Papers by Hao Liu
Cognitive-Uncertainty Guided Knowledge Distillation for Accurate Classification of Student Misconceptions (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying student misconceptions overlook students' reasoning processes, authors report . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework that mines high-value samples from existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms sota LLM and standard fine-tuned 72B models on cross-topic tests. |
WavLLM: Towards Robust and Adaptive Speech Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shujie Hu, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Lingwei Meng, Hongkun Hao, Jing Pan, Xunying Liu, Jinyu Li, Sunit Sivasankaran, Linquan Liu, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their scope to encompass multimodal functions. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and adaptive speech large language model with dual encoders . they validate the model on universal speech benchmarks and apply it to specialized speech-question-answer datasets based on a CoT approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size. |
Snapshot-Guided Domain Adaptation for ELECTRA (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing domain-specific knowledge of domain-related tasks is lacking in pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptation method which can dynamically select domain-specific tokens and guide the discriminator to emphasize them, without introducing new training parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture domain-specific knowledge of domain-related tasks without introducing new training parameters. |
Optimizing Code Retrieval: High-Quality and Scalable Dataset Annotation through Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for code retrieval struggle to balance scalability and annotation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates functions called within the repository and information on third-party APIs to enhance the annotation context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the annotation context by incorporating functions called within the repository and information on third-party API functionalities. |
Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Redundancy Optimization for Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianle Chen, Pengyu Cheng, Qiyuan Zhu, Jiacheng Wang, Bei Liu, Hao Gu, Ruijie Shen, Xiaofeng Hou, Sirui Han, Jiacheng Liu
| 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. |
Language Models as Inductive Reasoners (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to induce natural language rules from natural language facts using natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. |
Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jian Yang, Shuyue Guo, Linzheng Chai, Wei Zhang, Aishan Liu, Chuan Hao, Zhoujun Li, Xin Zhao, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development. |
| Approach: | They propose a proportion-dependent scaling law that prioritizes high-utility languages . they propose PLs to have varying effects during pre-training that affect model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law is based on 1000+ experiments across multiple languages and models. |
UAQFact: Evaluating Factual Knowledge Utilization of LLMs on Unanswerable Questions (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets to assess LLMs' performance on unanswerable questions lack factual knowledge support. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual unanswerable question dataset with auxiliary factual knowledge created from a Knowledge Graph and two new tasks to measure LLMs' ability to utilize internal and external factual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that LLMs do not consistently perform well even when they have factual knowledge stored. |
Beyond Numeric Rewards: In-Context Dueling Bandits with LLM Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) is a frontier paradigm for RL problems . authors find that LLMs can generalize cross-domain to perform ICRL on a stateless preference-based RL problem. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic-flow framework that integrates off-the-shelf DB algorithm support with LLM agents through fine-grained adaptive interplay. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generalize cross-domain to perform ICRL on a stateless preference-based RL problem. |
Entity-Aware Dependency-Based Deep Graph Attention Network for Comparative Preference Classification (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to comparative preference classification do not learn entity-aware representations well or use sequential modeling approaches that do not generalize well. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep-level deep-graph attention network that leverages word embeddings and syntactic information to solve a comparative preference classification problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in comparative preference classification. |
EmpathyEar: An Open-source Avatar Multimodal Empathetic Chatbot (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | EmpathyEar is an open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot . currently, ERG systems rely on text, sound, and vision . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot to fill the gap in traditional text-only ERG systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system enables users to generate emotional responses to user queries . it can also generate avatars with talking faces and synchronized speeches . |
Event Ontology Completion with Hierarchical Structure Evolution Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection require predefined schemas, but manual defining is expensive and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to achieve event clustering, hierarchy expansion and type naming . they propose 'neighbor Contrastive Clustering' module and a Hierarchy-Aware Linking module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on 1D text-related tasks, but lack 2D graph perception, a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules’ topological structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a cross-modal projector and a uni-modal adapter to enable an LM to understand both text- and graph-based molecular contents via a Q-Former. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baselines on tasks such as molecule captioning, IUPAC name prediction, and molecule-text retrieval. |
Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in literature understanding tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework that enables common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained language models on a comprehensive dataset. |
Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Exploring Hyperbolic Hierarchical Structure for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | rumor detection models often assume a simplistic one-to-one alignment between modalities . authors present a method that preserves hierarchical, non-linear relationships . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses hyperbolic geometry to preserve hierarchical relationships . it decomposes image and text content into three levels and embeds them in hyperbolical space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves hierarchical relationships rather than representing them at a flat semantic level. |
Planning with Multi-Constraints via Collaborative Language Agents (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural language models have sparked a new surge of intelligent agent research. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for collaborative LLM-based multi-agent systems that simplifies complex task planning with constraints by decomposing it into a hierarchy of subordinate tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average success rate of 42.68% on two constraint-intensive benchmarks, TravelPlanner and API-Bank. |
CtrlA: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Inherent Control (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Liu Huanshuo, Hao Zhang, Zhijiang Guo, Jing Wang, Kuicai Dong, Xiangyang Li, Yi Quan Lee, Cong Zhang, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on detecting LLM’s confidence via statistical uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a representation perspective to solve adaptive RAG by enabling dynamic retrieval during generation and enabling retrieval only when the query exceeds LLM's internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing adaptive RAG methods on a diverse set of tasks. |
OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Iat Long Iong, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Chen, Hanyu Lai, Shuntian Yao, Pengbo Shen, Hao Yu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | OpenWebAgent integrates large language models and large multimodal models to improve web automation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate large language models and large multimodal models into an open toolkit to optimize web automation. |
| Outcome: | The open toolkit integrates both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) it enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web. |
Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing open-source models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 12 multimodal tasks using 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in multimodal reasoning tasks, the authors show . they show that it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process. |
Unified Contextual Query Rewriting (2023.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Mukund Rungta, Yang Liu, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Vishal Vasudevan, Kellen Gillespie, Zeynab Raeesy
| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are becoming increasingly popular in real-world applications to assist users in daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified contextual query rewriting model that unifies QR for friction reduction and contextual carryover . they leverage the text-to-text unified framework which uses independent tasks with weighted loss to account for task importance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces friction and contextual carryover by using multiple auxiliary tasks. |
MemoPhishAgent: Memory-Augmented Multi-Modal LLM Agent for Phishing URL Detection (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional phishing website detection relies on static heuristics or reference lists, which lag behind rapidly evolving attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-augmented multi-modal LLM agent that leverages episodic memories to guide decisions on recurring and novel threats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art phishing detection tools on two public datasets and improves recall by 20%. |
PVPO: Pre-Estimated Value-Based Policy Optimization for Agentic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | extending grouping-based methods to agentic reasoning presents unique challenges . frequent environment interactions and tool invocations render intra-group advantage estimation unstable . |
| Approach: | They propose a grouping-based method that uses a single round of rollouts to stabilize advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | a new RL framework outperforms grouping-based methods in retrieval tasks and advanced mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
SKEP: Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | sentiment knowledge is ignored in sentiment analysis, despite its use in pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sentiment knowledge to learn a unified sentiment representation for multiple sentiment analysis tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong pre-training baseline on three kinds of sentiment tasks. |
Guided Knowledge Generation with Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved notable success in commonsense reasoning tasks, benefiting from extensive world knowledge acquired through extensive pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate knowledge explanations and to automatically assign labels based on the probability of correct answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four widely-used commonsense reasoning benchmarks and shows that it can generate high quality knowledge leading to correct answers. |
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yujie Feng, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Xu Chu, Zhaolu Kang, Yiran Liu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
CODE-MVP: Learning to Represent Source Code from Multiple Views with Contrastive Pre-Training (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on code representation learning, which aims to represent the semantics of source code into distributed vectors. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate different views with the natural-language description of source code into a unified framework with Multi-View contrastive Pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three downstream tasks over five datasets. |
From Insight to Action: A Novel Framework for Interpretability-Guided Data Selection in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ling Shi, Xinwei Wu, Xiaohu Zhao, Hao Wang, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Deyi Xiong, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | Recent research in mechanistic interpretability has revealed that Large Language models contain disentangled, human-understandable components. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that first identifies causal task features through frequency recall and interventional filtering, then selects “Feature-Resonant Data” that maximally activates task features for fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on mathematical reasoning, summarization, and translation tasks while using only 50% of the data. |
Detecting Subtle Differences between Human and Model Languages Using Spectrum of Relative Likelihood (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting modelgenerated texts from human texts are limited by the fact that absolute likelihood values of texts are bound to certain linguistic and cognitive constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to use relative likelihood values instead of absolute ones to extract useful features from the spectrum-view of likelihood for the human-model text detection task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reveal subtle differences between human and model languages, which find theoretical roots in psycholinguistics studies. |
PhotoChat: A Human-Human Dialogue Dataset With Photo Sharing Behavior For Joint Image-Text Modeling (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | PhotoChat contains 12k dialogues, each of which is paired with a user photo that is shared during the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PhotoChat to facilitate research on image-text modeling by combining a photo-sharing intent prediction task and a picture retrieval task to retrieve the most relevant photo according to the dialogue context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks achieve 10.4% recall@1 and 58.1% F1 scores, indicating that the proposed dataset presents interesting yet challenging real-world problems. |
DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jia Li, Ge Li, Yunfei Zhao, Yongmin Li, Huanyu Liu, Hao Zhu, Lecheng Wang, Kaibo Liu, Zheng Fang, Lanshen Wang, Jiazheng Ding, Xuanming Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Yihong Dong, Zhi Jin, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Gu, Mengfei Yang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level benchmark named DevEval to evaluate LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the LLMs perform better in real-world code repositories than existing benchmarks. |
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters. |
Progressive Re-ranking for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Curriculum Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve retrieval performance of large language models are limited by static knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal re-ranking framework that combines curriculum learning with fine-grained reranking and multimodal section reassessment to improve CLIP-based visual coarse-grain retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art answer accuracy and competitive retrieval performance on InfoSeek and Enc-VQA. |
Knowledge-augmented Financial Market Analysis and Report Generation (2024.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate financial market analysis text require extensive financial knowledge and skill of financial analysts. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate financial market analysis reports using financial market data using a financial knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large-scale language models and retrieval-augmented baselines in the financial market analysis generation task. |
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li
| 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. |
DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junchao Wu, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Hao Zhang, Zeyu Wu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Jinsong Su, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | Existing detectors are limited in their ability to detect large language models generated content in multilingual environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions to better align with real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. |
MAIN: Mutual Alignment Is Necessary for instruction tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Fanyi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Haoyu Liu, Xixin Cao, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Instruction tuning has enabled large language models to achieve remarkable performance, yet its success heavily depends on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a mutual alignment framework which enforces coherence between instructions and responses through mutual constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes well across model architectures and sizes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen models across diverse benchmarks. |
Align2LLaVA: Cascaded Human and Large Language Model Preference Alignment for Multi-modal Instruction Curation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hongzhe Huang, Jiang Liu, Zhewen Yu, Li Cai, Dian Jiao, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang, Juncheng Li, Hao Jiang, Haoyuan Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) introduce significant variability in data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human and LLM preference alignment to compress large corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions into a compact and high-quality form. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms LLaVA-series models in MLLM benchmarks by 90% . it uses human and LLM preference alignment to compress a large dataset . |
Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Linzhuang Sun, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liang, Ruitong Liu, Yuying Li, Qifeng Cai, Jingxuan Wei, Yuchen Wu, Bihui Yu, Xiangxiang Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui
| Challenge: | Structured Query Language (SQL) is the cornerstone for data-driven decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously evaluate Large Language Models within a dynamic interaction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. |
A Self-supervised Joint Training Framework for Document Reranking (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have been successfully applied to a wide range of tasks . however, the pretraining tasks were based on the context of documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised joint training framework with a method called Masked Query Prediction to establish semantic relations between given queries and positive documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on document reranking tasks without further pre-training . it uses a self-supervised method to establish semantic relations between given queries and positive documents. |
COPEN: Probing Conceptual Knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
DocLens: Multi-aspect Fine-grained Medical Text Evaluation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yiqing Xie, Sheng Zhang, Hao Cheng, Pengfei Liu, Zelalem Gero, Cliff Wong, Tristan Naumann, Hoifung Poon, Carolyn Rose
| Challenge: | Medical text generation systems are widely used to assist with administrative work and highlight salient information to support decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of metrics to evaluate completeness, conciseness, and attribution of medical text at a fine-grained level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits substantially higher agreement with medical experts than existing metrics. |
Towards Efficient NLP: A Standard Evaluation and A Strong Baseline (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangyang Liu, Tianxiang Sun, Junliang He, Jiawen Wu, Lingling Wu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Rather than pursuing the reachless SOTA accuracy, researchers are focusing on model efficiency and usability. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation and a public leaderboard for efficient NLP models that depicts the Pareto Frontier for various language understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or performs on par with SOTA compressed and early exiting models. |
Perplexity-Aware Data Scaling Law: Perplexity Landscapes Predict Performance for Continual Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities across a wide range of domains, but their generalpurpose pre-training objectives often leave them illsuited for specialized applications such as healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a perplexity-aware data scaling law that establishes a predictive relationship between the perplexities of domain-specific data and the test loss. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on medical and general-domain benchmarks show that the proposed scaling law consistently identifies near-optimal training subsets with significantly reduced data consumption. |
TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianwei Lin, Jiang Liu, Wenqiao Zhang, Yang Dai, Haoyuan Li, Zhelun Yu, Wanggui He, Juncheng Li, Jiannan Guo, Hao Jiang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning are resource-efficient, but performance often falls short . a new approach, TeamLoRA, integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce task-specific LoRA as domain experts to improve learning efficiency . teamLoRA integrates collaborative and competition modules to improve model learning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TeamLoRA improves performance in multi-task learning . teamLorea integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance . |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
The Microsoft Toolkit of Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaodong Liu, Yu Wang, Jianshu Ji, Hao Cheng, Xueyun Zhu, Emmanuel Awa, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Hoifung Poon, Guihong Cao, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | MT-DNN is an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it allows researchers and developers to train customized deep learning models . |
| Approach: | They present MT-DNN, an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it is designed to facilitate rapid customization for a broad spectrum of NLU tasks . MT supports multi-task knowledge distillation, which can substantially compress a deep neural model without significant performance drop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly compress a large model without significant performance drop. |
ReEval: Automatic Hallucination Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Transferable Adversarial Attacks (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing static benchmarks do not guarantee that models can use the provided evidence for answering, which is essential to avoid hallucination when the required knowledge is new or private. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically perturb existing static one for dynamic evaluation by using a chatGPT framework and a set of open-domain QA datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates new test cases on two open-domain QA datasets and is human-readable and useful to trigger hallucination in LLMs. |
Analyzing Chain-of-thought Prompting in Black-Box Large Language Models via Estimated V-information (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in improving performance on challenging reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric which extends the concept of pointwise V-information to black-box models and quantifies label-relevant new information introduced by CoT prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric extends the concept of pointwise V-information to black-box models, quantifying label-relevant new information introduced by CoT prompting beyond pre-existing label information. |
CLEAR: A Framework Enabling Large Language Models to Discern Confusing Legal Paragraphs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling LLMs to leverage legal rules to tackle complex legal reasoning tasks, but ignores their ability to understand legal rules. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal paragraph prediction task that aims to predict the legal paragraph given criminal facts and a framework CLEAR to enhance their legal reasoning ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the ability of LLMs to analyze legal cases with the guidance of legal rule insights. |
Data Mixing Agent: Learning to Re-weight Domains for Continual Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for reweighting data mixtures rely on manual designation with certain heuristics based on intuition or empirical results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based framework that learns to re-weight domains by reinforcement learning on large quantities of data mixing trajectories with corresponding feedback from an evaluation environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in achieving balanced performance across source and target fields and domain spaces without retraining. |
ProtT3: Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language Models excel in understanding textual descriptions of proteins, but struggle to process texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding that integrates a PLM as its protein understanding module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing baselines and is highly efficient in protein-to-text generation. |
BTC-LLM: Efficient Sub-1-Bit LLM Quantization via Learnable Transformation and Binary Codebook (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Gu, Lujun Li, Hao Wang, Lei Wang, Zheyu Wang, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent sparsity-aware binarization approaches can achieve sub-1-bit compression, but they face performance degradation, mask-management overhead, and limited hardware compatibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a binary quantization framework that leverages binary pattern clustering and weight transformation to overcome performance degradation and mask-management overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art compression (1.11–0.7 bits) it maintains high performance with only a 3.1% accuracy drop in zero-shot benchmarks while delivering a 1.6 speedup over FP16. |
Knowledge Distillation based Contextual Relevance Matching for E-commerce Product Search (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to e-commerce relevance matching ignore bipartite graphs in logs . experimental results show that proposed method improves human relevance judgment . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient knowledge distillation framework for e-commerce relevance matching to exploit the advantages of Transformer-style and classical relevance matching models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves human relevance judgment on large-scale real-world data. |
Novel Relation Detection: Discovering Unknown Relation Types via Multi-Strategy Self-Supervised Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation extraction can only recognize predefined relation types . new or out-of-scope relation types may continually emerge after the model is deployed . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel relation detection task that uses self-supervised learning to handle shallow semantic similarity problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets. |
MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jingqun Tang, Qi Liu, Yongjie Ye, Jinghui Lu, Shu Wei, An-Lan Wang, Chunhui Lin, Hao Feng, Zhen Zhao, Yanjie Wang, Yuliang Liu, Hao Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) is a text-centric visual task understanding tool. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark that features human expert annotations across 9 languages . they prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images. |
Vision-Language Models Can Self-Improve Reasoning via Reflection (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) has been shown to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which iteratively enhances the model’s Vision-language Reasoning by Reflecting on CoT Rationales. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multimodal reasoning on vision-language tasks by 23% to 60% over baselines. |
CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Nianqi Li, Jingping Liu, Sihang Jiang, Haiyun Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Jiaqing Liang, Zujie Liang, Feng Wei, Jinglei Chen, Zhenghong Hao, Bing Han
| 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. |
Adaptive Prompt Optimization for Open-Ended Tasks: Uncertainty Preference as a Secondary Signal (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent training-free prompt optimizers treat performance as maximizing a single scalar score and ignore a second signal that the desired style is task dependent. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-entropy-based method that uses task uncertainty to guide prompt optimization by selecting high-entropicy candidates for creative tasks and low-energetic candidates for conservative ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on MT-Bench subsets and integrates easily into existing prompt optimizers. |
Calibrated Speculative Decoding: Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection for Efficient Inference (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a powerful and efficient way to accelerate autoregressive generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification . they use online correction memory and Semantic Consistency Gating to analyze rejections . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. |
TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaopeng Feng, Yan Zhang, Hao Li, Bei Wu, Jiayu Liao, Wenqiang Liu, Jun Lang, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in Machine Translation (MT). human evaluations reveal that LLM-generated translations still contain various errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based self-refinement framework that feeds error information back into LLMs to facilitate self-finement, leading to enhanced translation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms internal refinement and feedback methods while ensuring a robust translation quality baseline. |
Emotion Transfer with Enhanced Prototype for Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on emotion recognition in conversation does not reach a consensus on classification theories . despite this, there is no clear consensus on how to recognize previously unseen emotions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a prototype-based emotion transfer framework that can be used in real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows promise but still faces key challenges in the field of emotion recognition in conversation. |
UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal ones . large-scale pre- training has drawn much attention in both the community of Compute Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture which can adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn more generalizable representations with rich non-paired single-modal data. |
EARL: Informative Knowledge-Grounded Conversation Generation with Entity-Agnostic Representation Learning (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded conversation models lack knowledge that occurs in training data, resulting in incomplete knowledge generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity-Agnostic Representation Learning method to introduce knowledge graphs to informative conversation generation using context of conversations and relational structure of knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more informative, coherent, and natural responses than baseline models. |
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance. |
MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for query expansion lack corpus-specific knowledge and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-query-document generation method that leverages large language models for mutual verification to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is fully zero-shot and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods. |
Se2: Sequential Example Selection for In-Context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior work has explored the selection of examples for in-context learning, neglecting the internal relationships between examples and exist an inconsistency between training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential-aware method that leverages the LLM’s feedback on varying context, aiding in capturing inter-relationships and sequential information among examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 23 NLP tasks show that Se2 surpasses baselines and achieves 42% relative improvement over random selection. |
PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from language shortcuts that allow models to rely on text, lack of question diversity, and narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal punchline comprehension benchmark to assess models' ability to comprehend punchlines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses in-context learning and chain-of-thought in punchline comprehension. |
