Papers by Hao Shen

Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)

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

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Yu Zhang, Hao Cheng, Zhihong Shen, Xiaodong Liu, Ye-Yi Wang, Jianfeng Gao

Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis (2025.findings-acl)

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.

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Feng Luo, Rui Yang, Hao Sun, Chunyuan Deng, Jiarui Yao, Jingyan Shen, Huan Zhang, Hanjie Chen

Explainability & Interpretability in NLP

Challenge:	Decomposed Reward Models extract diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations.
Approach:	They propose a decomposed reward model that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations.
Outcome:	The proposed approach extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations.

Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps (2022.naacl-main)

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Jiangang Bai, Yujing Wang, Hong Sun, Ruonan Wu, Tianmeng Yang, Pengfei Tang, Defu Cao, Mingliang Zhang1, Yunhai Tong, Yaming Yang, Jing Bai, Ruofei Zhang, Hao Sun, Wei Shen

OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

Challenge:	Existing works of knowledge infusion depend on multi-task learning frameworks, which are inefficient and require large-scale retraining when new knowledge is considered.
Approach:	They propose a method which integrates knowledge-generated attention maps into the self-attention mechanism and integrates it into the model.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing methods on academic datasets and industry-scale ad relevance applications.

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Iat Long Iong, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Chen, Hanyu Lai, Shuntian Yao, Pengbo Shen, Hao Yu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang

Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li

Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly.
Approach:	They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models.

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Zhewei Yao, Guoheng Sun, Łukasz Borchmann, Zheyu Shen, Minghang Deng, Bohan Zhai, Hao Zhang, Ang Li, Yuxiong He

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Translating natural language questions into SQL is a core challenge in natural language understanding and human-computer interaction.
Approach:	They propose a reinforcement learning framework and model family to generate accurate, executable SQL using a lightweight reward signal based solely on execution correctness.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms previous versions of 70B-class systems and achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy across six diverse Text2SQL benchmarks.

SafetyQuizzer: Timely and Dynamic Evaluation on the Safety of LLMs (2025.naacl-long)

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Zhichao Shi, Shaoling Jing, Yi Cheng, Hao Zhang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Jie Zhang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to evaluate the safety of their users . however, evaluation questions in current benchmarks are too straightforward and difficult to update with practical relevance due to their lack of correlation with real-world events.
Approach:	They propose a question-generation framework to evaluate the safety of LLMs in the Chinese context.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces decline rate while maintaining similar attack success rate.

Perplexity-Aware Data Scaling Law: Perplexity Landscapes Predict Performance for Continual Pre-training (2026.acl-long)

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Lei Liu, Hao Zhu, Xiaoyan Yang, Yue Shen, Zhixuan Chu, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Kui Ren

Language Models can be Deductive Solvers (2024.findings-naacl)

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.

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Jiazhan Feng, Ruochen Xu, Junheng Hao, Hiteshi Sharma, Yelong Shen, Dongyan Zhao, Weizhu Chen

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

Challenge:	Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to potentially exhibit reasoning capabilities, but complex logical reasoning remains a challenge.
Approach:	They propose a novel language model that internalizes and emulates the reasoning processes of logical solvers and avoids parsing errors by learning strict adherence to solver syntax and grammar.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art solver-augmented language models and few-shot prompting methods on public deductive reasoning benchmarks.

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

Reasoning-Enhanced Domain-Adaptive Pretraining of Multimodal Large Language Models for Short Video Content Governance (2025.emnlp-industry)

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

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Zixuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hongwei Wang, Baoyu Jing, Xiang Shen, Xin Dong, Zhuolin Hao, Hongyu Xiong, Yang Song

LoRAPrune: Structured Pruning Meets Low-Rank Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to identifying inappropriate content require extensive human-labeled data and lack cross-issue generalization.
Approach:	They propose a reasoning-enhanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) pretraining paradigm for unified inappropriate content detection.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves the MLLM's performance in both zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning settings and shows strong generalization capabilities to emergent, previously unseen issues.

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Mingyang Zhang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen, Zhen Yang, Linlin Ou, Xinyi Yu, Bohan Zhuang

From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Low-rank adaption (LoRA) is a low-level pruning method that can be expensive and slow to deploy.
Approach:	They propose a low-rank adaption pruning framework that provides an accurate structured pruned model in a memory-efficient manner.
Outcome:	The proposed pruning framework reduces perplexity and memory usage by 52.6% on LLaMA and T5 models while reducing memory usage.

