan Chen, Qiongyu Li, Bitong Luo, Zhixin Han, Haotian Wang, Zhiyu Li, Hang Gao, Mengting Hu

The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for benchmarking the uncertainty of large language models face challenges . existing methods require internal model access, additional training, or high computational costs .
Approach:	They propose a new benchmark for evaluating the uncertainty of large language models based on confidence intervals . UBench encompasses 11,978 multiple choice questions spanning knowledge, language, understanding, and reasoning capabilities.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing methods for benchmarking the uncertainty of large language models.

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Dan Wang, Boxi Cao, Ning Bian, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Le Sun, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han

Multilingual Sentence Transformer as A Multilingual Word Aligner (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Recent studies have discovered notable disparities in their performance across different languages.
Approach:	They conduct a systematic investigation into the behaviors of large language models across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios and reveals a Linguistic Map correlates with the richness of available resources and linguistic family relations.
Outcome:	The proposed model demonstrates that there are significant disparities in performance across languages across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios.

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Weikang Wang, Guanhua Chen, Hanqing Wang, Yue Han, Yun Chen

Rethinking Efficient Multilingual Text Summarization Meta-Evaluation (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multilingual word alignment induction, but these methods usually start from mBERT or XLM-R.
Approach:	They propose to fine tune multilingual sentence Transformer LaBSE for alignment induction using parallel corpus and a parallel corpora model.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models on seven language pairs and achieves new state-of-the-art on zero-shot language pairs.

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Rilyn Han, Jiawen Chen, Yixin Liu, Arman Cohan

A Quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever for Syntactically-Controlled Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	a limited number of human annotations are required to evaluate multilingual summarization evaluation metrics.
Approach:	They propose a multilingual meta-evaluation framework that uses machine translation systems to transform a monolingual metaevaluations dataset into multilingual versions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms classical text-matching-based metrics in non-English languages.

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Xue Zhang, Songming Zhang, Yunlong Liang, Yufeng Chen, Jian Liu, Wenjuan Han, Jinan Xu

MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing syntactically-controlled paraphrase generation models perform well with human-annotated or well-chosen syntaktic templates.
Approach:	They propose a quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever to retrieve templates based on the quality of the to-be-generated paraphrases.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm can generate high-quality paraphrases without sacrificing quality.

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Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou

READoc: A Unified Benchmark for Realistic Document Structured Extraction (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions.
Approach:	They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude.

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Zichao Li, Aizier Abulaiti, Yaojie Lu, Xuanang Chen, Jia Zheng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun

PREMISE: Matching-based Prediction for Accurate Review Recommendation (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Document Structured Extraction (DSE) is a field of document structure analysis that aims to extract structured content from raw documents.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate document structured extraction systems by converting unstructured PDFs into semantically rich Markdown.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark is based on 3,576 diverse and real-world documents from arXiv, GitHub, and Zenodo.

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Wei Han, Hui Chen, Soujanya Poria

Scaling Laws or Threshold Effects: Exploring the Optimal Vocabulary Size for Balancing Performance and Efficiency in Low-Resource Languages (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that PREMISE achieves promising performance with less computational cost.
Approach:	They propose a new architecture for matching-based learning in multimodal fields for the MRHP task.
Outcome:	The proposed architecture significantly boosts performance on multimodal tasks with less computational cost compared to the state-of-the-art fusion-based methods.

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Ao Han, Andong Chen, Yuan Sun, Xiaobing Zhao

Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	vocab expansion scaling laws are well-established for high-resource languages, but they remain unverified in low-resourced settings.
Approach:	They propose to scale trilingual vocabulary for languages with 140 to 195,000 tokens . they find that BBPE follows a "decline-then-rise" pattern, whereas BPE improves monotonically .
Outcome:	The proposed configuration reduces pre-training duration by over 71% across 1.5B to 8B models while improving downstream performance.

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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun

Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context.
Approach:	They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions.

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Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jin Xu, Xianpei Han, Jialong Tang, Annan Li, Le Sun, Meng Liao, Shaoyi Chen

LLM-Powered Test Case Generation for Detecting Bugs in Plausible Programs (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to extract event records from text decompose complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks.
Approach:	They propose a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can extract events from text . they propose unified event extraction, constrained decoding algorithm and curriculum learning algorithm .
Outcome:	The proposed method can achieve competitive performance using record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings.

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Kaibo Liu, Zhenpeng Chen, Yiyang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Yudong Han, Yun Ma, Yihong Dong, Ge Li, Gang Huang

Shadow-Activated Backdoor Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	TrickCatcher generates test cases that pass existing tests yet contain bugs . a recent study found that tricky bugs are not detected by test suites .
Approach:	They propose an LLM-powered approach to generating test cases for uncovering bugs in plausible programs . they use a PUT and specification to generate program variants, an input generator and an Llm to construct test inputs .
Outcome:	The proposed approach achieves recall, precision, and F1 scores that are 1.80, 2.65, and 1.66 . trickCatcher generates program variants based on the program under test and its specification .

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Ziyi Yin, Muchao Ye, Yuanpu Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Aofei Chang, Han Liu, Jinghui Chen, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma

Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Prompts (2022.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing backdoor attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models are less applicable to open-ended conversations with users.
Approach:	They propose a shadow-activated backdoor attack scenario where attackers inject malicious content into the responses of MLLMs when the responses explicitly relate to the shadowed object.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves the desired behaviors by constructing a poisoned dataset and implementing an attention-regularized tuning strategy.

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Rujun Han, Hong Chen, Yufei Tian, Nanyun Peng

PhiloGPT: A Philology-Oriented Large Language Model for Ancient Chinese Manuscripts with Dunhuang as Case Study (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing systems that generate flashbacks are monotonic and lack explicit guidance on how to insert them.
Approach:	They propose to use event temporal orders to encode events as temporal prompts . they leverage a Plan-and-Write framework enhanced by reinforcement learning to generate storylines .
Outcome:	The proposed method generates more interesting stories with flashbacks while maintaining textual diversity, fluency, and temporal coherence.

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Yuqing Zhang, Baoyi He, Yihan Chen, Hangqi Li, Han Yue, Shengyu Zhang, Huaiyong Dou, Junchi Yan, Zemin Liu, Yongquan Zhang, Fei Wu

Extending LLM Context Window with Adaptive Grouped Positional Encoding: A Training-Free Method (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	philology requires years of professional training in extensive knowledge memorization and manual textual retrieval.
Approach:	They curated the PhiloCorpus-ZH, a rich collec-tion of ancient Chinese texts spanning a millennium with 30 diverse topics, including firsthand folk copies.
Outcome:	The PhiloCorpus-ZH corpus facilitated the development of the first LLM tailored for discovering ancient Chinese manuscripts.

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Xinhao Xu, Jiaxin Li, Hui Chen, Zijia Lin, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding

Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing long-context training data is scarce and requires substantial GPU resources for training.
Approach:	They propose a training-free plug-and-play method to enhance long-context understanding in existing large language models.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing LLMs on various tasks and surpasses baseline methods.

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Tingxu Han, Zhenting Wang, Chunrong Fang, Shiyu Zhao, Shiqing Ma, Zhenyu Chen

DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods to enhance reasoning capabilities of large language models incur significant overhead in token usage, leading to increased costs.
Approach:	They propose a token-budget-aware LLM reasoning framework that adjusts the number of reasoning tokens based on the reasoning complexity of each problem.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces token costs in CoT reasoning with only a slight performance reduction.

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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.

Extracting and Understanding the Superficial Knowledge in Alignment (2025.naacl-long)

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Runjin Chen, Gabriel Jacob Perin, Xuxi Chen, Xilun Chen, Yan Han, Nina S. T. Hirata, Junyuan Hong, Bhavya Kailkhura

Challenge:	Recent studies have shown that alignment of large language models with human values and preferences requires substantial data and computation resources.
Approach:	They propose a method to extract and isolate superficial knowledge from aligned models by focusing on the shallow modifications to the final token selection process.
Outcome:	The proposed method extracts and isolates superficial knowledge from aligned models, focusing on the shallow modifications to the final token selection process.