M3-VQA: A Benchmark for Multimodal, Multi-Entity, Multi-Hop Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-based VQA benchmarks focus on coarse-grained categories and simple reasoning over single entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-based Visual Question Answering benchmark to enhance multimodality evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves evaluation of multimodal large language models in fine-grained multimodal entity understanding and complex multihop reasoning. |
Reliable Use of Lemmas via Eligibility Reasoning and Section-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on mathematical benchmarks but often import conclusions without validating assumptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encodes a lemma specification and trains with reinforcement learning and section-aware loss masking to assign penalty to the section responsible for errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on benchmarks but often misapplyes lemmas . the model is able to encode the specification and train with reinforcement learning . |
SciVQR: A Multidisciplinary Multimodal Benchmark for Advanced Scientific Reasoning Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal large language models fail to capture complexity and traceability of reasoning processes . SciVQR includes domain-specific visuals and challenges models to combine visual comprehension with reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for scientific reasoning covering 54 subfields . SciVQR includes domain-specific visuals and challenges models to combine visual comprehension with reasoning . |
| Outcome: | SciVQR evaluates 54 subfields in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy, and biology . the results highlight the need for improved multi-step reasoning and integration of interdisciplinary knowledge . |
From Multimodal LLM to Human-level AI: Modality, Instruction, Reasoning, Efficiency and beyond (2024.lrec-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This tutorial aims to deliver a comprehensive review of cutting-edge research in MLLMs. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML in learning and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | This course will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML models on learning, learning, and multimodal reasoning. |
M2PO: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Wang, Linlong Xu, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Xiaohu Zhao, Bo Zeng, Liangying Shao, Yichen Dong, Xinwei Wu, Jiang Zhou, Tianyu Dong, Xiangxiang Zeng, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | prevailing methods for machine translation are often hindered by misleading reward signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns large language models to human preferences . they propose 'M2PO' to correct the bias towards partial errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models and achieves parity with proprietary models. |
Scene Graph as Pivoting: Inference-time Image-free Unsupervised Multimodal Machine Translation with Visual Scene Hallucination (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current neural machine translation (NMT) relies on parallel sentences, which obstructs the development of NMT for minor languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised multimodal machine translation setup where the model is trained with source-text image pairs and tested with only source- text inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on the task and setup, helping yield translations with better completeness, relevance and fluency without relying on paired images. |
On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Weixiang Zhao, Yichen Zhang, Yingshuo Wang, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments. |
| Outcome: | The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation. |
STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
Mingbo Ma, Liang Huang, Hao Xiong, Renjie Zheng, Kaibo Liu, Baigong Zheng, Chuanqiang Zhang, Zhongjun He, Hairong Liu, Xing Li, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Simultaneous translation is notoriously dif- ficult due to word-order differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-to-prefix framework that implicitly learns to anticipate in a single translation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves low latency and reasonable qual- ity on 4 directions. |
Iterative Self-Tuning LLMs for Enhanced Jailbreaking Capabilities (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chung-En Sun, Xiaodong Liu, Weiwei Yang, Tsui-Wei Weng, Hao Cheng, Aidan San, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that crafts adversarial LLMs with enhanced jailbreak ability. |
| Outcome: | ADV-LLM significantly reduces the computational cost of generating adversarial suffixes while achieving nearly 100% ASR on various open-source LLMs. |
Context-Aware Non-Autoregressive Document-Level Translation with Sentence-Aligned Connectionist Temporal Classification (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies employ autoregressive translation (AT) methods to encode sentences . however, the AT methods struggle with error accumulation when the length of sentences increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware non-autoregressive framework with the sentence-aligned connectionist temporal classification loss for document-level neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 46X speedup on three benchmarks compared to strong baselines. |
Improve Dense Passage Retrieval with Entailment Tuning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dense retrieval have demonstrated remarkable performance in IR tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve the embedding of dense retrievers by using existence claim as a bridge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be plugged into current dense retrieval methods and the results are published in the journal Nature. |
DualRAG: A Dual-Process Approach to Integrate Reasoning and Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rong Cheng, Jinyi Liu, Yan Zheng, Fei Ni, Jiazhen Du, Hangyu Mao, Fuzheng Zhang, Bo Wang, Jianye Hao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering struggle to identify and organize dynamic knowledge . et al., 2023; Liu e.t. al. 2023) suggest a dual-process framework for multi-step reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a synergistic dual-process framework that integrates reasoning and retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves answer accuracy and coherence even in smaller-scale models. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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% . |
GeAR: Generation Augmented Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haoyu Liu, Shaohan Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Furu Wei, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Document retrieval techniques are used to compute semantic similarity between a query and documents, but the scalar similarity fails to reflect enough information, hindering the interpretation of retrieval results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Baojun Wang, Zhao Zhang, Kun Xu, Guang-Yuan Hao, Yuyang Zhang, Lifeng Shang, Linlin Li, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
Unsupervised Paraphrasing by Simulated Annealing (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate accurate and different-appearing paraphrases require massive parallel samples for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that accomplishes Unsupervised Paraphrasing by Simulated Annealing by performing local editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models in automatic and human evaluations on Quora, Wikianswers, MSCOCO, and Twitter. |
Task-Aware Specialization for Efficient and Robust Dense Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval models are parameter-inefficient and underperform sparse counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware specialization for dEnse Retrieval architecture that enables parameter sharing by interleaving shared and specialized blocks in a single encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture surpasses BM25 on questions and passages using 60% of the parameters as bi-encoder dense retrievers. |
All That Glitters is Not Gold: Improving Robust Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Fact-Centric Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models (LLMs) focus on basic plan validity, but neglect critical aspects such as route efficiency, POI appeal, and real-time adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for retrieval-augmented, spatiotemporal-aware travel planning that integrates retrieved trajectories with LLMs’ intrinsic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves spatial efficiency and POI rationality while challenging universality and robustness due to conflicting references and noisy data. |
Infini-gram mini: Exact n-gram Search at the Internet Scale with FM-Index (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern language models are trained on text data downsampled from massive text corpora like Common Crawl. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and scalable system that can make petabyte-level text corpora searchable by using the FM-index data structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system indexes 83TB of Internet text in 99 days with a single 128-core CPU node (or 19 hours if using 137 such nodes). |
Test-Time Code-Switching for Cross-lingual Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a thriving research area . current code-switching methods suffer from term boundary detection issues and out-of-dictionary problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time code-switching framework which bridges the gap between bilingual training and monolingual test- time prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement of 3.7% on four cross-lingual datasets. |
One Pair Suffices: Unlocking Universal Zero-Shot Translation via Cross-Architecture Alignment (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current paradigms for empowering Large Language Models with multilingual capabilities rely heavily on massive instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid cross-alignment approach that fuses a frozen NLLB encoder with a Qwen decoder via a closed-loop dual-adapter architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms towerPlus-9B and Aya-101 on language-agnostic projection protocols. |
Bit-by-Bit: Progressive QAT Strategy with Outlier Channel Splitting for Stable Low-Bit LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Binxing Xu, Hao Gu, Lujun Li, Hao Wang, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Xintong Yang, Chao Li, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training LLMs at ultra-low precisions suffer from convergence instability and substantial training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive QAT framework with outlier channel splitting to address these issues . they use nested structure of integer quantization grids to enable a "train once, deploy any precision" paradigm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on both Llama2/3 and W2A16, with an 11 speedup over BF16. |
A Bounding Box is Worth One Token - Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jinghui Lu, Haiyang Yu, Yanjie Wang, Yongjie Ye, Jingqun Tang, Ziwei Yang, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Hao Feng, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating spatial layouts with text have limitations . existing methods produce overly long text sequences or lack autoregressive traits of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They introduce Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model (LayTextLLM) they use OCR-derived text and spatial layouts to integrate with LLMs for document understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows an increase in performance in KIE and VQA tasks. |
Pattern-revising Enhanced Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Bases (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Simple question answering over knowledge bases is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct pattern extraction and entity linking first and put forward pattern revising procedure to mitigate the error propagation problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in this task by an absolute large margin. |
WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild? (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
An-Lan Wang, Jingqun Tang, Lei Liao, Hao Feng, Qi Liu, Xiang Fei, Jinghui Lu, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for document understanding in the wild are based on scanned or digital documents . however, these benchmarks fail to capture the challenges posed by documents in the real world . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that incorporates a diverse set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions and is compared with digital or scanned documents. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
FewRel: A Large-Scale Supervised Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset with State-of-the-Art Evaluation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that even the most competitive few-shot learning models struggle on this task, especially as compared with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset consisting of 70, 000 sentences on 100 relations derived from Wikipedia and annotated by crowdworkers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on the most competitive few-shot learning models, especially as compared with humans. |
VLSBench: Unveiling Visual Leakage in Multimodal Safety (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Commercial-scale language models (LMs) have taken APR to unprecedented levels, but they are limited by parameters and humans interact with them through explicit prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes process supervision to improve program repair by allowing users to input feedback from compilers and test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large outcome-based generation methods and is inspired by strategies used in programming competitions. |
Aristotle: Mastering Logical Reasoning with A Logic-Complete Decompose-Search-Resolve Framework (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jundong Xu, Hao Fei, Meng Luo, Qian Liu, Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang, Preslav Nakov, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu
| Challenge: | Existing systems fail to fully leverage the structure of logical tasks throughout the reasoning process, causing bottlenecks in efficiency and efficacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-complete reasoning framework, Aristotle, which integrates symbolic expressions and logical rules into the entire reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning frameworks in accuracy and efficiency. |
X-LeBench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Egocentric Video Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Wenqi Zhou, Kai Cao, Hao Zheng, Yunze Liu, Xinyi Zheng, Miao Liu, Per Ola Kristensson, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas, Fan Zhang, Weizhe Lin, Junxiao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark datasets focus on short to moderately long videos, leaving a substantial gap in evaluating extensive, ultra-long egocentric video recordings. |
| Approach: | X-LeBench is a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate long egocentric video recordings . it uses a life-logging pipeline to produce realistic, coherent daily plans . |
| Outcome: | X-LeBench is a new benchmark dataset designed to evaluate long-form egocentric video understanding . the approach produces realistic, coherent daily plans aligned with real-world video data . |
Can Large Language Models Effectively Support Decision-Making in Sudden Emergencies? (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on the earlier stages of emergency response . lack of suitable datasets for reliable and compliance-aware decision-oriented modeling and evaluation is limiting current research . |
| Approach: | They propose a first real-world emergency decision-making dataset EDM-Bench . they propose 'rule-enhanced reasoning framework' that integrates external regulatory knowledge with constrained inference mechanisms to improve both decision safety and interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves decision safety and interpretability by integrating regulatory knowledge with constrained inference mechanisms. |
ClinAlign: Scaling Healthcare Alignment from Clinician Preference (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shiwei Lyu, Xidong Wang, Hao Zhu, Lei Liu, Chaohe Zhang, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Benyou Wang, Yue Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for aligning open-ended outputs with fine-grained clinician preferences are weakly grounded in professional guidelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to align large language models' outputs with fine-grained clinician preferences . they propose 119 broadly reusable, clinically grounded principles organized by clinical dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on HealthBench-Hard and Deepseek-R1 and o3. |