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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Liang Xie, Wenxiao Wang, Chaochen Gu, Hao Tang, Jieping Ye

Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) are a powerful visual-language reasoning tool.
Approach:	They propose to integrate attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM to determine interactions between visual representations.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can be used to determine interactions between visual representations.

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Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao

Beyond Hard Masks: Progressive Token Evolution for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs .
Approach:	They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines.

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Linhao Zhong, Linyu Wu, Bozhen Fang, Tianjian Feng, Chenchen Jing, Wen Wang, Jiaheng Zhang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen

From Observation to Understanding: Front-Door Adjustments with Uncertainty Calibration for Enhancing Egocentric Reasoning in LVLMs (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing Diffusion Language Models rely on hard binary masking and discrete token assignments, which hinder the revision of early decisions.
Approach:	They propose a diffusion-based language modeling approach that replaces hard binary masks with evolving soft token distributions.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms existing DLMs on multiple benchmarks.

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Shenshen Li, Wenxin Meng, Lei Wang, Hao Yang, Chong Peng, Peng Yan, Fumin Shen, Jingkuan Song, Heng Tao Shen, Xing Xu

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods that adapt LVLMs to egocentric tasks overlook critical agent-environment interactions, limiting their ability to perform egoic reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a zero-shot paradigm to enhance egocentric reasoning by simulating human causal reasoning by formalizing ego-centric reasoning using a structural causal model.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves egocentric reasoning abilities on six tasks.

X-LeBench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Egocentric Video Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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

ClinAlign: Scaling Healthcare Alignment from Clinician Preference (2026.findings-acl)

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 .

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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.

Efficient Self-Evaluation for Diffusion Language Models via Sequence Regeneration (2026.acl-long)

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Linhao Zhong, Linyu Wu, Wen Wang, Yuling Xi, Chenchen Jing, Jiaheng Zhang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen

pFedGPT: Hierarchically Optimizing LoRA Aggregation Weights for Personalized Federated GPT Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Non-sequential and bidirectional nature of diffusion large language models makes direct likelihood-based self-evaluation challenging.
Approach:	They propose a self-evaluation confidence quantification method for diffusion large language models that quantifies confidence by computing the probability of regenerating tokens in the entire generated sequence, given the full context.
Outcome:	The proposed method is correlated with semantic coherence and answer accuracy.

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Zhanming Shen, Tianqi Xu, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Miao Pan

The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Event Extraction Evaluation (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with data heterogeneity and adapt shared global knowledge to individual client needs.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization (HBO) for fine-grained, personalized LoRA aggregation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on personalized FL benchmarks while introducing only minimal (approx. 4%) additional optimization overhead.

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Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Feng Yao, Kaisheng Zeng, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Weixing Shen

Information Extraction & Text Mining

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.

From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Junlong Tong, Zilong Wang, YuJie Ren, Peiran Yin, Hao Wu, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen

UnitedQA: A Hybrid Approach for Open Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing definitions of streaming LLMs are fragmented and lack a systematic taxonomy . large language models are pre-trained on static and full-context corpora .
Approach:	They propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming Large Language Models and propose underlying methodologies for streaming LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed model is based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities.

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Hao Cheng, Yelong Shen, Xiaodong Liu, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Jianfeng Gao

Natural Language Interfaces

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.

CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Tao Zhang, ChengLIn Zhu, Yanjun Shen, Wenjing Luo, Yan Zhang, Hao Liang, Tao Zhang, Fan Yang, Mingan Lin, Yujing Qiao, Weipeng Chen, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Zenan Zhou

PEGRL: Improving Machine Translation by Post-Editing Guided Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user’s perspective.
Approach:	They propose a Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs that compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs a systematic framework for constraint types.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment.

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Yunzhi Shen, Hao Zhou, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Shujian Huang

Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong promise for LLM-based machine translation . however, translation-oriented RL remains challenged by high-variance policy gradients induced by Monte Carlo baselines and large trajectory space that favors global exploration over fine-grained local optimization.
Approach:	They propose a two-stage RL framework that uses post-editing as an auxiliary task to stabilize training and guide overall optimization.
Outcome:	The proposed framework supports global exploration and fine-grained optimization while supporting global exploration.