DIAG-NRE: A Neural Pattern Diagnosis Framework for Distantly Supervised Neural Relation Extraction (P19-1)

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Shun Zheng, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Peilin Yu, Lu Chen, Ling Huang, Zhiyuan Liu, Wei Xu

DeKeyNLU: Enhancing Natural Language to SQL Generation through Task Decomposition and Keyword Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for labeling relational facts require significant expert labor to write relation-specific patterns, which makes them too sophisticated to generalize quickly.
Approach:	They propose a neural pattern diagnosis framework that can summarize and refine relation-specific patterns with human experts in the loop.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can summarize and refine high-quality relational patterns from noise data with human experts in the loop.

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Jian Chen, Zhenyan Chen, Xuming Hu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Han Fang, Cissy Hing Yee Choy, Xinmei Ke, Jingfeng Luo, Zixuan Yuan

Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	NL2SQL provides a model-centric paradigm that simplifies database access for non-technical users . challenges such as inaccurate task decomposition and keyword extraction remain major bottlenecks .
Approach:	They propose a RAG-based NL2SQL pipeline that employs three modules for query understanding, entity retrieval, and generation to improve SQL generation accuracy.
Outcome:	The proposed pipeline improves the accuracy of query generation on BIRD and Spider datasets.

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Lvxue Li, Jiaqi Chen, Xinyu Lu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Visual Question Decomposition on Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability.
Approach:	They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard.
Outcome:	The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets.

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Haowei Zhang, Jianzhe Liu, Zhen Han, Shuo Chen, Bailan He, Volker Tresp, Zhiqiang Xu, Jindong Gu

Quantize What Counts: More for Keys, Less for Values (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for question decomposition focus on unimodal language models, but question decomposing capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has yet to be explored.
Approach:	They propose a finetuning dataset and a training objective for selective decomposition to enhance the model's question decomposing capability.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset shows that existing models struggle to produce high-quality sub-questions.

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Mohsen Hariri, Alan Luo, Weicong Chen, Tianyi Zhang, Qifan Wang, Xiaotian Han, Vipin Chaudhary

Challenge:	Empirical evaluations across various prominent LLMs and benchmarks show that key-favored allocations retain up to 98.3% accuracy compared to uniform allocations (e.g., 4-bit keys, 2-bit values).
Approach:	They propose two theorems that anchor mixed-precision KV quantization in the intrinsic geometry of Transformer models.
Outcome:	Empirical evaluations show that key-favored allocations retain up to 98.3% accuracy while conserving memory.

Improving Copy-oriented Text Generation via EDU Copy Mechanism (2024.lrec-main)

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Tianxiang Wu, Han Chen, Luozheng Qin, Ziqiang Cao, Chunhui Ai

Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing extractive models generate texts through word-by-word decoding, causing factual inconsistencies and slow inference.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates the behavior of copying EDUs into generative models.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces the number of generated tokens significantly.

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Tianshu Wang, Xiaoyang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xuanang Chen, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hao Wang, Zhenyu Zeng

LongInsightBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Omni-Modal Models on Human-Centric Long-Video Understanding. (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Entity matching (EM) is a critical step in entity resolution (ER).
Approach:	They propose a method that incorporates record interactions from different perspectives.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves on 8 ER datasets and 10 LLMs and achieves higher efficiency and effectiveness.

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ZhaoYang Han, Qihan Lin, Hao Liang, Bowen Chen, Zhou Liu, Wentao Zhang

MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	LongInsightBench is the first benchmark designed to assess models’ ability to understand long videos, with a focus on human language, viewpoints, actions, and other contextual elements.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to assess models’ ability to understand long videos with a focus on human language, viewpoints, actions, and other contextual elements.
Outcome:	The proposed model excels in three key areas: a) long-duration, human-centric videos; b) diversifying and challenging task scenarios; c) quality assurance pipeline; and d) reliability.

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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

MuBench: Assessment of Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models Across 61 Languages (2026.findings-acl)

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 .

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Wenhan Han, Yifan Zhang, Zhixun Chen, null Binbinliu, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Meng Fang, Yin Zheng

BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models (2022.emnlp-demos)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation datasets lack cross-lingual alignment, leaving assessments of multilingual capabilities fragmented in both language and skill coverage.
Approach:	They propose to use multilingual consistency as a complementary metric to assess performance bottlenecks and guide model improvement.
Outcome:	The proposed model lacks cross-lingual alignment and language coverage gaps between state-of-the-art models.

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Zhengyan Zhang, Baitao Gong, Yingfa Chen, Xu Han, Guoyang Zeng, Weilin Zhao, Yanxu Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing efforts to compress medium-sized models for specific tasks have limited results.
Approach:	They propose a task-agnostic compression toolkit for big models that implements quantization, pruning, distillation and MoEfication methods.
Outcome:	The proposed tool improves performance on a model with 3 billion parameters by 12x . it also outperforms the original model on three typical NLP benchmarks.

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Zhiwei Fei, Xiaoyu Shen, Dawei Zhu, Fengzhe Zhou, Zhuo Han, Alan Huang, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen, Zhixin Yin, Zongwen Shen, Jidong Ge, Vincent Ng

DocEE: A Large-Scale and Fine-grained Benchmark for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.naacl-main)

Challenge:	LegalBench evaluated 20 LLMs in 162 legal tasks in 20 countries and jurisdictions.
Approach:	They present a comprehensive evaluation of 21 popular Large Language Models and the first comparative analysis of the empirical results.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks are based on the Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy and are compared to 21 popular LLMs.

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MeiHan Tong, Bin Xu, Shuai Wang, Meihuan Han, Yixin Cao, Jiangqi Zhu, Siyu Chen, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li

Boosting Inference Efficiency: Unleashing the Power of Parameter-Shared Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing datasets focus on sentence-level event extraction, but document-level EE is limited due to the lack of large-scale and practical training and evaluation datasets.
Approach:	They propose a document-level event extraction dataset with 27,000+ events and 180,000+ arguments.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset includes 27,000+ events, 180,000+ arguments and large-scale manual annotations, fine-grained argument types and application-oriented settings.

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Weize Chen, Xiaoyue Xu, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

The UIR Uncertainty Corpus for Chinese: Annotating Chinese Microblog Corpus for Uncertainty Identification from Social Media (L18-1)

Challenge:	Parameter-shared pre-trained language models (PLMs) have emerged as a successful approach in resource-constrained environments.
Approach:	They propose a method to enhance the inference efficiency of parameter-shared PLMs by pre-training models that can achieve even greater acceleration.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves inference efficiency on autoregressive and autoencoding models.

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Binyang Li, Jun Xiang, Le Chen, Xu Han, Xiaoyan Yu, Ruifeng Xu, Tengjiao Wang, Kam-fai Wong

Challenge:	Uncertainty identification is an important semantic processing task, critical to the quality of information in terms of factuality in many NLP techniques and applications.
Approach:	They propose to annotate Chinese microblogs with an open uncertainty corpus . they propose to use contextual uncertain semantics rather than traditional cue-phrases to identify uncertainty .
Outcome:	The proposed corpus can be used to identify uncertainty in social media texts.

ShortGPT: Layers in Large Language Models are More Redundant Than You Expect (2025.findings-acl)

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Xin Men, Mingyu Xu, Qingyu Zhang, Qianhao Yuan, Bingning Wang, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Weipeng Chen

Cost-Optimal Grouped-Query Attention for Long-Context Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent studies have identified significant redundancy in large language models . quantization and pruning are two methods that reduce computational resources .
Approach:	They propose simple pruning methods that prune redundant layers based on their BI scores.
Outcome:	The proposed pruning methods demonstrate superior performance over previous pruning methods.

