Papers by Hao Hu
WavLLM: Towards Robust and Adaptive Speech Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shujie Hu, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Lingwei Meng, Hongkun Hao, Jing Pan, Xunying Liu, Jinyu Li, Sunit Sivasankaran, Linquan Liu, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their scope to encompass multimodal functions. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and adaptive speech large language model with dual encoders . they validate the model on universal speech benchmarks and apply it to specialized speech-question-answer datasets based on a CoT approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size. |
Safety Sidecar: Reflection-Driven Runtime Control for Safer Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety controls fail to provide runtime intervention or cross-architecture portability for autonomous LLM agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic, plug-and-play module to provide arbitrary agent safety control and auditability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module improves the secure-solution rate by 2.9–11.2 percentage points . it adds only 3.2s to end-to-end latency and a negligible average cost of 5.37 10-4 per scenario . |
Forest for the Trees: Overarching Prompting Evokes High-Level Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly propelled the progress of natural language process (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a deductive paradigm that decomposes the reasoning process and a prompting method that elicits high-level thinking of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ChatGPT and CoT by 19.0% and 3.1% on MMLU’s College Physics, 8.8% and 2.3% on GSM8k, and 10.3% and 2.5% on StrategyQA, respectively. |
Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yanbin Yin, Kun Zhou, Zhen Wang, Xiangdong Zhang, Yifei Shao, Shibo Hao, Yi Gu, Jieyuan Liu, Somanshu Singla, Tianyang Liu, Eric P. Xing, Zhengzhong Liu, Haojian Jin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | closed-ended question-based benchmarks struggle with saturation as newer models emerge . crowd-sourced leaderboards rely on costly and slow human judges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages collective intelligence from all large language models to evaluate each other. |
| Outcome: | a new framework enables a democratic, pairwise evaluation of all large language models . it achieves 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models. |
SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility (2026.acl-long)
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Xuyang Zhi, Peilun Zhou, Chengqiang Lu, Hang Lv, Yiwei Liang, Rongyang Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Hongchao Gu, Defu Lian, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting the focus from single verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically adjusts reward weights and data importance to synchronize learning intent with data utility for optimal performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model capabilities across all domains and scales. |
COPEN: Probing Conceptual Knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge probing studies focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) but ignore conceptual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They evaluate conceptual knowledge of pre-trained language models by annotating 24k data instances covering 393 concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks evaluate pre-trained language models' conceptual knowledge of entities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts. |
Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, particularly with Chain-of-Thought-style prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search) it achieves optimum balance between exploration and exploitation, while achieving high-reward reasoning paths efficiently. |
Unsupervised Learning of Hierarchical Conversation Structure (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Goal-oriented conversations often have sub-dialogue structure, but it can be domain-dependent . Increasingly, language understanding applications involve conversational speech and text . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to learning hierarchical conversation structure . they use turn and sub-dialogue segment labels to decode the structure based on dialogue acts and subtasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves neural models for three conversation-level understanding tasks. |
Towards a Mechanistic Understanding of Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Training, Inference, and Failures (2026.acl-long)
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Yi Hu, Jiaqi Gu, Ruxin Wang, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Xiaobao Wu, Jianhui Chen, Muhan Zhang, Liangming Pan
| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that reinforcement learning can elicit intriguing emergent reasoning behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive survey of the mechanistic understanding of large reasoning models . they organize findings into three core dimensions: 1) training dynamics, 2) reasoning mechanisms, and 3) unintended behaviors. |
| Outcome: | This paper synthesizes the mechanistic understanding of large reasoning models into three dimensions . authors outline a roadmap for future studies including improved interpretability and methodologies . |
CLEAN–EVAL: Clean Evaluation on Contaminated Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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Wenhong Zhu, Hongkun Hao, Zhiwei He, Yun-Ze Song, Jiao Yueyang, Yumeng Zhang, Hanxu Hu, Yiran Wei, Rui Wang, Hongyuan Lu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate large language models are prone to data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which parses contaminated data and back-translates it into a candidate set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces data contamination and evaluates the LLMs more cleanly. |
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
SERE: Structural Example Retrieval for Enhancing LLMs in Event Causality Identification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various NLP tasks, but their effectiveness in ECI remains limited due to biases in causal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a structural example retrieval framework that leverages LLMs’ few-shot learning capabilities to help LLM models in ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages LLMs’ few-shot learning capabilities to guide LLM models in causal reasoning, mitigating bias and improving accuracy. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
ControlText: Unlocking Controllable Fonts in Multilingual Text Rendering without Font Annotations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bowen Jiang, Yuan Yuan, Xinyi Bai, Zhuoqun Hao, Alyson Yin, Yaojie Hu, Wenyu Liao, Lyle Ungar, Camillo Jose Taylor