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Yougang Lyu, Jitai Hao, Zihan Wang, Kai Zhao, Shen Gao, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Fang Wang, Zhaochun Ren

Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing methods for predicting judgment results for multiple defendants are ineffective.
Approach:	They propose a method to predict the judgment results for each defendant in multi-defendant cases . they formalize the multi-diffendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains .
Outcome:	The proposed method can predict the judgment results for multiple defendants in multi-defendant cases.

MAF: Multimodal Alignment Framework for Weakly-Supervised Phrase Grounding (2020.emnlp-main)

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Qinxin Wang, Hao Tan, Sheng Shen, Michael Mahoney, Zhewei Yao

RatE: Relation-Adaptive Translating Embedding for Knowledge Graph Completion (2020.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing work on phrase localization uses caption-image datasets as weak supervision . existing work on supervised phrase localisation uses a large-scale annotated dataset .
Approach:	They develop a multimodal alignment framework to leverage more widely available caption-image datasets to model phrase relevance.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on the widely-adopted Flickr30k dataset . it also improves the previous best unsupervised result by 5.56% .

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Hao Huang, Guodong Long, Tao Shen, Jing Jiang, Chengqi Zhang

Improving Contextual Query Rewrite for Conversational AI Agents through User-preference Feedback Learning (2023.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Existing approaches for knowledge graph embedding have limitations in complex vector space . embeddability of one-to-many relations is not explicitly alleviated .
Approach:	They propose a relation-adaptive translating embedding function that can be extended to complex vector space.
Outcome:	The proposed translation function improves expressive power and alleviates embedding ambiguity problem.

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Zhongkai Sun, Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Chengyuan Ma, Wei Shen, Chenlei Guo

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Contextual query rewriting (CQR) is a crucial component in Conversational AI agents, leveraging contextual information from previous user-agent conversations to improve comprehension of current user intent.
Approach:	They propose a framework to enhance the CQR model's capability in generating user preference-aligned rewrites.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the CQR model's ability to generate user preference-aligned rewrites.

Shallow Focus, Deep Fixes: Enhancing Shallow Layers Vision Attention Sinks to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Chaochen Gu, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Jiawei Cao, Hao Cheng, Kaijie Wu, Jieping Ye

Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities for understanding visual information, but the hallucination remains a challenging problem.
Approach:	They propose a training-free approach to enhance vision attention sinks to facilitate convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers.
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves the convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers and strengthens the layer’s focus on the image itself.

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Jianqiao Li, Chunyuan Li, Guoyin Wang, Hao Fu, Yuhchen Lin, Liqun Chen, Yizhe Zhang, Chenyang Tao, Ruiyi Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Qian Yang, Lawrence Carin

Text Generation

Challenge:	Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to train models, but during testing, the model is conditioned on previously generated tokens, resulting in exposure bias.
Approach:	They propose to use optimal transport to match the sequences generated in MLE and test modes to reduce exposure bias.
Outcome:	The proposed method is validated on machine translation, text summarization, and text generation tasks.

AutoTaskEval: Towards Domain-Specific and Fine-Grained Evaluation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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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.

360∘REA: Towards A Reusable Experience Accumulation with 360∘ Assessment for Multi-Agent System (2024.findings-acl)

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Shen Gao, Hao Li, Zhengliang Shi, Chengrui Huang, Quan Tu, Shuo Shang, Zhiliang Tian, Minlie Huang

OpenRLHF: A Ray-based Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework (2025.emnlp-demos)

Challenge:	Recent studies focus on optimizing the agent team or employing self-reflection to iteratively solve complex tasks.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework that uses 360 assessment to accumulate experience through fine-grained assessment.
Outcome:	The proposed framework is based on corporate organizational practices and employs a dual-level experience pool for agents to accumulate experience through fine-grained assessment.

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Jian Hu, Xibin Wu, Wei Shen, Jason Klein Liu, Weixun Wang, Songlin Jiang, Haoran Wang, Hao Chen, Bin Chen, Wenkai Fang, null Xianyu, Yu Cao, Haotian Xu, Yiming Liu