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Yingfa Chen, Yutong Wu, Chenyang Song, Zhen Leng Thai, Xingyu Shen, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Does Memory Need Graphs? A Unified Framework and Empirical Analysis for Long-Term Dialog Memory (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Current GQA configurations overlook how context length influences inference cost .
Approach:	They propose a recipe for deriving cost-optimal GQA configurations that decouple the total head size from the hidden size and allow more flexible control over attention FLOPs.
Outcome:	The proposed configurations reduce memory usage and FLOPs by more than 50% compared to Llama-3's GQA, with no degradation in model capabilities.

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Sen Hu, Yuxiang Wei, Jiaxin Ran, Xueran Han, Zhiyuan Yao, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen, Lei Zou

Self-supervised Cross-modal Pretraining for Speech Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing literature on dialog memory systems is inconsistent on their effectiveness . empirical findings on graph structures are difficult to attribute to specific design choices .
Approach:	They propose a framework that decomposes dialog memory systems into core components . they conduct stage-wise experiments on LongMemEval and HaluMeM, and compare implementation details .
Outcome:	The proposed framework compares graph-based and non-graph memory architectures on long-term dialog memory systems.

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Iek-Heng Chu, Ziyi Chen, Xinlu Yu, Mei Han, Jing Xiao, Peng Chang

Multi-Value-Product Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification (2025.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to multimodal speech emotion recognition and sentiment analysis have not improved results due to their relatively simple fusion mechanisms and lack of proper cross-modal pretraining.
Approach:	They propose a deep-fused audio-text bi-modal transformer with carefully designed cross-modal fusion mechanism and stage-wise cross-mod pretraining scheme to facilitate cross-modulation.
Outcome:	The proposed method exceeds benchmarks on public IEMOCAP emotion and CMU-MOSEI sentiment datasets by a large margin.

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Huike Zou, Haiyang Yang, Yindu Su, Chen Li Yu, Qinye Xie, Chengbao Lian, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen

On the Transformer Growth for Progressive BERT Training (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for product attribute value identification suffer from cascading errors and lack of generalization capability.
Approach:	They propose a multi-level retrieval scheme that uses products and attribute values as distinct hierarchical levels in PAVI domain.
Outcome:	The proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods on a real-world industrial dataset.

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Xiaotao Gu, Liyuan Liu, Hongkun Yu, Jing Li, Chen Chen, Jiawei Han

Improving Multimodal Fusion with Hierarchical Mutual Information Maximization for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods only conduct network growth in a single dimension, but compound growth operators are beneficial for multiple dimensions.
Approach:	They propose a method to train BERT progressively using a Transformer model and explore alternative growth operators in each dimension via controlled comparison.
Outcome:	The proposed method speeds up BERT pre-training by 73.6% and 82.2% for the base and large models respectively while achieving comparable performances.

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Wei Han, Hui Chen, Soujanya Poria

Level-Up: Learning to Improve Proficiency Level of Essays (P19-3)

Challenge:	Existing work on multimodal sentiment analysis relies on back-propagated task loss or geometric property of feature spaces to produce favorable fusion results.
Approach:	They propose a framework which hierarchically maximizes the Mutual Information (MI) in unimodal input pairs and between multimodal fusion result and unimod input to maintain task-related information through multimodal integration.
Outcome:	The proposed framework maximizes the Mutual Information (MI) in unimodal input pairs and between multimodal fusion result and unimodulated input to maintain task-related information through multimodal integration.

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Wen-Bin Han, Jhih-Jie Chen, Chingyu Yang, Jason Chang

From Generalist to Specialist: A Survey of Large Language Models for Chemistry (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Many essays are submitted to tutoring services by English learners on the Web every day . few systems provide focused suggestions on how to raise the level of proficiency.
Approach:	They propose a method for generating suggestions on a sentence for improving proficiency . they propose identifying grammatical elements and ranking related elements to provide suggestions .
Outcome:	The proposed method helps english learners improve their writing and reading skills.

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Yang Han, Ziping Wan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu, Xin Chen

SAT: Improving Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Simple Instance-Adaptive Self-Training (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies on pretraining of LLMs on extensive web-based texts are insufficient for advanced scientific discovery, especially in chemistry.
Approach:	They outline methodologies for incorporating domain-specific chemistry knowledge and multi-modal information into LLMs and conceptualize chemistry LLM agents using chemistry tools.
Outcome:	The proposed models are based on domain-specific chemistry knowledge and multi-modal information and are capable of accelerating scientific research.

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Hui Chen, Wei Han, Soujanya Poria

Reinforcement Learning–Guided Adaptive Tuning for Out-of-Distribution Harmful Text Detection (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for semi-supervised text classification have shown great performance in few-shot scenarios, where both labeled and unlabeled data are utilized.
Approach:	They propose a simple instance-adaptive self-training method for semi-supervised text classification that generates two augmented views for each unlabeled data and trains a meta learner to identify relative strength of augmentations based on the similarity between the original view and the augmented view.
Outcome:	The proposed method consistently shows competitive performance with varying sizes of labeled training data compared to existing semi-supervised learning methods.

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Mengyu Xiang, Tinghao Chen, Boxu Han, Qiudan Li, Shu Wu, Daniel Dajun Zeng

User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2025.acl-industry)

Challenge:	Existing methods for testing harmful information on social media rely on fixed parameters that fail to handle substantial semantic discrepancies . RLAT can be used to adapt to semantic variations while preventing overfitting from continuous tuning.
Approach:	They propose a reinforcement learning-guided adaptive tuning method for harmful text detection that optimizes consistency loss and applies word-level attention constraints to reduce over-reliance on local words.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in cross-platform and cross-temporal scenarios across multiple public datasets.

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Jianling Wang, Yifan Liu, Yinghao Sun, Xuejian Ma, Yueqi Wang, He Ma, Zhengyang Su, Minmin Chen, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Ningren Han, Haokai Lu

AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to broaden user experiences beyond established preferences and reinforce feedback loops.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical approach that combines hierarchic planning with LLM inference-time scaling to improve recommendation relevancy without compromising novelty.
Outcome:	The proposed approach shows significant gains in both user satisfaction and exploration diversity.

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Jianlyu Chen, Nan Wang, Chaofan Li, Bo Wang, Shitao Xiao, Han Xiao, Hao Liao, Defu Lian, Zheng Liu

DecisionFlow: Advancing Large Language Model as Principled Decision Maker (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains.
Approach:	They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data.

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Xiusi Chen, Shanyong Wang, Cheng Qian, Hongru Wang, Peixuan Han, Heng Ji

Uncertainty-Aware Contrastive Sentence Embedding With Local Context Representation for Text Classification (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Current language models lack the structured deliberation needed for high-stakes tasks such as healthcare and finance.
Approach:	They propose a decision-making framework that guides models to reason over structured representations of actions, attributes, and constraints.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves up to 30% accuracy gains over strong prompting baselines and enhances alignment in outcomes.

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Han Liu, Jiaqing Zhan, Zhichao Chen, Qin Zhang

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Entity Alignment (2022.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing models for text classification are based on encoder-only transformers and generative pre-trained transformers.
Approach:	They propose an uncertainty-aware contrastive sentence embedding approach that addresses language ambiguity and inter-class separability for a text classification task.
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves classification accuracy on public datasets compared with state-of-the-art methods.

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Lingbing Guo, Yuqiang Han, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen

Representation Learning

Challenge:	Entity alignment (EA) methods identify the aligned entities based on cosine similarity, ignoring the semantics underlying the embeddings themselves.
Approach:	They propose to model entity alignment as a sequential decision-making task where an agent sequentially decides whether two entities are matched or mismatched based on representation vectors.
Outcome:	The proposed framework consistently advances the performance of several state-of-the-art methods, with a maximum improvement of 31.1% on Hits@1.

ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)

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Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu

SANCL: Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction with Selective Attention and Natural Contrastive Learning (2022.coling-1)

Challenge:	Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty.
Approach:	They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline.
Outcome:	The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets.

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Wei Han, Hui Chen, Zhen Hai, Soujanya Poria, Lidong Bing

RESTful-Llama: Connecting User Queries to RESTful APIs (2024.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	e-commerce has become a research hotspot for review helpfulness prediction . a new approach to help predict helpfulness of multimodal product reviews is proposed .
Approach:	They propose a machine learning task to identify helpfulness of multimodal product reviews . they use a probe-based strategy to enforce high attention weights on regions of greater significance .
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance with lower memory consumption on two benchmark datasets with three categories.

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Han Xu, Ruining Zhao, Jindong Wang, Haipeng Chen

EUSP: An Easy-to-Use Semantic Parsing PlatForm (D19-3)

Challenge:	Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in zero-shot learning and reasoning tasks.
Approach:	They propose a framework that transforms natural language instructions into effective RESTful API calls and a method to generate fine-tuning datasets from public API documentation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves performance in a 31.9% improvement in robustness and 2.33x increase in efficiency compared to existing methods.

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Bo An, Chen Bo, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

TIGER: Text-Informed Generalized Enzyme-Reaction Retrieval (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Semantic parsing aims to map natural language utterances into structured meaning representations.
Approach:	They propose a modular platform that allows developers to build semantic parser from scratch.
Outcome:	The proposed platform achieves competitive performance on semantic parsing task and improves performance of a business search engine.

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Yuhang Zhang, Keyan Ding, Peilin Chen, Han Liu, Can Lin, Ruixi Chen, Shiqi Wang, Qi Song

Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to enzyme–reaction retrieval suffer from poor generalization across tasks and distributions . TIGER is a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that bridges enzymes and biochemical reactions.
Approach:	They propose a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that leverages protein-to-text generation models to distill textual knowledge from enzyme sequences.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in enzyme–reaction retrieval tasks and distributions.

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Xinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Xu Han, Zihang Xu, Yuanwei Xu, Weilin Zhao, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu

RAG over Tables: Hierarchical Memory Index, Multi-Stage Retrieval, and Benchmarking (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly permeating daily lives and require real-time interactions that mirror human conversations.
Approach:	They propose to use time-division-multiplexing to process queries and responses pseudo-simultaneously.
Outcome:	The proposed model can listen to users while generating output and adjust to provide instant feedback.

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Jiaru Zou, Dongqi Fu, Sirui Chen, Xinrui He, Zihao Li, Yada Zhu, Jiawei Han, Jingrui He

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrates knowledge from tables with an external knowledge base to improve the answer relevance and accuracy.
Approach:	They propose a table-corpora-aware RAG framework called T-RAG to integrate external knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) they then develop a multi-table question answering benchmark called MultiTableQA which spans 3 different task types, 57,193 tables, and 23,758 questions in total.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, recall, and runtime performance, with improvements of up to 9.4%.

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Weize Chen, Hao Zhu, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	a conceptually simple and effective method to quantify the similarity between relations is presented . identifying relations is a crucial problem for several information extraction tasks.
Approach:	They propose a method to quantify the similarity between relations in knowledge bases . they use a neural network to parameterize conditional probability distributions over entity pairs .
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly correlates with human judgments, the authors show . it could be incorporated into negative sampling and softmax classification to alleviate these mistakes.

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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

Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)

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.

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Weize Chen, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Hexu Zhao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

Challenge:	Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space.
Approach:	They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models .

Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)

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Yuning Mao, Pengcheng He, Xiaodong Liu, Yelong Shen, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han, Weizhu Chen

Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to answer open-domain questions use sparse representations and sparsity.
Approach:	They propose a method which augments a query by generating relevant contexts from heuristically discovered contexts without external supervision.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art dense retrieval methods on natural questions and triviaQA datasets.

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Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Jiawen Chen, Yilun Zhao, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Pengfei Liu, Dragomir Radev, Chien-Sheng Wu, Arman Cohan

Improving Federated Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Topic Memories (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent studies have found that large language models (LLMs) can achieve state-of-the-art performance on generic summarization benchmarks, but their performance on more complex summarizing task settings is less studied.
Approach:	They benchmark large language models on instruction controllable text summarization . they use 4 evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs to evaluate their performance .
Outcome:	The proposed model performs well on instruction controllable text summarization tasks with 4 evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs.

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Han Qin, Guimin Chen, Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity for aspect term in sentences . labeled data stored at different locations and inaccessible due to privacy or legal concerns .
Approach:	They propose a model with federated learning to combine labeled data across different domains . they incorporate topic memory to take data from diverse domains into consideration .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines on a simulated environment with three nodes.

Automate Strategy Finding with LLM in Quant Investment (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Zhizhuo Kou, Holam Yu, Junyu Luo, Jingshu Peng, Xujia Li, Chengzhong Liu, Juntao Dai, Lei Chen, Sirui Han, Yike Guo

Prompt-learning for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Experimental results demonstrate robust performance of the strategy in Chinese & US market regimes compared to established benchmarks.
Approach:	They propose a framework leveraging Large Language Models within a risk-aware multi-agent system for automate strategy finding in quantitative finance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms all benchmarks in Chinese & US market regimes with 53.17% cumulative return on SSE50.

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Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Xu Han, Guangwei Xu, Xiaobin Wang, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Hong-Gee Kim

CodeBind: Decoupled Representation Learning for Multimodal Alignment with Unified Compositional Codebook (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Extensive experiments on fine-grained entity typing under fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of prompt-learning.
Approach:	They propose a prompt-learning pipeline that stimulates versatile knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by constructing entity-oriented verbalizers and templates and conducting masked language modeling.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can be applied to fine-grained entity typing in fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios.

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Zeyu Chen, Jie Li, Kai Han

Representation Learning

Challenge:	Multimodal representation alignment is crucial for large language models and robotics.
Approach:	They propose a framework that optimizes multimodal representation spaces through a modality-shared-specific codebook design.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal classification and retrieval tasks.

Let’s Ask GNN: Empowering Large Language Model for Graph In-Context Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Zhengyu Hu, Yichuan Li, Zhengyu Chen, Jingang Wang, Han Liu, Kyumin Lee, Kaize Ding

CloneMem: Benchmarking Long-Term Memory for AI Clones (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Textual Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are crucial for modeling complex real-world systems, yet leveraging large language models (LLMs) for TAGs presents unique challenges due to the gap between sequential text processing and graph-structured data.
Approach:	They propose a novel approach that leverages In-Context Learning to integrate graph data and task-specific information into large language models (LLMs) they employ a Graph Neural Network-powered structure-enhanced retriever to select labeled nodes across graphs, incorporating complex graph structures and their supervision signals.
Outcome:	Experiments on three tasks and seven LLMs show that AskGNN performs better than existing methods.

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Sen Hu, Zhiyu Zhang, Yuxiang Wei, Xueran Han, Zhenheng Tang, Ronghao Chen, Huacan Wang

DSMoE: Matrix-Partitioned Experts with Dynamic Routing for Computation-Efficient Dense LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing memory benchmarks rely on user–agent conversational histories, which are temporally fragmented and insufficient for capturing continuous life trajectories.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark for evaluating long-term memory in AI Clone scenarios grounded in non-conversational digital traces, including diaries, social media posts, and emails, spanning one to three years.
Outcome:	Experiments show that existing memory benchmarks struggle in this setting, highlighting open challenges for life-grounded personalized AI.