Continual Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation via Dual Importance-based Model Division (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting by making compromises between the original and new language pairs, leading to sub-optimal performance on both translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual importance-based model division method to divide the model parameters into two parts and separate the translation of the original and new tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines under different incremental translation scenarios. |
Mistake Notebook Learning: Batch-Clustered Failures for Training-Free Agent Adaptation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mistake Notebook Learning (MNL) is a new memory framework for large language model agents . it allows agents to distill shared error patterns into structured "mistake notes" |
| Approach: | They propose a new memory framework that enables agents to self-curate generalizable guidance from batch-clustered failures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance compared to existing memory mechanisms. |
SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Zhanxin Hao, Ye He, Zekun Li, Jiangyi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Huiqin Liu, Yu Zhang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent . |
Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Xinhua Zeng, Yang Liu, Xiang Zhang, Haoran Yang, Yumeng Zhang, Shan Huang, Yiran Wei, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | a new paradigm for dialogue systems is being developed to mimic human interactions . the current single-step dialogue paradigm lacks the depth and fluidity of human interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-by-step dialogue paradigm that mimics human interactions . they use a dataset to fine-tune existing language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system mimics the dynamic nature of human conversations . it is compared with existing paradigms and will be released later this year . |
Rethinking Text-based Protein Understanding: Retrieval or LLM? (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on integrating protein-related knowledge into large language models through continued pretraining and multi-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-enhanced method which significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs for protein-to-text generation and shows accuracy and efficiency in training-free scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs for protein-to-text generation and shows accuracy and efficiency in training-free scenarios. |
Incorporating Chinese Characters of Words for Lexical Sememe Prediction (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of lexical sememe prediction rely on external context information of words to represent meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a character-enhanced sememe prediction framework for Chinese language that takes advantage of internal character information and external context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a Chinese sememe knowledge base and maintains robust performance even for low-frequency words. |
Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In implicit sentiment analysis, the opinion cues come in an implicit and obscure manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-step prompting principle for THOR to step-by-step induce the implicit aspect, opinion and finally the sentiment polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework pushes the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 6% F1 on supervised setup and more strikingly, boosts the SoTA by over 50% F1 with THOR+GPT3. |
FAER: Benchmarking VLMs for Failure-Aware Embodied Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Visual-language models (VLMs) are the core component of embodied agents in perceiving the environment and making decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-aware benchmark to evaluate the performance of visual language models (VLMs) in long-horizon tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of 16 widely utilized VLMs and 4 LLMs for FAER tasks. |
Self-Bootstrapped Visual-Language Model for Knowledge Selection and Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a framework that leverages the visual-language model to select key knowledge retrieved by DPR and answer questions improves performance of the baseline on the open-domain Knowledge-based VQA benchmark, OK-VQA. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages visual-language models to retrieve related knowledge . they use dense passage retrieval to retrieve knowledge related to visual-linguistics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the baseline on the open-domain Knowledge-based VQA benchmark, OK-VQA. |
A Dual-Mind Framework for Strategic and Expressive Negotiation Agent (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to negotiation dialogue focus on only one aspect, ignoring the synergistic effect of their combined synergies. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-mind negotiation agent framework that integrates an intuitive and a deliberative module for slow, expression optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on negotiation datasets showing that it improves negotiation ability. |
Pruning via Merging: Compressing LLMs via Manifold Alignment Based Layer Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Deyuan Liu, Zhanyue Qin, Hairu Wang, Zhao Yang, Zecheng Wang, Fangying Rong, Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Bo Li, Xi Chen, Cunhang Fan, Zhao Lv, Dianhui Chu, Zhiying Tu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter pruning fail to utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck measure to merge similar layers to preserve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pruning methods on multiple datasets and LLMs with quantization and achieves substantial compression ratios. |
StableToolBench-MirrorAPI: Modeling Tool Environments as Mirrors of 7,000+ Real-World APIs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tool environments face challenges in balancing stability, scale, and realism, especially for benchmarking purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains specialized LLMs to accurately simulate real API responses by supervised fine-tuning and chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior accuracy and stability compared to state-of-the-art methods on the newly constructed MirrorAPI-Bench and its integration into StableToolBench. |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss. |
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Few-shot domain adaptation and NOTA detection are two real-world challenges for few-shot relation classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models . they build upon the FewRel dataset by adding a new test set in a different domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can evaluate few-shot domain adaptation and few- shot none-of-the-above detection on a new domain and NOTA relation choice. |
Knowledge-Rich Self-Supervision for Biomedical Entity Linking (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Sheng Zhang, Hao Cheng, Shikhar Vashishth, Cliff Wong, Jinfeng Xiao, Xiaodong Liu, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon
| Challenge: | Entity linking is challenging in high-value domains with myriad entities . standard classification approaches suffer from the annotation bottleneck . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised approach to learn domain knowledge for biomedical entity linking . it generates self-reported mention examples on unlabeled text and trains contextual encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 20 points in accuracy on biomedical datasets. |
MdEval: Massively Multilingual Code Debugging (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shukai Liu, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Jiajun Shi, He Zhu, Liran Wang, Jin Ke, Wei Zhang, Hualei Zhu, Shuyue Guo, Tao Sun, Jiaheng Liu, Yunlong Duan, Yu Hao, Liqun Yang, Guanglin Niu, Ge Zhang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are limited in terms of language diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual debugging benchmark that includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and introduces the debug instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair task, bug localization task, and bug identification task. |
Diffusion Glancing Transformer for Parallel Sequence-to-Sequence Learning (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that non-autoregressive generation models are superior in generation efficiency but inferior in generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion glancing transformer which employs a modality diffusion process and residual glancy sampling to improve multi-modality modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms autoregressive and non-autoregressive models on machine translation and text generation benchmarks. |
Cross-lingual Lexical Sememe Prediction (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sememes are defined as the minimum semantic units of human languages . but most languages do not have sememe-based linguistic knowledge bases . a new framework is proposed to predict sememes for words in other languages based on semems . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to model correlations between sememes and multi-lingual words in low-dimensional semantic space for sememe prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baseline methods on real-world datasets. |
Cross-Lingual Contrastive Learning for Fine-Grained Entity Typing for Low-Resource Languages (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Dynamic Anticipation and Completion for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Sparse Knowledge Graph (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning methods for sparse KGs are incomplete and lack of evidential paths to target entities makes multi-hop reasoning difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-hop reasoning model over sparse KGs to solve this problem . they use latent prediction of embedding-based models to make the model perform more potential path search over sparses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on five datasets from Freebase, NELL and Wikidata. |
ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Chen, Yukun Yan, Sen Mei, Wanxiang Che, Zhenghao Liu, Qi Shi, Xinze Li, Yuchun Fan, Pengcheng Huang, Qiushi Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RAG systems often underutilize the retrieved documents, authors say . they fail to extract and integrate key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning . |
| Approach: | a new framework extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths . the framework optimizes the model by selecting the most appropriate reasoning path . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ClueAnchor outperforms baseline RAG frameworks in completeness and robustness. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
Rethinking Data Mixing from the Perspective of Large Language Models (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Yuanjian Xu, Tianze Sun, Changwei Xu, XinLong Zhao, Jianing Hao, Ran Chen, Yang Liu, Ruijie Xu, Stephen Chen, Guang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to mix data with LLMs have relied on domain definitions derived from intuition. |
| Approach: | They propose a reweighting framework that restructures data scheduling as a graph-constrained optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on GPT-2 models. |
Robust Neural Machine Translation with Joint Textual and Phonetic Embedding (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are sensitive to noises in input sentences . one special kind of noise is the homophone noise, where words are replaced by other words with similar pronunciations. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed phonetic and textual information into neural machine translation datasets to improve robustness to homophone noises. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the robustness of neural machine translation to homophone noises on clean test sets. |
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou
| 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. |
Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research lacks systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection. |
| Approach: | They investigate the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead. |
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Diversified Multiple Instance Learning for Document-Level Multi-Aspect Sentiment Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that D-MILN outperforms recent weakly-supervised baselines . document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification requires a lot of manual aspect-level annotations - which is time-consuming and laborious . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Diversified Multiple Instance Learning Network to achieve DMSC with only document-level weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms weakly-supervised baselines on TripAdvisor and BeerAdvocate datasets. |
LearnAct: Few-Shot Mobile GUI Agent with a Unified Demonstration Benchmark (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guangyi Liu, Pengxiang Zhao, Liang Liu, Zhiming Chen, Yuxiang Chai, Yaozhen Liang, WenHao Wang, Siheng Chen, Zhengxi Lu, Shuai Ren, Hao Wang, Shibo He, Yong Liu, Wenchao Meng
| Challenge: | Mobile GUI agents show promise in automating tasks but face significant generalization challenges in long-tail scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework for mobile GUI agents that measures the performance of GUI agents by analyzing their performance. |
| Outcome: | The LearnGUI benchmark outperforms existing methods in offline and online evaluations and demonstrates consistent gains across model architectures. |
Don’t Corrupt the Fact: A Trustworthy RAG Watermarking Framework based on Dual Factual Shield (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing watermarking methods are fact-agnostic and cause "faithfulness hallucinations" a novel framework to enforce knowledge loyalty is proposed to improve watermarks . |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that enforces knowledge loyalty by spoofing terms from retrieved contexts and prompt-based semantic guidance to protect against factual corruption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the Knowledge Corruption Rate while maintaining its original high security and robustness. |
CGF: Constrained Generation Framework for Query Rewriting in Conversational AI (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Hao, Yang Liu, Xing Fan, Saurabh Gupta, Saleh Soltan, Rakesh Chada, Pradeep Natarajan, Chenlei Guo, Gokhan Tur
| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant help millions of users to perform a lot of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Constrained Generation Framework for query rewriting at global and personalized levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts the query rewriting performance. |
Entity-Aware Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for multidocument summarization do not focus on explicitly modeling the underlying semantic information across documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an entityaware model for abstractive multi-document summarization that augments the classical Transformer-based encoder-decoder framework with a heterogeneous graph consisting of text units and entities as nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can deal with saliency and redundancy issues explicitly and can be used with pre-trained language models, arriving at improved performance. |
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Liu, Jingqing Ruan, Hao Li, Haodong Zhao, Desheng Wang, Jiansong Chen, Wan Guanglu, Xunliang Cai, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% . |
SWEET - Weakly Supervised Person Name Extraction for Fighting Human Trafficking (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | SWEET is a weak supervision pipeline for extracting person names from noisy escort ads . it does not require any human annotators and labeling, which is incredibly important . |
| Approach: | They propose a weak supervision pipeline SWEET: Supervise Weakly for Entity Extraction to fight Trafficking for extracting person names from noisy escort ads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed weak supervision pipeline outperforms the previous method by 9% on domain data and generalizes to common benchmark datasets. |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting During Domain Adaptation of Seq2seq Language Generation (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on lifelong learning requires incremental memory space to learn a model . existing work on experience replay or elastic weighted consolidation requires incremental space . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a recall optimization mechanism to memorize parameters of previous tasks via regularization and a domain drift estimation algorithm to compensate the drift between different domains in the embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA models on paraphrase and dialog response generation tasks. |