| Challenge: | a new method for visual text rendering requires glyph annotations to be obtained . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates diffusion with a text segmentation model to achieve multilingual text rendering using just raw images without font label annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve font-controllable multilingual text rendering without label annotations. |
All That Glitters is Not Gold: Improving Robust Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Fact-Centric Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn adaptive retrieval for noisy documents lack prior filtering and may lead to the loss of crucial information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve retrieval performance without prior filtering . they use LLMs self-generated synthetic data as training data without manual annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs positive document mining based on factual consistency and uses LLMs self-generated synthetic data as training data without manual annotation. |
Leibniz: Theory-of-Mind Driven Neuro-Symbolic Logical Reasoning via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for logical reasoning with large language models suffer from insufficient rule semantic grounding and weak rule application mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a theory-of-mind driven neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that integrates natural language and symbolic representations throughout the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art models in reasoning accuracy and flexibility. |
When Personalization Legitimizes Risks: Uncovering Safety Vulnerabilities in Personalized Dialogue Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jiahe Guo, Xiangran Guo, Yulin Hu, Zimo Long, Xingyu Sui, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Weixiang Zhao, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing research on personalized LLM agents focuses on the effectiveness of personalized responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to quantify intent legitimation in personalized interactions . they propose 'detection-reflection' method that detects intent legititimation from internal representation space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces safety degradation by using internal representation space. |
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Check for Hallucination (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuo Li, Yupeng Zhang, Pengyu Cheng, Jiajun Song, Mengyu Zhou, Hao Li, Shujie Hu, Yu Qin, null Erchao.zec, Xiaoxi Jiang, null Guanjunjiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect hallucinations suffer from inherent confirmation bias, where the verifier inadvertently reproduces the errors of the original generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enforces rigorous factual alignment by leveraging deliberate *information asymmetry* by combining a pipeline of three specialized agents: a Solver, a Proposer, and a Checker. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that MARCH substantially reduces hallucinism rates. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
VLSBench: Unveiling Visual Leakage in Multimodal Safety (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that textual unlearning does not achieve comparable safety performance with image-text alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use textual unlearning to align MLLMs with image-text pairs to explain this problem . they construct a visual leakless safety bench with 2.2k image- text pairs to test this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can refuse image-text pairs according to textual queries, leading to unreliable safety evaluations. |
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuqing Huang, Rongyang Zhang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Xuyang Zhi, Guiquan Liu, Xin Li, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention. |
Efficient Cross-modal Prompt Learning with Semantic Enhancement for Domain-robust Fake News Detection (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MFND methods conduct cross-modal information interaction at later stage, resulting in weak generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic multi-modal fake news detection method that exploits cross-modal information interaction at later stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three MFND benchmarks. |
LLM-Based Agent Society Investigation: Collaboration and Confrontation in Avalon Gameplay (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yihuai Lan, Zhiqiang Hu, Lei Wang, Yang Wang, Deheng Ye, Peilin Zhao, Ee-Peng Lim, Hui Xiong, Hao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM agents' social behaviors are lacking . previous studies focused on positive social behaviors, leaving research on negative social behaviors relatively scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features a multi-agent system facilitating efficient communication and interaction with LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on Avalon and evaluates on game success and analyzes agents’ social behaviors. |
LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zhaoyan Guo, Chenxu Wang, Shengji Tang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Yang Chen, Biqing Qi, Peng Ye, Lei Bai, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the best suitable model from an ensemble. |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing . they find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented and performance-cost trade-off routing. |
Knowing False Negatives: An Adversarial Training Method for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction ignore the incompleteness of existing knowledge bases . current methods are too weak and cause noises when training and testing are not based on training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically align unstructured text with relation instances in a knowledge base . they use heuristics to leverage the memory mechanism of deep neural networks to find out possible FN samples . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two wildly-used benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method. |
Uni-Retrieval: A Multi-Style Retrieval Framework for STEM’s Education (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current retrieval models focus on natural text-image retrieval, which is insufficient for STEM education contexts due to ambiguities in the retrieval process. |
| Approach: | They propose a diverse expression retrieval task tailored to educational scenarios . they extract query style features as prototypes and build a continuously updated Prompt Bank . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing retrieval models in most retrieval tasks. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xukai Wang, Xuanbo Liu, Mingrui Chen, Haitian Zhong, Xuanlin Yang, Bohan Zeng, Jinbo Hu, Hao Liang, Junbo Niu, Xuchen Li, Ruitao Wu, Ruichuan An, Yang Shi, Liu Liu, Qiang Liu, Zhouchen Lin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Dong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models are limited in scope and lack flexibility to adapt difficulty according to evolving reasoning capacities of models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