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Minxuan Lv, Zhenpeng Su, Leiyu Pan, Yizhe Xiong, Zijia Lin, Hui Chen, Wei Zhou, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding, Wenwu Ou, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Songlin Hu

SQL-Trail: Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Feedback for Text-to-SQL (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing sparsification methods like pruning can lose model knowledge through parameter removal.
Approach:	They propose a novel approach that achieves sparsification by partitioning pre-trained FFN layers into computational blocks.
Outcome:	The proposed approach achieves superior performance across language modeling and downstream tasks under equivalent computational constraints.

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Harper Hua, Zhen Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Meng-Chieh Lee, Sheng Guan, Qi Zhu, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Yunfei Bai, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala

NesTools: A Dataset for Evaluating Nested Tool Learning Abilities of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Recent large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved Text-to-SQL generation, but a gap remains between AI systems and human experts on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD-Sql.
Approach:	They propose a multi-turn reinforcement learning agentic framework for Text-to-SQL that uses execution feedback to iteratively refine its predictions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms proprietary systems on 7B and 14B models by **5% on average, underscoring the effectiveness of interactive, agentic workflows for robust Text-to-SQL generation.

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Han Han, Tong Zhu, Xiang Zhang, MengSong Wu, Xiong Hao, Wenliang Chen

PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preference (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks on nested tool learning are lacking relevant data instances.
Approach:	They propose a method to construct large-scale nested tool calls with different nesting structures using a large-quality dataset.
Outcome:	The proposed method can be used to evaluate the nested tool learning abilities of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications.

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Jiaming Ji, Donghai Hong, Borong Zhang, Boyuan Chen, Josef Dai, Boren Zheng, Tianyi Alex Qiu, Jiayi Zhou, Kaile Wang, Boxun Li, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Yaodong Yang

Challenge:	Using large-scale annotation data, large language models can generate noise, errors and biases, leading to unexpected behaviours.
Approach:	They propose a dataset to promote safety alignment in large language models . they separate helpfulness and harmlessness annotations for question-answering pairs .
Outcome:	The proposed dataset provides 44.6k prompts and 265k question-answer pairs with safety meta-labels for 19 harm categories and three severity levels, with answers generated by Llama-family models.

UniDataBench: Evaluating Data Analytics Agents Across Structured and Unstructured Data (2026.acl-long)

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Han Weng, Zhou Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Xiaoming Yin, Xing Chen, Wentao Zhang

CourtReasoner: Can LLM Agents Reason Like Judges? (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks do not assess agents’ capabilities across data types . Existing tools only evaluate agents' ability to extract reasonable insights across data formats.
Approach:	They propose a multi-source benchmark to evaluate the performance of data analytics agents in handling diverse data sources.
Outcome:	The proposed agent performs end-to-end analysis over diverse data sources by automatically discovering cross-source linkages, decomposing goals, and generating robust, self-correcting code to extract actionable insights.

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Sophia Simeng Han, Yoshiki Takashima, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Chen Liu, Yixin Liu, Roque K. Thuo, Sonia Knowlton, Ruzica Piskac, Scott J Shapiro, Arman Cohan

Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across mathematical, logical, and commonsense reasoning tasks.
Approach:	They propose a novel expert-annotated judicial reasoning benchmark to measure LLMs' ability to construct goal-oriented legal reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark measures the LLM agent’s ability to construct goal-oriented legal reasoning.

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Zichao Li, Shaojie He, Meng Liao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Yanxiong Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Challenge:	Document logical structuring is crucial for document intelligence due to the complexity of text segment dependencies in the document.
Approach:	They propose an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring that generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model and updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions.
Outcome:	Experiments on ChCatExt and HierDoc datasets show that Seg2Act performs better than previous methods in both supervised and transfer learning settings.

MR-ALIGN: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Xinming Wang, Jian Xu, Bin Yu, Sheng Lian, yi Chen, Boran Wang, Yingjian Zhu, Hongzhu Yi, Hong-Ming Yang, Han Hu, Cheng-Lin Liu, Xu-Yao Zhang

IPL: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for Intelligent Product Listing (2024.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Large reasoning models (LRMs) show strong capabilities in complex reasoning, yet their marginal gains on evidence-dependent factual questions are limited.
Approach:	They propose a Meta-Reasoning informed alignment framework that quantifies state-transition probabilities along the model’s thinking process and constructs a transition-aware implicit reward that reinforces beneficial reasoning patterns while suppressing defective ones at the atomic thinking segments.
Outcome:	Empirical evaluations of four factual QA datasets and one long-form factuality benchmark show that MR-ALIGN consistently improves accuracy and truthfulness while reducing misleading reasoning.

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Kang Chen, Qing Zhang, Chengbao Lian, Yixin Ji, Xuwei Liu, Shuguang Han, Guoqiang Wu, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen

Complete Chess Games Enable LLM Become A Chess Master (2025.naacl-short)

Challenge:	Unlike professional Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms, consumer-to consumer (C2C), is mainly targeting individual sellers.
Approach:	They develop an intelligent product listing tool that generates product descriptions using various product attributes such as category, brand, color, condition, etc.
Outcome:	The proposed tool outperforms the base model in domain-specific tasks while producing less hallucination.

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Yinqi Zhang, Xintian Han, Haolong Li, Kedi Chen, Shaohui Lin

Breaking the Hourglass Phenomenon of Residual Quantization: Enhancing the Upper Bound of Generative Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in text generation, question answering, language translation, reasoning and many other tasks.
Approach:	They propose a Large language model that can play chess games by transforming a game into a textual format with the best move represented in the Forsyth-Edwards Notation.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves professional-level Elo rating of 1788 in matches against the standard Elo-rated Stockfish when permitted to sample 10 times.

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Zhirui Kuai, Zuxu Chen, Huimu Wang, Mingming Li, Dadong Miao, Wang Binbin, Xusong Chen, Li Kuang, Yuxing Han, Jiaxing Wang, Guoyu Tang, Lin Liu, Songlin Wang, Jingwei Zhuo

MPCoder: Multi-user Personalized Code Generator with Explicit and Implicit Style Representation Learning (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Generative retrieval (GR) is a transformative paradigm in search and recommender systems . however, data sparsity and long-tailed distribution hinder the full utilization of GR .
Approach:	They propose a method to reduce the "Hourglass" phenomenon in RQ-SID where codebook tokens become overly concentrated.
Outcome:	The proposed methods improve retrieval efficiency and generalization capabilities.

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Zhenlong Dai, Chang Yao, WenKang Han, Yuanying Yuanying, Zhipeng Gao, Jingyuan Chen

Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing Large Language Models are usually generalized with large programming corpus, therefore the generated code is difficult to adapt to personalized and/or customized requests.
Approach:	They propose a method to use Large Language Models to generate personalized code for multiple users.
Outcome:	The proposed model can generate personalized code for multiple users . it can be used to improve code generation and reduce maintenance costs.

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Tingxu Han, Wei Song, Ziqi Ding, Ziming Li, Chunrong Fang, Yuekang Li, Dongfang Liu, Zhenyu Chen, Zhenting Wang

Entity Resolution in Open-domain Conversations (2021.naacl-industry)

Challenge:	Existing work probes when biased outputs appear, but gives little insight into the mechanisms that generate them, leaving existing mitigations largely fragile.
Approach:	They propose a lightweight debiasing framework that detects bias heads and selectively masks only those heads that activate under DA and CoT.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces unfairness by 391.9%- 534.5% in both one- and two-turn dialogues.

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Mingyue Shang, Tong Wang, Mihail Eric, Jiangning Chen, Jiyang Wang, Matthew Welch, Tiantong Deng, Akshay Grewal, Han Wang, Yue Liu, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur

AdaTP: Attention-Debiased Token Pruning for Video Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Recent work on incorporating external knowledge into the response generation models has attracted great interest.
Approach:	They propose a neural entity linking approach to incorporate external knowledge into the response generation models to improve the relevancy of retrieved knowledge.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model by 62.8% relative to the baseline.