CCTVBench: Contrastive Consistency Traffic VideoQA Benchmark for Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Stable Language Guidance for Vision–Language–Action Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing vision-Language-Action models are notoriously brittle to linguistic perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic framework that disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. |
Multi-View Incongruity Learning for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Yanbing Liu, Guangjie Zeng, Xiaoyan Yu, Hao Peng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sarcasm detection rely on spurious correlations, demonstrating poor generalizability beyond training environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates multimodal incongruities via contrastive learning for multimodal sarcasm detection by using three views to drive multi-view learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and shows that it is more generalizable than existing methods. |
Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using customized retrieval models, model transferability and scalability are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular retrieval model where individual modules correspond to key skills that can be reused across datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms self-supervised retrievers in zero-shot evaluations and achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuned retrieval performance on NQ, HotpotQA and OTT-QA. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Part Represents Whole: Improving the Evaluation of Machine Translation System Using Entropy Enhanced Metrics (2022.findings-aacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing machine translation metrics have poor correlations with human assessments . entropy-based evaluations are often limited to a limited number of samples . |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and unsupervised approach to enhance machine translation metrics using entropy by introducing sentence-level difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing metrics on five sub-tracks in the WMT19 Metrics shared tasks. |
Make Large Language Model a Better Ranker (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate robust capabilities across various fields . current list-wise approaches fail in ranking tasks due to misalignment between ranking objectives and next-token prediction . |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model framework with Aligned Listwise Ranking Objectives (ALRO) this framework provides explicit feedback in a listwise manner by introducing soft lambda loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing recommendation methods and embedding-based recommendations without additional computational burdens. |
JanusMM: A Benchmark for Self-Deprecation Understanding in Real-World Multimodal Conversations (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xinyi Xu, Bingguang Hao, Yongyi Xiong, Zimo Chen, Xinchen Liu, Hongxin Guo, Xuelong Wang, Silin Zhou, Shihan Dou
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are a common communicative strategy in human society, often using image-text interplay to express emotions and intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs)' understanding of self-deprecation in real-world conversations using 2,016 bilingual memes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates MLLMs' understanding of self-deprecation in real-world conversations. |
AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xueqiao Sun, Siyi Cheng, Hao Yu, Hanyu Lai, Shudan Zhang, Dan Zhang, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Existing studies on Android agents lack systematic research on open-source and closed-source models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Android agents that includes an operation environment and a reproducible benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework lifts the success rate of open-source LLMs and LMMs from 4.59% to 21.50% for LLM and 1.93% to 13.28% for LMM. |
Learning with Noisy Labels for Sentence-level Sentiment Classification (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on learning with noisy labels dates back to the 1980s, but it is still vibrant today. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel DNN model called NetAb to deal with noisy labels during training and train the networks using their respective loss functions in mutual reinforcement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can fit training data with noisy labels and predict clean labels. |
PRA-RAG: Provably Robust Aggregation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation against Retrieval Corruption (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xue Tan, Yi Zheng, Chang Huo, Yunruo Zhang, Yu Liu, Hao Luan, Zhuyang Yu, Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, Ping Chen
| Challenge: | Existing defense mechanisms lack theoretical robustness guarantees and perform unreliably when the LLM has limited knowledge of the retrieved content. |
| Approach: | They propose a provably robust retrieval aggregation algorithm designed to defend against poisoning attacks on retrieved texts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PRA-RAG reduces the attack success rate to as low as 1% while maintaining an accuracy of 71%, significantly outperforming representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. |
C-ReD: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for AI-Generated Text Detection Derived from Real-World Prompts (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to develop algorithms for large language models (LLMs) have limited model diversity and data homogeneity in the Chinese corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Real-prompt AI-generated text Detection benchmark that can be generalized to unseen LLMs and external Chinese datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks address critical gaps in model diversity, domain coverage, and prompt realism that have limited prior Chinese detection benchmarks. |
PedagogyBench: A Cognitive-Driven Benchmark for Multimodal Instructional Video Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing video understanding benchmarks do not adequately capture the pedagogical logic embedded in instructional videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a pedagogy-driven segmentation strategy and a dual-stream semantic injection pipeline that combines machine pre-annotation with expert refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on discriminative tasks but degrades on higher-order pedagogical diagnosis, relying on parametric memory rather than grounded visual perception. |
FinRipple: Aligning Large Language Models with Financial Market for Event Ripple Effect Awareness (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Financial markets exhibit complex dynamics where localized events trigger ripple effects across entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that empowers large language models to analyze ripple effects . they use financial theory-guided large-scale reinforcement learning to align LLMs with the market . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows LLMs to analyze ripple effects through financial theory-guided large-scale reinforcement learning. |
LongInsightBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Omni-Modal Models on Human-Centric Long-Video Understanding. (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Breaking the Reasoning Barrier A Survey on LLM Complex Reasoning through the Lens of Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tao He, Hao Li, Jingchang Chen, Runxuan Liu, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao, Zihao Zheng, Zheng Chu, Jiafeng Liang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | OpenAI's O1 and subsequent projects like DeepSeek R1 have significantly advanced research on complex reasoning in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing reasoning studies from the perspective of self-evolution and summarize O1-like works from open-source projects like DeepSeek R1 and Kimi-k1.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on open-source models and pioneer advanced methodologies like Scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Event Extraction Evaluation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Event extraction (EE) is a fundamental information extraction task aimed at extracting events from plain texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to specify data preprocessing, standardize outputs, and provide pipeline evaluation results to avoid these pitfalls. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the evaluations are reliable and lack pipeline evaluations. |
GOME: Grounding-based Metaphor Binding With Conceptual Elaboration For Figurative Language Illustration (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal models are unable to illustrate figurative language based on literal objects, ignoring the underlying groundings and associations across disparate metaphorical domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a grounding-based method for metaphor illustration that integrates metaphorical knowledge into systematic instructions for existing large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing LLMs, diffusion models, or their direct collaboration. |
Long-form Hallucination Detection with Self-elicitation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection tend to decompose text into isolated statements, unable to understand contextual semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to leverage self-generated thoughts derived from prior statements as catalysts to elicit the expression of intrinsic knowledge and understand contextual semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables self-elicitation to elicit expressions of knowledge and understand semantics. |
Let Retrievers Think Before Action: Thought-Augmented Embedding for Dense Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated that explicit step-by-step thinking can substantially improve performance on complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates preliminary thoughts for input queries before document retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates preliminary thoughts for input queries before document retrieval. |
UnitedQA: A Hybrid Approach for Open Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on open-domain question answering focuses on either extractive or generative readers exclusively. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid approach to extractive and generative readers that leverages both models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on NaturalQuestions and TriviaQA respectively. |
ClimAgent: LLM as Agents for Autonomous Open-ended Climate Science Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to climate research are limited to simple Q A tasks . a lack of data and computational expertise has created bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose autonomous framework to perform end-to-end climate research tasks across diverse climate sub-fields. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in rigorousness and practicality. |
David vs. Goliath: Cost-Efficient Financial QA via Cascaded Multi-Agent Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but performance in FQA remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-cost yet effective framework that enables small LLMs to perform complex reasoning tasks without expensive models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best open-source model on BizBench by 10.46% and achieves competitive performance to GPT-3.5 using significantly fewer parameters. |
ACEBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM Tool Usage (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chen Chen, Xinlong Hao, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Xingshan Zeng, Shuai Yu, Dexun Li, Yuefeng Huang, Xiangcheng Liu, Wang Xinzhi, Wu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs’ tool usage face several limitations: limited evaluation scenarios, lacking assessments in real multi-turn dialogue contexts; narrow evaluation dimensions, with insufficient detailed assessments of how LLM use tools; and reliance on LLM or real API executions for evaluation, which introduces significant overhead. |
| Approach: | ACEBench is a benchmark for evaluating tool usage in Large Language Models . it categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
| Outcome: | ACEBench categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
Graph Neural Networks with Generated Parameters for Relation Extraction (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing graph neural networks can only process multi-hop relational reasoning on pre-defined graphs and cannot be directly applied in natural language relational reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network with generated parameters using natural language sentences as inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process relational reasoning on graphs and in natural language processing tasks. |
Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection via Structure Consolidation Networks (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Xiaolong Liu, Bo Li, Dianbo Sui, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Xi Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen
| Challenge: | Existing intent detection models can only handle predefined intent classes in the offline environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that continually learns new intent classes from new data . structure-based retrospection and contrastive knowledge distillation are used to solve these problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three benchmarks. |
Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Models (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empathetic conversational models have been shown to improve user satisfaction and task outcomes in numerous domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a task towards persona-based empathetic conversations and propose e-learning model CoBERT that can be used to train persona on emmpathetic conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves empathetic responding more when trained on e-mpathetic conversations than non-empathy ones. |
LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qibing Ren, Hao Li, Dongrui Liu, Zhanxu Xie, Xiaoya Lu, Yu Qiao, Lei Sha, Junchi Yan, Lizhuang Ma, Jing Shao
| Challenge: | Current safety training focuses on teaching models to reject harmful queries, but recent research shows that adversarial attacks or jailbreak methods bypass these safety mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a new attack method to craft multi-turn toxic prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs. |
Beyond Stochastic Exploration: What Makes Training Data Valuable for Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based search agents rely on stochastic exploration, leading to inefficient reasoning trajectories and unstable training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance the performance and training stability of search agents by transforming raw reasoning trajectories into hierarchical experience knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits strong cross-task and cross-algorithm generalizations on multiple complex agentic search and mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Divide and Conquer: Legal Concept-guided Criminal Court View Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating rationales for criminal cases do not pay enough attention to the important legal concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal concept-guided court view generation framework that generates rationales based on predicted legal concepts . they first divide the court view into sub-views, then employ a solver and verifier to generate and select rationale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates coherent and coherent court views on a real-world criminal case dataset. |
StableToolBench: Towards Stable Large-Scale Benchmarking on Tool Learning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhicheng Guo, Sijie Cheng, Hao Wang, Shihao Liang, Yujia Qin, Peng Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual API server and stable evaluation system to assess the stability of large-scale real-time APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks demonstrate the stability of the proposed system and its caching system. |
Open-domain Question Answering via Chain of Reasoning over Heterogeneous Knowledge (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering methods rely on the retriever to gather all evidence in isolation, but our approach uses an intermediary module to perform a chain of reasoning over the retrieved set. |
| Approach: | They propose a new open-domain question answering framework that integrates an intermediary module into the current retriever-reader pipeline and integrates it into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on two OTT-QA datasets with an exact match score of 47.3 (45% relative gain). |