TWEET-FID: An Annotated Dataset for Multiple Foodborne Illness Detection Tasks (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Approximately 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) are sickened by foodborne illness each year. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Twitter's TWEET-FID dataset to create annotated datasets for multiple foodborne illness incident detection tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first publicly available annotated dataset for multiple foodborne illness incident detection tasks. |
CCTVBench: Contrastive Consistency Traffic VideoQA Benchmark for Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Xingcheng Zhou, Hao Guo, Rui Song, Walter Zimmer, Mingyu Liu, André Schamschurko, Hu Cao, Alois Knoll
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-language models are prone to hallucinating nonexistent entities or events and missing subtle but critical visual cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a Traffic VideoQA Benchmark that enforces a single structured decision pattern over each video question quadruple and provides actionable diagnostics that decompose failures into positive omission, positive swap, negative hallucination, mutual-exclusivity violation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects true hazards when an accident occurs, and rejects plausible-but-false hypotheses under near-identical counterfactual scenes. |
A Systematic Study of Compositional Syntactic Transformer Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Syntactic language models (SLMs) incorporate syntactical biases into Transformers . authors identify key aspects of design choices in existing models and novel variants based on experimental results . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates existing and new SLMs to enhance Transformers by incorporating syntactic biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing models and novel variants across language modeling, syntactic generalization, summarization, and inference efficiency. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
Beyond the Surface: Measuring Self-Preference in LLM Judgments (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods measure self-preference bias by comparing the scores a judge model assigns to its own responses with those assigned to other models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use gold judgments as proxies for the actual quality of responses . they propose to measure self-preference bias as the difference between the judge model's own and other models' scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can assess self-preference bias across large language models . it uses gold judgments as proxies for the ground truth scores of the judge model . |
TrimLLM: Progressive Layer Dropping for Domain-Specific LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | specialized language models do not show simultaneous memory saving and inference speedup at deployment time. |
| Approach: | They develop a layer-wise specialization technique that reduces the depth of LLMs by progressive layer dropping and compares it to other algorithms for inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains LLMs’ capacity in specific domains and achieves inference speedup irrespective of hardware and deep learning frameworks. |
LPO: Towards Accurate GUI Agent Interaction via Location Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Tang, Yu Xia, Yi-Feng Wu, Yuwei Hu, Chen Yuhui, Qing-Guo Chen, Xiaogang Xu, Xiangyu Wu, Hao LU, Yanqing Ma, Shiyin Lu, Qifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing strategies for spatial localization are limited due to their limited capacity to perceive positional data. |
| Approach: | They propose a location-based approach that leverages locational data to optimize interaction preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves SOTA results across offline benchmarks and real-world evaluations. |
OneEE: A One-Stage Framework for Fast Overlapping and Nested Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Event extraction (EE) is an essential task of information extraction, which aims to extract structured event information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a tagging scheme and a model to form EE as word-word relation recognition using parallel grid tapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 3 overlapped and nested EE benchmarks and faster than baselines. |
Beyond Output Confidence: Epistemic-Aware Hallucination Detection with Answer-Level Signals (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations are confounded by epistemic uncertainty and cannot distinguish genuine uncertainty from fabricated content. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic metric that captures epistemic boundary deviations by measuring answer-level stability across multiple stochastic forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms strong uncertainty-only baselines and can be used to detect hallucinations on open-domain question answering, dialogue generation, and code completion. |
MoSEs: Uncertainty-Aware AI-Generated Text Detection via Mixture of Stylistics Experts with Conditional Thresholds (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods neglect stylistic modeling and rely on static thresholds, which greatly limits the detection performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables stylistics-aware uncertainty quantification through conditional threshold estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement 11.34% in detection performance compared to baselines. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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Qiyue Gao, Xinyu Pi, Kevin Liu, Junrong Chen, Ruolan Yang, Xinqi Huang, Xinyu Fang, Lu Sun, Gautham Kishore, Bo Ai, Stone Tao, Mengyang Liu, Jiaxi Yang, Chao-Jung Lai, Chuanyang Jin, Jiannan Xiang, Benhao Huang, Zeming Chen, David Danks, Hao Su, Tianmin Shu, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, but a systematic evaluation of VLMs’ fundamental WM abilities remains absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses perception and prediction to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses perception and prediction abilities on 15 latest VLMs and compares them to human-level models. |
SPPD: Self-training with Process Preference Learning Using Dynamic Value Margin (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve numerical and logical reasoning of Large Language Models are limited . existing approaches rely on prompt engineering and pretrained knowledge to ensure correctness . |
| Approach: | They propose to train LLMs with process-based reasoning using a dynamic value margin . they use the Bellman optimality equation to derive a value margin for step-level preference optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is equivalent to on-policy policy gradient methods under constrained reward functions. |