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Fengyuan Sun, Leqi Shen, Hui Chen, Sicheng Zhao, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding

Converging to a Lingua Franca: Evolution of Linguistic Regions and Semantics Alignment in Multilingual Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing visual token compression methods rely on attention scores but have inherent biases . global and local attention biased scores cause excessive computational overhead .
Approach:	They propose a token pruning pipeline that targets global and local attention biases . the pipeline is designed to reduce computational overhead of Video Large Language Models based on visual tokens compiled from multiple video frames .
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly reduces the computational overhead of Video Large Language Models while retaining the performance of vanilla models.

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Hongchuan Zeng, Senyu Han, Lu Chen, Kai Yu

Optimizing NLU Reranking Using Entity Resolution Signals in Multi-domain Dialog Systems (2021.naacl-industry)

Challenge:	Recent studies suggest that large language models can transfer skills learned in one language to others, but internal mechanisms behind this ability remain unclear.
Approach:	They find that LLMs map semantically identical inputs from different languages into a common semantic latent space that allows for consistent processing across languages.
Outcome:	The findings highlight the structural evolution of multilingual models during training and scaling up.

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Tong Wang, Jiangning Chen, Mohsen Malmir, Shuyan Dong, Xin He, Han Wang, Chengwei Su, Yue Liu, Yang Liu

ContextLens: Modeling Imperfect Privacy and Safety Context for Legal Compliance (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	In dialog systems, the Natural Language Understanding component makes the interpretation decision before the mentioned entities are resolved.
Approach:	They propose to leverage Entity Resolution (ER) features in NLU reranking to learn model weights . they propose a score distribution matching method to ensure the models are calibrated .
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model on multiple domain evaluations.

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Haoran Li, Yulin Chen, Huihao Jing, Wenbin Hu, Tsz Ho Li, Chanhou Lou, Hong Ting Tsang, Sirui Han, Yangqiu Song

QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to contextualize safety and privacy assessments assume the availability of complete and clear context, whereas real-world contexts tend to be ambiguous and incomplete.
Approach:	They propose a semi-rule-based framework that leverages large language models to ground the input context in the legal domain and explicitly identify both known and unknown factors for legal compliance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can significantly improve existing baselines without training and can identify the ambiguous and missing factors.

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Songxin Qu, Tai-Ping Sun, Yun-Jie Wang, Huan-Yu Liu, Cheng Xue, Xiao-Fan Xu, Han Fang, Yang Yang, Yu-Chun Wu, Guo-Ping Guo, Zhao-Yun Chen

IBSEN: Director-Actor Agent Collaboration for Controllable and Interactive Drama Script Generation (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models lack reliability in scientific domains that require strict adherence to physical constraints.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models and is competitive with proprietary models.

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Senyu Han, Lu Chen, Li-Min Lin, Zhengshan Xu, Kai Yu

Understanding LLMs’ Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Language models have demonstrated their capabilities in storyline creation and human-like character role-playing.
Approach:	They propose a director-actor coordinate agent framework that generates drama scripts . framework allows actors to role-play their characters while maintaining plot development .
Outcome:	The proposed framework generates drama scripts from a drama plot outline and human actors can play their characters.

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Changjiang Gao, Hankun Lin, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang

Cross-Lingual Transfer

Challenge:	Cross-lingual context retrieval is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs) remains unclear.
Approach:	They evaluate cross-lingual context retrieval of over 40 large language models . they use cross-linguistic machine reading comprehension as a representative scenario .
Outcome:	The results show that open LLMs show strong cross-lingual context retrieval ability . the results also show that their oracle performances improve after training .

Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)

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Ming Li, Han Chen, Yunze Xiao, Jian Chen, Hong Jiao, Tianyi Zhou

Cognitive Modeling

Challenge:	Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty suffers from the cold start problem.
Approach:	They propose to use large-scale empirical analysis to examine human-AI Difficulty Alignment . they find that models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students .
Outcome:	The proposed model size is not reliably helpful for human-AI alignment . high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, the authors say .

InfoGain-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Document Information Gain-based Reranking and Filtering (2025.emnlp-main)

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Zihan Wang, Zihan Liang, Zhou Shao, Yufei Ma, Huangyu Dai, Ben Chen, Lingtao Mao, Chenyi Lei, Yuqing Ding, Han Li

Unlocking the Effectiveness of LoRA-FP for Seamless Transfer Implantation of Fingerprints in Downstream Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation.
Approach:	They propose a document-related metric to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches on both single and multiple retrieval paradigms.

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Zhenhua Xu, Zhaokun Yan, Binhan Xu, Xin Tong, Haitao Xu, Yourong Chen, Meng Han

RealMem: Benchmarking LLMs in Real-World Memory-Driven Interaction (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	lightweight plug-and-play framework that encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters .
Approach:	proposed framework encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters via constrained fine-tuning . enables seamless fingerprint transplantation through parameter fusion, eliminating full-parameter updates while maintaining integrity.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves superior robustness against various scenarios while reducing computational overhead compared to traditional approaches.

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Haonan Bian, Zhiyuan Yao, Sen Hu, Zishan Xu, Shaolei Zhang, Yifu Guo, Ziliang Yang, Xueran Han, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen

LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture “long-term project-oriented” interactions where agents must track evolving goals.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark that simulates the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks simulate the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects.

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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

Dancing in Chains: Reconciling Instruction Following and Faithfulness in Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented.
Approach:	They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs).
Outcome:	The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings.

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Zhengxuan Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Rujun Han, Yian Zhang, Jifan Chen, Bonan Min, Zhiheng Huang

Unleashing the Native Recommendation Potential: LLM-Based Generative Recommendation via Structured Term Identifiers (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Modern language models fail to follow human instructions while being faithful . a trade-off exists between instruction following and faithfulness when training LMs .
Approach:	They propose a method that relies on Reject-sampling by Self-instruct with Continued Fine-tuning to train LMs to follow human instructions while being faithful.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms vanilla MTL with high-quality data, but with significantly smaller data.

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Zhiyang Zhang, Junda She, Kuo Cai, Bo Chen, Shiyao Wang, Xinchen Luo, Qiang Luo, Ruiming Tang, Han Li, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou

From Style to Story: A Curriculum Learning Approach for Imitative Novel Generation (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for constructing item identifiers face bottlenecks due to their large output space and expensive vocabulary expansion and alignment training.
Approach:	They propose to use Large Language Models to develop general-purpose, semantically-aware recommender systems that can be generalized and reusable.
Outcome:	Experiments on real-world datasets show that GRAM outperforms baselines and significantly outperformed baselines.

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Xueran Han, Yuhan Liu, Mingzhe Li, Wei Liu, Sen Hu, Rui Yan, Zhiqiang xu, Xiuying Chen

Accurate Text-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Representation Learning (N18-1)

Challenge:	Novels create rich, immersive worlds with intricate plots and distinct styles, captivating readers through complex storytelling.
Approach:	They propose a novel generation system that imitates novel elements by predicting plot developments and writing concrete details using vivid, expressive language.
Outcome:	The novel imitative novel generation system is trained through a curriculum learning paradigm, progressing from low-level stylistic mastery to high-level narrative coherence.

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Bo An, Bo Chen, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup: A New Axis of Sparsity for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing representation learning methods for knowledge graph representation do not consider the ambiguity of relations and entities.
Approach:	They propose a text-enhanced knowledge graph representation learning method which exploits the entity descriptions and triple-specific relation mention to enhance representations.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing representation learning models on link prediction and triple classification tasks and significantly outperformed existing models.

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Xin Cheng, Wangding Zeng, Damai Dai, Qinyu Chen, Bingxuan Wang, Zhenda Xie, Kezhao Huang, Xingkai Yu, Zhewen Hao, Han Zhang, Yu-Kun Li, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Wenfeng Liang

Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slips (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, but lacks knowledge lookup primitive.
Approach:	They propose a conditional memory instantiated via Deep Sparse Embedding (DSE) they propose 'u-shaped scaling law' that identifies optimal balance between MoE experts and DSE memory .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms an iso-parameter and isoFLOPs MoE baseline across knowledge and reasoning benchmarks and is infrastructure-efficient.