Lexicon-Based Graph Convolutional Network for Chinese Word Segmentation (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Chinese word segmentation have high performance on benchmarks but are limited by the small-scale annotated corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates a lexicon-based graph convolutional network into the Transformer encoder to improve Chinese word segmentation (CWS) Chinese word is an essential and pre-processing step for many downstream NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the information of candidate words and improves performance on benchmarks and datasets. |
MAS-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Shortcut-Augmented Hybrid Mobile GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Yaozhen Liang, Weiqing He, Zhengxi Lu, WenHao Wang, Yuehao Huang, Yuxiang Chai, Zhaolu Kang, Yaxuan Guo, Hao Wang, Kexin Zhang, Liang Liu, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Shortcuts such as APIs and deep-links have emerged as efficient complements to flexible GUI operations, but systematic evaluation of GUI–shortcut hybrid agents remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. |
| Outcome: | MAS-Bench evaluates agent's ability to generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. |
A Simple Contrastive Learning Framework for Interactive Argument Pair Identification via Argument-Context Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on argument mining uses context-based methods to identify whether two arguments are interactively related. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework to extract valuable information from the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark dataset and visually displays more compact representations. |
AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
FineReason: Evaluating and Improving LLMs’ Deliberate Reasoning through Reflective Puzzle Solving (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Guizhen Chen, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Hou Pong Chan, Chaoqun Liu, Lidong Bing, Deli Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight an important shift from the “System 1” way of quick reactions to the “system 2” style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-puzzle benchmark for systematic evaluation of large language models' reasoning capabilities that decomposes each puzzle into atomic steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on state checking and state transition tasks and demonstrates gains in reasoning by up to 5.1%. |
Margin Matching Preference Optimization: Enhanced Model Alignment with Granular Feedback (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models rely on binary labels that fail to capture the subtle differences in relative quality between pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates relative quality margins into optimization to improve LLM policies and reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods on popular benchmarks including MT-bench and RewardBench. |
MoralDial: A Framework to Train and Evaluate Moral Dialogue Systems via Moral Discussions (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | A moral dialogue system aligned with users’ values could enhance conversation engagement and user connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems based on communication mechanisms of morality and a method to construct moral discussions between simulated users and the dialogue system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can train and evaluate moral dialogue systems based on simulated users and their values . |
MC-indexing: Effective Long Document Retrieval via Multi-view Content-aware Indexing (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document question answering do not consider content structures, resulting chunks exclude vital information or include irrelevant content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that segments document into content chunks and represents each content chunk in raw-text, keywords, and summary views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves recall of long document question answering datasets compared to state-of-the-art chunking schemes. |
RAPID: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Long Text Generation with Writing Planning and Information Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge-intensive long texts struggle with issues like hallucinations, topic incoherence, and significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented long text generation framework with writing P**lanning and I**nformation to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a freshWiki-2024 dataset. |
ERCThinker: Fast-Slow Thinking for Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ERC lack interpretability and shallow semantics capture deep semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fast-Slow thinking framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversation . they use fine-grained emotion reasoning chains to capture deep semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in explanation and judgment on a benchmark dataset. |
SimRPD: Optimizing Recruitment Proactive Dialogue Agents through Simulator-Based Data Evaluation and Selection (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyong Cao, Dunqiang Liu, Qi Dai, Haojun Xu, Huai Yuen Khor, Hao Wang, Huan He, Yafei Liu, Ke Ma, Ruqian Shi, Sicheng Zhou, Sijia Yao
| Challenge: | High-quality data in training proactive dialogue agents is scarce, despite fine-tuning and reinforcement learning . a recent study has shown that the effectiveness of supervised fine-touring is limited by the lack of high-quality, domain-specific training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training recruitment proactive dialogue agents using a high-fidelity user simulator and a multi-dimensional evaluation framework based on Chain-of-Intention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing simulator-based data selection strategies in a real-world recruitment scenario. |
Efficient Paths and Dense Rewards: Probabilistic Flow Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yan Liu, Feng Zhang, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He, Han Liu, Yangdong Deng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mitigate inference inefficiency and optimization difficulty are fragmented and constrained by inherent trade-offs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconceptualizes discrete reasoning steps as a continuous probabilistic flow, quantifying the contribution of each step toward the ground-truth answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a superior balance between inference efficiency and reasoning performance on challenging benchmarks. |
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yichen Ouyang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chenghua Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Bochen Pang, Yaming Yang, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
Plug-and-Play Data Module for Code RL: Adaptive Ambiguity Replay (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jianqing Zhang, Wei Xia, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Yang Liu, Jian Cao, Qiang Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) rely on static, in-epoch metrics that overlook training dynamics, often introducing low-utility or outdated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module that prioritizes cross-epoch ambiguous samples to neutralize the noise from stale experiences. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on nine LLMs show that Adaptive Ambiguity Replay outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on real-world code editing tasks. |
Quantifying Similarity between Relations with Fact Distribution (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zheng Chu, Huiming Fan, Jingchang Chen, Qianyu Wang, Mingda Yang, Jiafeng Liang, Zhongjie Wang, Hao Li, Guo Tang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses self-critique feedback to guide iterative reasoning by enabling iteration and self-evaluation of its intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA by 8.6% on three multi-hop reasoning datasets. |
MoSEs: Uncertainty-Aware AI-Generated Text Detection via Mixture of Stylistics Experts with Conditional Thresholds (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
TLUE: A Tibetan Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Fan Gao, Cheng Huang, Yutong Liu, Nyima Tashi, Xiangxiang Wang, Thupten Tsering, Ban Ma-bao, Renzeng Duojie, Gadeng Luosang, Rinchen Dongrub, Dorje Tashi, Xiao Feng Cd, Yongbin Yu, Hao Wang
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages, like Tibetan, remain underrepresented in large language models' evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tibetan Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark to assess LLMs' proficiency in Tibetan . they use a multi-task understanding benchmark and a safety benchmark to evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that most large language models perform below the random baseline, especially in Tibetan language processing. |
QaRL: Rollout-Aligned Quantization-Aware RL for Fast and Stable Training under Training–Inference Mismatch (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Gu, Hao Wang, Jiacheng Liu, Lujun Li, Qiyuan Zhu, Bei Liu, Binxing Xu, Lei Wang, Xintong Yang, Sida Lin, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning with simple rule-based reward functions (RLVR) can induce emergent reasoning behaviors and yield gains in challenging domains such as math problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a rollout-alignment-quantization-aware RL which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 on Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems while maintaining low-bit throughput. |
Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Hierarchical Pretraining and Topic Segment (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for meeting summary have limited the ability to deal with long-term dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical transformer encoder-decoder network with multi-task pre-training to capture key sentences at word level and generate them at word-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior to the previous methods in meeting summary datasets AMI and ICSI. |
CCHall: A Novel Benchmark for Joint Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Hallucinations Detection in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on hallucinations in large language models are limited to a single scenario, either cross-lingual or cross-modal. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint Cross-lingual and Cross-modal hallucinations benchmark to fill this gap . they incorporate cross-lingual, cross-modal scenarios to assess hallucinic capabilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates both cross-lingual and cross-modal hallucination scenarios to assess the cross-linguistic and crossmodal capabilities of LLMs. |
Taming Text-to-Image Synthesis for Novices: User-centric Prompt Generation via Multi-turn Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yilun Liu, Minggui He, Feiyu Yao, Yuhe Ji, Shimin Tao, Jingzhou Du, Justin Li, Jian Gao, Zhang Li, Hao Yang, Boxing Chen, Osamu Yoshie
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for text-to-image synthesis are sensitive on textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasizes user experience for novice users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model emphasizes user experience for novice users . it improves user-centricity score while maintaining a competitive quality of synthesized images. |
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wenhan Xiong, Jingyu Liu, Igor Molybog, Hejia Zhang, Prajjwal Bhargava, Rui Hou, Louis Martin, Rashi Rungta, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Barlas Oguz, Madian Khabsa, Han Fang, Yashar Mehdad, Sharan Narang, Kshitiz Malik, Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Mike Lewis, Sinong Wang, Hao Ma
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Tiny Scales, Great Challenges: The Limits of Multimodal LLMs in Scale Recognition (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on a single type of quantity or a specific format, lacking a comprehensive evaluation of scale recognition capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual scale recognition benchmark built using images from COCO, Open Images, and Flickr to evaluate scale recognition capabilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 42.60% accuracy, lower than the 97.40% of humans. |
Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entropy Change Perspective (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Haoyang Liu, Jian Luo, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Jiawei Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable reasoning capabilities in complex tasks such as mathematics and coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-modulation method that adaptively reweighs tokens based on theoretically-estimated entropic variations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in six mathematical reasoning and three coding benchmarks. |
SPPD: Self-training with Process Preference Learning Using Dynamic Value Margin (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Adaptive Schema-aware Event Extraction with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Event extraction is a task in natural language processing that involves identifying and extracting event information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that combines schema paraphrasing with schema retrieval-augmented generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm retrieves paraphrased schemas and accurately generates targeted structures. |
Long Context is Not Long at All: A Prospector of Long-Dependency Data for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) however, training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient since some samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a data mining framework ProLong that assigns each training sample with a long dependency score and ranks and filters them according to their results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can rank and filter training samples that exhibit more powerful long-context modeling abilities. |
UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework for joint learning . they propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves visual and visual semantic alignment on images and texts. |
Making Every Step Effective: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models Through Hierarchical KV Equalization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | HKVE selectively accepts gradient optimization results based on the distribution of attention scores across different layers, ensuring that every optimization step positively contributes to the attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that selectively accepts gradient optimization results based on the distribution of attention scores across different layers and selectively takes them into account when calculating the attack success rate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by achieving success rates of 75.08% on MiniGPT4, 85.84% on LLaVA and 81.00% on Qwen-VL. |
Pushing the Limits of LLM Tool Calling via Experiential Knowledge Integration and Activation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat tool use as a problem of prompt design, API documents specification, or supervised or unsupervised alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-augmented tool execution framework that integrates experiential knowledge with reasoning-width-expanded inference and knowledge-aware training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on BFCL-V3 and AppWorld on three model scales. |
Parameter-Efficient Conversational Recommender System as a Language Processing Task (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to recommend items are categorized into attribute-based and generation-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent items in natural language and formulate a conversational recommender system that can be optimized in a single stage without relying on non-textual metadata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. |
Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zheyuan Zhang, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Linlu Gong, Jinchang Zhou, Zhanxin Hao, Jianxiao Jiang, Jie Cao, Huiqin Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Initial studies have focused on task-specific, independent LLM-empowered agents, but the potential of LLMs within a multi-agent collaborative framework for classroom simulation with real user participation remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent classroom simulation teaching framework that recognizes representative class roles and introduces a novel class control mechanism for automatic classroom teaching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can simulate dynamic learning environment for users with active teacher-student and student-studente interactions. |