BertNet: Harvesting Knowledge Graphs with Arbitrary Relations from Pretrained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to construct knowledge graphs are limited to a small set of relations due to manual cost or restrictions in text corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically construct knowledge graphs (KGs) of diverse new relations from pretrained language models that accept knowledge queries with prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts knowledge of over 400 new relations from pretrained language models, including RoBERTaNet, with minimal input of a relation definition and a few shot of example entity pairs. |
Tree-CoT-RT: An Explainable Multi-Path Tree-Guided Chain-of-Thought and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Zhenke Duan, Xin Yin, Haichuan Hu, Hualong Chen, null Suyi, Congqing He, Yike Tan, Yu-N Cheah
| Challenge: | Existing methods lack explainability and generalization, making it difficult to justify inference decisions and detect implicit sentiment across domains and varied expression patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an explainable multi-path tree-guided chain-of-thought framework specifically designed for ASQP. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on benchmark datasets show that Tree-CoT-RT outperforms baselines. |
LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qi Zhang, Shouqing Yang, Lirong Gao, Hao Chen, Xiaomeng Hu, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can boost LLMs’ reasoning ability by integrating external knowledge sources through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) The proposed model can mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational systems are agent-centric, which assumes the user utterances will closely follow the system ontology. |
| Approach: | They build a dataset that maps user preferences to an ontology and model user preferences as estimated distributions over the system ontologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be used to push existing research from agent-centric to user-centric. |
MTRouter: Cost-Aware Multi-Turn LLM Routing with History–Model Joint Embeddings (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-turn, long-horizon tasks require dozens of sequential model calls per episode. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-aware multi-turn LLM routing tool which encodes interaction history and candidate models into joint history–model embeddings and learns an outcome estimator from logged trajectories to predict turn-level model utility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces cost and performance by 58.7% on ScienceWorld and on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) and even reduces costs for held-out tasks. |
InterIDEAS: Philosophical Intertextuality via LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new dataset aims to bridge philosophy, literary studies, and natural language processing (NLP) by integrating theories of intertextuality with bibliometric techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that bridges philosophy, literary studies, and natural language processing (NLP) it combines theories of intertextuality from literary studies with bibliometric techniques and recent LLMs . |
| Outcome: | a new dataset bridges philosophy, literary studies, and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze intertextuality . the proposed method helps scholars understand the intellectual, social, and historical relations embedded in texts . it also contributes to the development of language models, authors say . |
OpenRLHF: A Ray-based Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Jian Hu, Xibin Wu, Wei Shen, Jason Klein Liu, Weixun Wang, Songlin Jiang, Haoran Wang, Hao Chen, Bin Chen, Wenkai Fang, null Xianyu, Yu Cao, Haotian Xu, Yiming Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RLHF frameworks face inference bottlenecks and complexity barriers restricting their accessibility for newcomers. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source RLHF framework that can be used to train large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior training efficiency with speedups ranging from 1.22 to 1.68 across different model sizes compared to state-of-the-art frameworks, while requiring significantly fewer lines of code for implementation. |
Transferable Direct Prompt Injection via Activation-Guided MCMC Sampling (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show superior cross-model transferability . Prompt injection attacks are among the most critical threats . |
| Approach: | They propose an activations-guided prompt injection attack framework to address the impracticality of existing white-box/gray-box methods and the poor transferability of black-box approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 49.6% success rate and 34.6% improvement over human-crafted prompts on five mainstream LLMs. |
GMN: Generative Multi-modal Network for Practical Document Information Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Document Information Extraction (DIE) has attracted increasing attention due to its various advanced applications in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal generation method without predefined label categories for real-world scenarios using a spatial encoder and modal-aware mask module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can deal with complex documents that are hard to serialize into sequential order. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Jiawei Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Lan Luo, Ke Zhan, Enrui Hu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Fan Yu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train dense passage retrieval have a large data gap between upstream and downstream relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlinks within Web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods under different scenarios and in the open-domain question answering domain. |
IntelliCockpitBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark to Evaluate VLMs for Intelligent Cockpit (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a key task in vehicular systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that encompasses diverse automotive scenarios . they use images from front, side, and rear cameras, various road types, weather conditions, and interior views . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes images from front, side, and rear cameras, various road types, weather conditions, and interior views. |
CYCLE-INSTRUCT: Fully Seed-Free Instruction Tuning via Dual Self-Training and Cycle Consistency (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhanming Shen, Hao Chen, Yulei Tang, Shaolin Zhu, Wentao Ye, Xiaomeng Hu, Haobo Wang, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning rely on expensive human-annotated seed data or powerful external teacher models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves fully seed-free instruction tuning by employing a dual self-training loop where two models are bootstrapped solely from raw, unlabeled text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms seed-driven back-translation baselines and achieves comparable performance to strongly supervised methods. |