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Yingfa Chen, Chenlong Hu, Cong Feng, Chenyang Song, Shi Yu, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

MRT: Multi-modal Short- and Long-range Temporal Convolutional Network for Time-sync Comment Video Behavior Prediction (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Using a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer, we analyze ancient Chinese scripts . a large proportion of the characters in ancient Chinese are rare or undeciphered .
Approach:	They propose a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for ancient Chinese scripts.
Outcome:	The proposed tokenizer improves on the part-of-speech tagging task on the Chu bamboo slip script.

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Weihao Zhao, Weidong He, Hao Wang, Haoyang Bi, Han Wu, Chen Zhu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen

MedINST: Meta Dataset of Biomedical Instructions (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Using time-sync comments, it is difficult to understand user behavior due to complexity of interactions between users, videos, and comments.
Approach:	They propose a novel time-sync comment behavior prediction model that takes historical behavior into account and optimizes it on the basis of user preferences.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves the performance of time-sync comments on visual frames and textual comments on two cats playing simultaneously.

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Wenhan Han, Meng Fang, Zihan Zhang, Yu Yin, Zirui Song, Ling Chen, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Qingyu Chen

Chinese Metaphorical Relation Extraction: Dataset and Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Medical data and tasks require extensive preprocessing and standardization for effective use in training LLMs.
Approach:	They propose to use MedINST as a meta-dataset to evaluate LLMs' generalization ability.
Outcome:	The meta-dataset of biomedical instruction measures the generalization ability of LLMs across multiple open-domain tasks.

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Guihua Chen, Tiantian Wu, MiaoMiao Cheng, Xu Han, Jiefu Gong, Shijin Wang, Wei Song

Self-Adjust Softmax (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Metaphor identification is a core task in metaphor processing, which involves recognizing and analyzing metaphorical expressions in text.
Approach:	They propose a new formulation of metaphor identification as a relation extraction problem . they use a dataset to analyze metaphorical relations between two spans, a target and a source .
Outcome:	The proposed model can capture the properties of the target and source in Chinese sentences.

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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Guoxuan Chen, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Xiaozhe Ren, Chao Huang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li

Federated Chinese Word Segmentation with Global Character Associations (2021.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Usually, tokens with larger attention scores are important for the final prediction.
Approach:	They propose to modify softmax(z) to z softmax and its normalized variant to improve the Transformer attention mechanism by making minor adjustments to the softmax function.
Outcome:	The proposed model provides enhanced gradient properties compared to the vanilla softmax function.

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Yuanhe Tian, Guimin Chen, Han Qin, Yan Song

A Statistical and Multi-Perspective Revisiting of the Membership Inference Attack in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is a fundamental task for natural language processing.
Approach:	They propose a neural model for Chinese word segmentation with federated learning to help CWS deal with data isolation.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines on a simulated environment with five nodes.

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Bowen Chen, Namgi Han, Yusuke Miyao

Beyond A Fixed Seal: Adaptive Stealing Watermark in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Membership Inference Attack (MIA) is a method that differentiates trained (member) and untrained (non-member) data.
Approach:	They used thousands of experiments to examine membership inference attacks from different settings and then revisited them with thousands of different methods.
Outcome:	The proposed methods outperform baselines in the study and improve with model size and varies with domains.

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Shuhao Zhang, Yuli Chen, Jiale Han, Bo Cheng, Jiabao Ma

Learning to Link Grammar and Encyclopedic Information of Assist ESL Learners (P19-3)

Challenge:	Existing detection methods for large language models rely on fixed strategies to steal watermarks.
Approach:	They propose a novel steal-based watermark algorithm that derives watermark information from watermarked texts to craft highly targeted adversarial attacks.
Outcome:	The proposed system significantly increases steal efficiency against target watermarks under identical conditions.

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Jhih-Jie Chen, Chingyu Yang, Peichen Ho, Ming Chiao Tsai, Chia-Fang Ho, Kai-Wen Tuan, Chung-Ting Tsai, Wen-Bin Han, Jason Chang

Challenge:	Linggle Booster provides rich lexical information such as collocations and grammar patterns for target words.
Approach:	They propose a system that takes an article, identifies target vocabulary, provides lexical information, and generates a quiz on target words.
Outcome:	The proposed system has been evaluated on a set of target words and has a good performance.

StateX: Enhancing RNN Recall via Post-training State Expansion (2026.findings-acl)

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Xingyu Shen, Yingfa Chen, Zhen Leng Thai, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Different Tunes Played with Equal Skill: Exploring a Unified Optimization Subspace for Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies show that RNNs with large recurrent states are expensive to train . however, the ability to recall contextual information from long contexts is underperforms them in certain aspects.
Approach:	They propose a framework that expands the states of pre-trained RNNs by scaling them up to 1.3B . they use a recurrent architecture that compresses contextual information into a fixedsize state .
Outcome:	Experiments on models with up to 1.3B parameters show that StateX expands state sizes without incurring high post-training costs or compromising other capabilities.

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Jing Yi, Weize Chen, Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ning Ding, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

Alleviating Performance Degradation Caused by Out-of-Distribution Issues in Embedding-Based Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing delta tuning algorithms freeze most of the parameters and only optimize minimal adaptive parameters.
Approach:	They propose to decompose DETs into a unified optimization subspace and conduct optimization within the subspace.
Outcome:	The proposed DETs achieve comparable performance to the original DET and can be transferred to another DET with non-trivial performance.

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Haotong Bao, Jianjin Zhang, Qi Chen, Weihao Han, Zhengxin Zeng, Ruiheng Chang, Mingzheng Li, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang

QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent studies reveal query out-of-distribution issues degrading ANN performance . a distribution regularizer is introduced into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings.
Approach:	They introduce a distribution regularizer into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings.
Outcome:	The proposed method consistently improves retrieval performance across multiple datasets.

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Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Linyong Nan, Boyu Mi, Yixin Liu, Weijin Zou, Simeng Han, Ruizhe Chen, Xiangru Tang, Yumo Xu, Dragomir Radev, Arman Cohan

Refining and Synthesis: A Simple yet Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Cross-Domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights.
Approach:	They propose a query-focused task where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored table summary.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves existing baselines on table-to-text generation and large language models by concatenating generated facts to the model input.

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Haining Wang, Kang He, Bobo Li, Lei Chen, Fei Li, Xu Han, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) data augmentation has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to data sparsity.
Approach:	They propose a framework to augment ABSA data using pseudo labels for target domain . they refine generated labeled data using a natural language inference filter .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms 7 strong baselines on 4 kinds of ABSA tasks.

AlignSum: Data Pyramid Hierarchical Fine-tuning for Aligning with Human Summarization Preference (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Yang Han, Yiming Wang, Rui Wang, Lu Chen, Kai Yu

Detecting Customer Complaint Escalation with Recurrent Neural Networks and Manually-Engineered Features (N19-2)

Challenge:	Text summarization tasks employ Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to fit diverse datasets.
Approach:	They propose a human summarization preference alignment framework to align PLMs with human preferences.
Outcome:	The proposed framework narrows the gap between automatic and human evaluations by integrating three components.

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Wei Yang, Luchen Tan, Chunwei Lu, Anqi Cui, Han Li, Xi Chen, Kun Xiong, Muzi Wang, Ming Li, Jian Pei, Jimmy Lin

Challenge:	e-commerce companies often have the option of escalating complaints by filing grievances with a government authority . this is detrimental to an ecommerce company, but this problem is challenging to solve by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features.
Approach:	They propose a model that integrates recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides better recall and triage for specialized agents.

Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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Haoyu Han, Yaochen Xie, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sreyashi Nag, William Headden, Yang Li, Chen Luo, Shuiwang Ji, Qi He, Jiliang Tang

Conjoin after Decompose: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Named Entity Recognition (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, however, they still face challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences.
Approach:	They propose to construct explicit graphs from context and leverage them to enhance LLM reasoning performance on reasoning tasks.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves both logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks.

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Chengcheng Han, Renyu Zhu, Jun Kuang, Fengjiao Chen, Xiang Li, Ming Gao, Xuezhi Cao, Yunsen Xian

MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing prompt-based NER models fail to detect entity boundaries, causing performance degradation.
Approach:	They propose a model which consists of a BART encoder and a parabiotic decoder and propose ' boundary expansion strategy' to enhance the model's capability in entity type classification.
Outcome:	The proposed model can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art models.

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Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui

LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to improve efficiency often enforce rigid structural constraints such as local attention windows.
Approach:	They propose a framework that augments sparse-attention mechanisms with dynamically integrated in-context information through an efficient retrieval system.
Outcome:	Empirical results show that MATCH significantly improves the performance of sparse-attention models on synthetic and real-world natural-language tasks.

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Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Can an Individual Manipulate the Collective Decisions of Multi-Agents? (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size.
Approach:	They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models.

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Fengyuan Liu, Rui Zhao, Shuo Chen, Guohao Li, Philip Torr, Lei Han, Jindong Gu

When Gradient Descent Meets Derivative-Free Optimization: A Match Made in Black-Box Scenario (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent studies show that coordinated multi-agent systems exhibit enhanced decision-making and reasoning abilities through collaboration.
Approach:	They propose a framework that simulates agent interactions within a multi-agent system to generate adversarial samples and use them to manipulate the target agent in the target system.
Outcome:	The proposed framework generates adversarial samples that are used to manipulate the target agent in the target system, misleading the system’s decision-making process.

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Chengcheng Han, Liqing Cui, Renyu Zhu, Jianing Wang, Nuo Chen, Qiushi Sun, Xiang Li, Ming Gao

On the Evaluation of Speech Foundation Models for Spoken Language Understanding (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are expensive and may not be open-sourced due to commercial considerations and potential risks of misuse.
Approach:	They propose to introduce gradient descent into black-box tuning scenario . they propose a method which integrates gradient descent and derivative-free optimization .
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves significant performance gains over previous state-of-the-art methods.

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Siddhant Arora, Ankita Pasad, Chung-Ming Chien, Jionghao Han, Roshan Sharma, Jee-weon Jung, Hira Dhamyal, William Chen, Suwon Shon, Hung-yi Lee, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe

ROSE: An Intent-Centered Evaluation Metric for NL2SQL (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Spoken language understanding evaluation (SLUE) benchmarks are used to benchmark complex spoken language understanding tasks on natural speech.
Approach:	They propose a set of benchmark tasks to evaluate spoken language understanding on natural speech . they use pre-trained speech foundation models to evaluate the utility of different SFMs .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms pre-trained speech foundation models on natural speech . the proposed framework also outperformed self-supervised SFMs on the sequence generation tasks .

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Wenqi Pei, Shizheng Hou, Boyan Li, Chen Han, Zhichao Shi, Yuyu Luo

CiteEval: Principle-Driven Citation Evaluation for Source Attribution (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions are becoming unreliable due to its sensitiveness to syntactic variation and inconsistent consistency with ground-truth SQL.
Approach:	They propose an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL.
Outcome:	The proposed metric outperforms the next-best metric by nearly 24% on the expert-aligned validation set ROSE-VEC.

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Yumo Xu, Peng Qi, Jifan Chen, Kunlun Liu, Rujun Han, Lan Liu, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli, Arshit Gupta, Zhiguo Wang

Challenge:	Current evaluation frameworks rely on NLI to assess binary or ternary support from cited sources, which is suboptimal for citation evaluation.
Approach:	They propose a citation evaluation framework based on fine-grained citation ratings within a broad context and construct a multi-domain benchmark with high-quality human annotations.
Outcome:	The proposed framework provides a high-quality human annotation benchmark and a suite of model-based metrics that exhibit strong correlation with human judgments.

Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data (2026.acl-long)

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FengXian Dong, Zhi Zheng, Xiao Han, Wei Chen, Jingqing Ruan, Tong Xu, Yong Chen, Enhong Chen

Character-centric Story Visualization via Visual Planning and Token Alignment (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for automated feature generation rely on predefined operator libraries and do not incorporate feature semantics, limiting their ability to produce high-quality features.
Approach:	They propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) that decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities.
Outcome:	The proposed method extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning.

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Hong Chen, Rujun Han, Te-Lin Wu, Hideki Nakayama, Nanyun Peng

SOLAR-RL: Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Story visualization is a task that requires machines to understand long text inputs and produce a globally consistent image sequence that illustrates the contents of the story.
Approach:	They propose to augment VQ-VAE with a text-to-visual-token (transformer) architecture to enable multiple image generation based on a complete story.
Outcome:	The proposed method excels at preserving characters and produces higher quality image sequences compared with baselines.

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Jichao Wang, Liuyang Bian, Yufeng Zhou, Han Xiao, Yue Pan, Guozhi Wang, Hao Wang, Zhaoxiong Wang, Yafei Wen, Xiaoxin Chen, Shuai Ren, Lingfang Zeng

Sparse Latents Steer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to training GUI agents on dynamic tasks are based on SFT or Behavior Cloning.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates global trajectory insights directly into offline learning . they reconstruct diverse rollout candidates from static data and detect first failure point .
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves long-horizon task completion rates and robustness compared to baselines.

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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Xuanang Chen, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Generative Personality Simulation via Theory-Informed Structured Interview (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	In this study, we uncover interpretable latents that govern RAG behavior in large language models . Sparse Autoencoders are used to control large language model (LLM) behavior .
Approach:	They leverage Sparse Autoencoders within the LLaMA Scope to uncover latents that govern RAG behaviors.
Outcome:	The proposed model can be used to control large language models without architectural modifications.

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Pengda Wang, Huiqi Zou, Han Jiang, Hanjie Chen, Tianjun Sun, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ziang Xiao, Frederick L. Oswald

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

Challenge:	Personality structured interviews are often lacking in advancing social science research.
Approach:	They propose a method to incorporate psychological insights into LLM simulations . they use a measure theory grounded evaluation procedure to evaluate reliability and validity .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves human-like heterogeneity in LLM-simulated personality data and predicts personality-related behavioral outcomes.

Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)

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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun

PrivaCI-Bench: Evaluating Privacy with Contextual Integrity and Legal Compliance (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain.
Approach:	They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task .
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision.

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Haoran Li, Wenbin Hu, Huihao Jing, Yulin Chen, Qi Hu, Sirui Han, Tianshu Chu, Peizhao Hu, Yangqiu Song

Self-Adaptive Sampling for Accurate Video Question Answering on Image Text Models (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in generative large language models (LLMs) have enabled wider applicability, accessibility, and flexibility.
Approach:	They propose a contextual privacy evaluation benchmark that covers the entire relevant social context through private information flows.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks cover legal compliance, real court cases, privacy policies, and synthetic data.

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Wei Han, Hui Chen, Min-Yen Kan, Soujanya Poria

ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Image–text models (ITMs) are the prevalent architecture to solve video question–answering tasks, which requires only a few input frames to save huge computational cost compared to video–language models.
Approach:	They propose a sampling method based on question–frame correlation that is efficient for the few-frame situations.
Outcome:	The proposed method can boost the performance of image–text pretrained models and have a wide application scenario in terms of model architectures and dataset types.

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Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun

Reader-Guided Passage Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance .
Approach:	They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization .
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance.

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Yuning Mao, Pengcheng He, Xiaodong Liu, Yelong Shen, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han, Weizhu Chen