Unraveling the Mechanics of Learning-Based Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent learning-based demonstration selection methods have proven beneficial to in-context learning (ICL) by choosing more useful exemplars. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to capture task-agnostic similarities between input and output of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods integrate task-agnostic similarities of different levels between input and output of exemplars and test cases to eliminate costly data collection. |
Complex Event Schema Induction with Knowledge-Enriched Diffusion Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on event schema induction have been hindered by errors and data quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enriched discrete diffusion model that distills event scenario knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves outstanding performance across evaluation metrics. |
Uncertainty Calibration for Tool-Using Language Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language agents are increasingly used to perform tasks and interact with a variety of external tools to achieve specific, goal-oriented objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool calibration tool called ProbeCal which recalibrates the internal probabilities of tool-using language agents to better reflect the actual effectiveness of tool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves off-the-shelf language models in tool-using applications. |
Middleware for LLMs: Tools Are Instrumental for Language Agents in Complex Environments (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are generalist agents capable of operating within complex environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a class of tools that can serve as a middleware layer shielding LLMs from environmental complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can shield the LLM from environmental complexity in two representative complex environments. |
Adaptive Tool Use in Large Language Models with Meta-Cognition Trigger (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wenjun Li, Dexun Li, Kuicai Dong, Cong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing research expands the tool arrays of large language models (LLMs), but the necessity of using these tools is often overlooked, leading to indiscriminate tool invocation. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognition proxy proxy for LLMs self-assessment of their capabilities, reflecting the model’s awareness of its own limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is fine-tuned-free and costs minimal. |
Learning to Generate Question by Asking Question: A Primal-Dual Approach with Uncommon Word Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing automatic question generation methods focus on encoding passage and answer to generate question. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic question generation approach which integrates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
Dynamic Collaboration of Multi-Language Models based on Minimal Complete Semantic Units (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance reasoning capabilities of language models are expensive and often lack the ability to perform complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level multi-model collaboration strategy to enhance reasoning capabilities in language models by selecting the optimal tokens from the next token distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods and will be released soon. |
CrisPrune: Combining Contextual Relevance and Intrinsic Saliency for Efficient Visual Token Pruning in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual token pruning compromise the integrity of visual understanding in pursuit of efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic method that integrates visual saliency and text relevance to reconcile efficiency with understanding by integrating visual salions and text relevant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on LLaVA-NeXT . it achieves 13 decrease in FLOPs while maintaining 97% of original performance . |
A Syntactic and Semantic Probe into Language Evolution based on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on language evolution have relied on manual annotated resources and rely on dependency parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose to use attention-based structural distance and semantic space distance to measure language development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measures show that human and LLMs share common characteristics in language processing. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
MetaMixSpeech: Meta Task Augmentation for Low-Resource Speech Recognition (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Meta-learning has proven to be a powerful paradigm for improving speech recognition performance . however, multilingual meta learning also faces challenges such as task overfitting and learner overfit . |
| Approach: | a new method is proposed to augment meta-training tasks with "more data" the method incorporates both support and query augmentations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 6.35% improvement in the word error rate on FLEURS and Common Voice datasets. |
Compilable Neural Code Generation with Compiler Feedback (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xin Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yao Wan, Fei Mi, Yitong Li, Pingyi Zhou, Jin Liu, Hao Wu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing deep-learning approaches model code generation as text generation, but few of them account for compilability of the generated programs. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage pipeline utilizing compiler feedback for compilable code generation to improve compilability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves compilability of generated programs by combining compiler feedback, language model fine-tuning, and compilable discrimination. |
Posterior Differential Regularization with f-divergence for Improving Model Robustness (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained models suffer catastrophic degradation in out-of-domain generalization to datasets with domain shift or adversarial scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to regularize the posterior difference between clean and noisy inputs by using a Jacobian regularization framework and a virtual adversarial training framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve model robustness in fully supervised and semi-supervised settings. |
Can Watermarks Survive Translation? On the Cross-lingual Consistency of Text Watermark for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text watermarking technologies lack consistency when texts are translated into different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual watermark removal attack to bypass watermarking by first obtaining a response from an LLM in a pivot language and then translating it into the target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can remove watermarks without performance loss by obtaining a response from an LLM in a pivot language and then translating it into the target language. |
SKIntern: Internalizing Symbolic Knowledge for Distilling Better CoT Capabilities into Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have high computational costs and privacy concerns due to their high computational expenses and data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that empowers SLMs to internalize symbolic knowledge and few-shot examples gradually through a progressive fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5% while reducing inference costs by up to 4 across a wide range of SLMs in both in-domain (ID) and out-of domain (OOD) tasks. |
STGN: an Implicit Regularization Method for Learning with Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work to mitigate the effect of noisy labels is limited to specific tasks or training procedures, making it hard to be widely used. |
| Approach: | They propose a stochastic tailor-made gradient noise to mitigate the effect of noisy labels by introducing benign noise into stochistic gradient descent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to discriminate correct samples from incorrect ones and boost existing training methods. |
PIGuard: Prompt Injection Guardrail via Mitigating Overdefense for Free (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt injection attacks pose a critical threat to large language models, enabling goal hijacking and data leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt guard model that incorporates a new training strategy to mitigate over-defense for free . PIGuard significantly reduces the bias on trigger words, enabling fine-grained evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model on diverse benchmarks by 30.4%. |
Enhancing Explainable Rating Prediction through Annotated Macro Concepts (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models learn user and item embeddings and generate reasons based on these embedds. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based explanation framework that leverages macro concepts to bridge the gap between the user/item embeddings and the recommendation reasons. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three datasets prove the proposed model is superior to existing models. |
Improving Constituent Representation with Hypertree Neural Networks (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of span representation are based on simple derivations from word representations and do not utilize compositional structures of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a hypertree neural network that is structured with constituency parse trees to improve representations of constituent spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves representations of constituent spans using constituency parse trees. |
LM-Interview: An Easy-to-use Smart Interviewer System via Knowledge-guided Language Model Exploitation (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Semi-structured interviews are a crucial method of data acquisition in qualitative research. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-structured interview system that automates interview preparation, analysis and control by interviewers. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LM-Interview performs comparable to human interviewers . the system can be used to analyze semi-structured interviews without interviewers' involvement . |
WebDP: Understanding Discourse Structures in Semi-Structured Web Documents (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Web documents are one of the most primary and biggest data resources in current era, and understanding their discourse structure will benefit various downstream document processing applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a web document discourse structure representation schema by extending classical discourse theories and adding special features to well represent discourse characteristics of web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is feasible but challenging for current models. |
Language Modeling with Sparse Product of Sememe Experts (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing language modeling methods rely on large-scale text data to learn the sequential patterns of words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sememes to represent the implicit semantics behind words for language modeling . they propose to employ sememe-driven language models to fine-grained semem-level semantics . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on language modeling and the downstream application of headline generation show the effectiveness of SDLM. |
Benchmarking Large Language Models on Communicative Medical Coaching: A Dataset and a Novel System (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing applications of natural language processing (NLP) focus on patient-centered services, but the potential of NLP to benefit inexperienced doctors remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-AI cooperative framework to assist medical learners in practicing communication skills during patient consultations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables medical learners to practice communication skills during patient consultations while a coach agent provides immediate, structured feedback. |
Incentivizing Parametric Knowledge via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Cross-Cultural Entity Translation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiang Zhou, Xiaohu Zhao, Xinwei Wu, Tianyu Dong, Hao Wang, Yangyang Liu, Heng Liu, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Current systems often fall short of this goal in settings where translation hinges on culturally grounded entities such as books, films, places, songs and idioms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that anchors supervision on a verifiable, entity-level reward signal and incorporates lightweight structural gates to stabilize optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on XC-Translate and shows that it can learn a robust reasoning process rather than imitating reference translations. |
NoisywikiHow: A Benchmark for Learning with Real-world Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large-scale datasets in the real world often contain label noise, which can cause model overfitting and degrade generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use label noise to imitate human errors in annotations . they use a noisy label noise benchmark to evaluate their methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are different from data with heterogeneous label noises in the real world. |
CoreCodeBench: Decoupling Code Intelligence via Fine-Grained Repository-Level Tasks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Lingyue Fu, Hao Guan, Bolun Zhang, Haowei Yuan, Yaoming Zhu, Lin Qiu, ZongYu Wang, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing large language models for software engineering rely on coarse-grained pass rates obscuring specific cognitive bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level benchmark that dissects coding capabilities through atomized tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 78.55% validity yield, surpassing the 31.7% retention rate of SWE-bench-Verified. |
SolEval: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Repository-level Solidity Smart Contract Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on Python and Java, neglecting Solidity, the programming language for Ethereum smart contracts. |
| Approach: | They construct a repository-level benchmark for Solidity to evaluate the performance of LLMs on Ethereum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the best performing LLM achieves only 26.29% Pass@10, highlighting room for improvement in Solidity code generation. |
War of Thoughts: Competition Stimulates Stronger Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped the landscape of reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances LLM reasoning without finetuning by using test-time scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models in both budget and model size. |
UPRISE: Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving Zero-Shot Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Junyu Bi, Yuefeng Zhan, Jianfeng Liu, Yujing Wang, Hao Sun, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but need for task-specific prompt engineering can hinder their generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and versatile retriever that automatically retrieves prompts for a given zero-shot task input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is universally applicable across tasks and models . it mitigates hallucination problem in chatGPT, and it improves even the strongest LLMs. |
SARA: Unlocking Multilingual Knowledge in Mixture-of-Experts via Semantically Anchored Routing Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyu Dong, Yangyang Liu, Jiang Zhou, Xinwei Wu, Xiaohu Zhao, Hao Wang, Heng Liu, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Shaolin Zhu, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Low-resource language tokens are often routed to different experts than those activated by high-resourced inputs, which hinders their efficacy in multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to transfer specialized capabilities from high-resource languages as anchors to low-resourced languages by using a symmetric Jensen-Shannon constraint. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard instruction tuning on 5 low-resource languages and 3 benchmarks. |
Put It Back: Entity Typing with Language Model Enhancement (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Entity typing models suffer from noisy labels due to distant supervision . |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance existing entity typing models with language model enhancement to measure compatibility between context sentences and labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model on benchmark datasets and is available on github. |
A Multi-answer Multi-task Framework for Real-world Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models of machine reading comprehension (MRC) are based on cloze style questions or crowdworkers given a short passage from well-edited sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-answer multi-task framework that uses multiple reference answers for multiple questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases the ROUGE-L score on the DuReader dataset from 44.18, the previous state-of-the-art, to 51.09 . |
DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Yuhan Wu, Jinsong Zhang, Shengqiong Wu, Jingye Li, Yijiang Liu, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | a new task of conversational aspect-based sentiment analysis (DiaASQ) is designed to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis to detect the quadrangle of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a high-quality dataset in Chinese and English . it improves the end-to-end quadruple prediction and integrates rich feature representations . |
Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a retriever-reader framework is popular for open domain question answering . however, accessing heterogeneous knowledge sources through a unified interface remains unknown . |
| Approach: | They propose a retriever-reader framework that uses explicit knowledge to access heterogeneous knowledge sources through a unified interface. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can benefit from the expanded knowledge index, the authors show . their approach sets the single-model state-of-the-art on Natural Questions . |
NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
An Empirical Study of LLM Reasoning Ability Under Strict Output Length Constraint (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yi Sun, Han Wang, Jiaqiang Li, Jiacheng Liu, Xiangyu Li, Hao Wen, Yizhen Yuan, Huiwen Zheng, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for test-time scaling, but they are often used under time constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to make models think before answering questions . they also use self-correction and best-of-N decoding to encourage deeper thinking . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are able to achieve higher inference accuracy with extra inference computation under time constraints. |
JoPR: Joint Emotion Perception and Reasoning for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ERC lack human-like emotion reasoning and discrimination between similar emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimension curriculum with long CoT fine-tuning to clone human-like emotion reasoning for conversational emotion recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on three widely used datasets and shows that it is more intuitive and more accurate. |
T-Know: a Knowledge Graph-based Question Answering and Infor-mation Retrieval System for Traditional Chinese Medicine (C18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is one of precious intangible cultural heritages of the Chinese nation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use authorized and anonymized clinical records, medicine clinical guidelines, teaching materials, classic medical books, academic publications, etc. as data resources to build a TCM knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts triples from free texts to build a TCM knowledge graph. |
Faithful Logical Reasoning via Symbolic Chain-of-Thought (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | SymbCoT is a framework that integrates symbolic expressions and logic rules with CoT prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a Symbolic Chain-of-Thought framework that integrates symbolic expressions and logic rules with CoT prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on 5 standard datasets with symbolic expressions and rules . it shows that it is more faithful, flexible, and explainable than the current method . |
Beyond Surface Features: Advancing Medical Vision-Language Alignment via Dynamic Evidence-Guided Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zixuan Huang, Zhihong Zhu, Xiaolong Liu, Yanchao Hao, Manman Zhang, Zheng Wei, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu, Ye Li, Fen Miao, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based methods for medical large vision-Language Models face limitations in medical settings . existing methods are limited by overfitting to superficial cues and pseudo convergence of the preference signal. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables evidence-aware and adaptive preference learning for Med-LVLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evidence-aware and adaptive preference learning for Med-LVLMs. |
PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on text-based mental health counseling is limited due to the lack of relevant corpora in Chinese language. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese dataset of psychological health support in the form of question and answer pair that is crawled from a mental health service platform and contains 22K questions and 56K long and wellstructured answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 22K questions and 56K long and wellstructured answers. |
CFinBench: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ying Nie, Binwei Yan, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liu, Haoyu Wang, Wei He, Binfan Zheng, Weihao Wang, Qiang Li, Weijian Sun, Yunhe Wang, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging task like finance, has not been fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the financial knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in China. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date for LLMs in finance. |
HopRAG: Multi-Hop Reasoning for Logic-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional retrieval systems focus on lexical or semantic similarity rather than logical relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a new RAG framework that augments retrieval with logical reasoning . hopRAG uses a retrieve-reason-prune mechanism to explore multi-hop neighbors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms conventional retrieval systems and state-of-the-art benchmarks on multi-hop QA tasks. |
Investigating Inference-time Scaling for Chain of Multi-modal Thought: A Preliminary Study (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Inference-time scaling of chain-of-thought (CoT) has been demonstrated as a promising approach for addressing multi-modal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate visual and textual modalities within the reasoning process . they adopt a consistency-enhanced verifier to ensure effective guidance for both methods across different thought paradigms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms text-only reasoning on 10 tasks spanning diverse domains and requires higher token consumption for processing richer visual inputs. |
AutoTaskEval: Towards Domain-Specific and Fine-Grained Evaluation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qingqing Lyu, Linjuan Wu, Yongliang Shen, Hengwei Liu, Hao Li, Shengpei Jiang, Yin Zhang, Weiming Lu
| Challenge: | Existing automated approaches operate within fixed task schemas and often fail to autonomously discover new evaluation dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated framework that constructs domain-specific benchmarks directly from unstructured corpora using Bloom’s Taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework uncovers a broader and more fine-grained task space than expert-curated benchmarks while producing high-quality instances that preserve established model-level evaluation trends. |
Targeted Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial training approaches focus on making adversarials less expensive or regularizing rather than replacing the standard training objective. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to introspect current mistakes and prioritize adversarial training steps to where the model errs the most. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves adversarial training for natural language understanding by introspecting mistakes and prioritizing training steps to where the model errs the most. |
Bayes-enhanced Lifelong Attention Networks for Sentiment Classification (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing deep learning paradigms focus on learning a model from training data of a single task and the learned model is also tested on the same task. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayes-enhanced lifelong attention network to learn attention knowledge from a sequence of sentiment classification tasks and build lifelong ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to learn attention knowledge from a set of sentiment classification tasks and build lifelong attentions. |
EWEK-QA : Enhanced Web and Efficient Knowledge Graph Retrieval for Citation-based Question Answering Systems (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Mohammad Dehghan, Mohammad Alomrani, Sunyam Bagga, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Khalil Bibi, Abbas Ghaddar, Yingxue Zhang, Xiaoguang Li, Jianye Hao, Qun Liu, Jimmy Lin, Boxing Chen, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Mahdi Biparva, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh
| Challenge: | citation-based QA systems are suffering from two shortcomings . they usually rely only on web as a source of extracted knowledge and external knowledge sources can hamper the efficiency of the system. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a web-based knowledge graph retrieval solution to enrich extracted knowledge fed to a citation-based QA system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source state-of-the-art models in 7 quantitative and human evaluation tasks. |
Revealing Procedural Reasoning Structures in Chain-of-Thought Training via Span-Level Gradient Organization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts elicit multi-step reasoning, yet how reasoning related structure is expressed during training remains poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that tracks span-level gradients during fine-tuning on reasoning benchmarks to understand how models develop structured, step-by-step reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework tracks span-level gradients during fine-tuning on reasoning benchmarks to understand how models develop structured, step-by-step reasoning capabilities. |
Rethinking Translation Memory Augmented Neural Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance neural machine translation (NMT) by using a TM have been reported to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation memory augmented neural machine translation model that is good at fitting data but more sensitive to fluctuations in training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves consistent gains over conventional and existing models under two variance-preferable scenarios as well as the high resource scenario. |
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios. |
Exploiting Unlabeled Data for Target-Oriented Opinion Words Extraction (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yidong Wang, Hao Wu, Ao Liu, Wenxin Hou, Zhen Wu, Jindong Wang, Takahiro Shinozaki, Manabu Okumura, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract opinion words from sentences are limited due to the expensive annotation process. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit massive unlabeled data to reduce distribution shift risk . they propose to use two filters specifically for TOWE to filter noisy data . results indicate superiority of MGCR over current state-of-the-art methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the risk of distribution shifts by increasing the exposure of the model to varying distribution shift. |
Diversifying the Expert Knowledge for Task-Agnostic Pruning in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have outstanding performance by learning a large number of model parameters on large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method of grouping and pruning similar experts to improve the model’s parameter efficiency by a range of natural language tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other model pruning methods on a range of natural language tasks. |
Spectral Disentanglement: Rank-Aware Task Adaptation for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Continual Learning (CL) for Large Language Models faces a fundamental Stability-Plasticity Dilemma . Rank-Blindness enforces a single rank constraint across diverse tasks, leading to catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks and underfitting on complex new ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a rank-spectrum-based rehearsal-free framework that explicitly disentangles knowledge into two orthogonal subspaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a superior stability-plasticity balance compared to single-rank baselines. |
Allies: Prompting Large Language Model with Beam Search (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to build LLMs with stacking are limited by their information coverage and low fault tolerance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to iteratively generate new queries from an input query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on open-domain question answering benchmarks. |
OpenRLHF: A Ray-based Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Generative Zero-Shot Prompt Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Inverse Prompting (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to slot filling only learn surface mapping of slot types between D S and D T and get poor generalization capability or robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative zero-shot prompt learning framework for cross-domain slot filling which improves generalization and robustness than previous work. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and robustness on unseen slots and an efficient prompt tuning strategy boosts performance. |
Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Feng, Shu Wei, Xiang Fei, Wei Shi, Yingdong Han, Lei Liao, Jinghui Lu, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Chunhui Lin, Jingqun Tang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Current document image parsing solutions rely on specialized models or generate content autoregressively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal document image parsing model that integrates specialized models with autogeneous content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings while ensuring superior efficiency. |
Cyclical Annealing Schedule: A Simple Approach to Mitigating KL Vanishing (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Variational autoencoders (VAEs) with an auto-regressive decoder have been applied for many natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cyclical annealing schedule which repeats the process of increasing multiple times to learn more meaningful latent codes progressively by leveraging previous learning cycles as warm re-restart. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a broad range of NLP tasks, including language modeling, dialog response generation and semi-supervised text classification. |
Speak No Evil, Just Prompt: Low-resource Multilingual Toxic Speech Detection with Audio Language Model (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for toxic speech detection rely on high-resource languages and lack acoustic cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based adaptation framework that performs end-to-end toxicity detection without ASR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a micro-averaged ROC-AUC of 98.07% on polySpeechTox . it is based on a frozen audio language model and can perform end-to-end toxicity detection without ASR . |
GMN: Generative Multi-modal Network for Practical Document Information Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Evaluating Personalized Tool-Augmented LLMs from the Perspectives of Personalization and Proactivity (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Personalized tool utilization is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preference in interaction scenarios with various tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a key-point-based LLM evaluation method that mitigates biases by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates biases in the LLM-as-a-judge system by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
LogitSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding via Next Next Token Speculation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate draft tokens in a retrieval-based manner to reduce drafting overhead and improve inference speed. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests show that *LogitSpec* can achieve 2.61 speedup and 3.28 mean accepted tokens per decoding step. |
JumpCoder: Go Beyond Autoregressive Coder via Online Modification (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing code large language models lack reversibility and autoregressive sequential generation is incapable of correcting previous missing statements as humans do. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework that enables human-like online modification and non-sequential generation to augment code large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables human-like modification and non-sequential generation to augment code large language models. |