Papers by He Ma

76 papers
Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: composition of pre-training datasets for large language models remains undisclosed . current methods for evaluating data quality are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies.
Approach: They propose a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings.
Outcome: The proposed method doubles convergence speed for 1.3B model models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23%.
MTA:A Merge-then-Adapt Framework for Personalized Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to align outputs with individual user preferences . current methods of fine-tuning a separate module for each user are unscalable .
Approach: They propose a Merge-then-Adapt framework for Personalized Large Language Models . they construct a shared Meta-LoRA bank and propose an Adaptive LoRA Fusion stage .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing SOTA methods on the LaMP benchmark.
Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity due to their lack of knowledge hallucination and lack of a coherent model.
Approach: They propose a self-supervised quantized representation method to compress KG structural and semantic knowledge into discrete codes that align the format of language sentences.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing unsupervised methods producing more distinguishable codes on KG link prediction and triple classification tasks.
FineLAP: Taming Heterogeneous Supervision for Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing audio-language models excel at clip-level understanding but struggle with frame-level tasks.
Approach: They propose a novel training paradigm that advances both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data.
Outcome: The proposed training paradigm improves both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data.
Query Rewriting in Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on adapting either the retriever or the reader, but this approach is more focused on adaptation of the query itself.
Approach: They propose a new framework for retrieval-augmented Large Language Models . they propose rewrite-retrieve-read instead of retrieve-then-read .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance on downstream tasks, open-domain QA and multiple-choice QA.
Interpretable Safety Alignment via SAE-Constructed Low-Rank Subspace Adaptation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Prior work has shown that safety behaviors are governed by low-rank structures . Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) consistently underperforms full fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on safety benchmarks .
Approach: They propose a safety alignment system that disentangles safety-relevant directions into monosemantic features and constructs an interpretable safety subspace from SAE directions.
Outcome: Empirically, the proposed model achieves 99.6% safety rates across multiple model families and scales . low-rank Adaptation consistently underperforms full fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on safety benchmarks compared with previous methods .
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
JiraiBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Detection of Human risky health behavior Content in Jirai Community (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: a cross-lingual dataset captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . risky health behaviors (RHB) are often linked to complex mental health conditions .
Approach: They present the first cross-lingual dataset that captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . their dataset of more than 15,000 annotated social media posts forms the core of JiraiBench .
Outcome: The study shows that cultural context can be more influential than linguistic similarity . the study also shows that the Japanese prompts better handle Chinese content .
UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: UFO is a UI-Fcused agent designed to fulfill user requests tailored to Windows OS applications . it decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications.
Approach: They propose a UI-Fcused Windows OS agent that decomposes user requests using a divide-and-conquer approach and incorporates a control interaction module tailored for Windows OS.
Outcome: The proposed agent decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications.
GRAIT: Gradient-Driven Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning for Effective Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Experimental evaluations on open-ended and multiple-choice questions demonstrate GRAIT significantly outperforms existing RAIT methods in the overall performance.
Approach: They propose a framework to reduce the risk of over-refusal and reduce hallucinations by rejecting unknown questions to minimize hallucinism and ensuring correct answers are not rejected.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on open-ended and multiple-choice questions.
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)

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Challenge: Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks.
Approach: They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks.
Outcome: Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more.
Robustness via Referencing: Defending against Prompt Injection Attacks by Referencing the Executed Instruction (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prompt injection attacks manipulate large language models (LLMs) by misleading them to deviate from the original input instructions and execute maliciously injected instructions.
Approach: They propose a prompt injection defense method that suppresses the model's instruction-following tendencies rather than suppressing them.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms prompt-engineering-based approaches and fine-tuning methods and reduces the ASR to nearly 0% in some scenarios.
Efficient Shapley Values Estimation by Amortization for Text Classification (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Shapley Values are often estimated with a small number of stochastic model evaluations, but this can only be mitigated by aggregating thousands of model evaluation.
Approach: They propose to combine a model with thousands of model evaluations to estimate Shapley Values without additional model evaluation.
Outcome: The proposed model estimates Shapley Values accurately with up to 60 times speedup compared to traditional methods and does not suffer from stability issues as inference is deterministic.
SCVQ: Sparse-Compensated Vector Quantization for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing vector quantization methods incur inference overhead due to massive codebook storage and intensive index lookups.
Approach: They propose a framework for vector quantization that incorporates a salience-aware weighted K-means clustering scheme with symmetry constraints to reduce codebook size and indexing costs.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves a perplexity of 5.78 on WikiText-2 for LLaMA-2-7B at 2-bit quantization while delivering a 1.4 speedup over existing baselines.
Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for long chain-of-thought (LCoT) are coarse-grained, reward hacking, and poor generalization.
Approach: They propose a Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT) model that integrates reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards with a process-aware verification approach.
Outcome: The proposed model improves reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing the cost of training and performance bottlenecks.
RESF: Regularized-Entropy-Sensitive Fingerprinting for Black-Box Tamper Detection of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for tamper detection rely on model stability, not inherently stochastic models.
Approach: They propose a hypothesis-testing method for black-box tamper detection for LLMs . they propose regularized entropy-sensitive fingerprinting to enable efficient fingerprinting .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 98.80% detection accuracy under challenging conditions . it is based on a first-order surrogate for KL divergence to identify prompts most responsive to parameter perturbations.
AUGUST: an Automatic Generation Understudy for Synthesizing Conversational Recommendation Datasets (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing work on conversational recommendation systems lacks high-quality data . existing datasets lack large-scale and high-level data based on human annotators .
Approach: They propose an automatic dataset synthesis approach that generates large-scale recommendation dialogues using structured graphs based on user-item information from the real world.
Outcome: The proposed approach can generate large-scale and high-quality recommendation dialogues . it exploits user preferences, knowledge graphs, and conversation ability from existing datasets based on real-world data .
FinanceReasoning: Benchmarking Financial Numerical Reasoning More Credible, Comprehensive and Challenging (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging.
OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined.
Approach: They propose a multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself after each iteration.
Outcome: The proposed agent improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets.
End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a new study proposes a conversational search system that integrates product attributes and dialog with search . but it faces two real world challenges: imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data .
Approach: They propose an end-to-end conversational search system that integrates search with text . they propose an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterations from other domains .
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms the best tested baseline in a conversational search dataset for online shopping.
Response-G1: Explicit Scene Graph Modeling for Proactive Streaming Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for streaming video understanding are query-agnostic and implicitly model video evidence.
Approach: They propose a framework that establishes explicit, structured alignment between the accumulated video evidence and the query’s expected response conditions via scene graphs.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves more interpretable and accurate response timing decisions on both proactive and reactive tasks.
Towards Hierarchical Multi-Step Reward Models for Enhanced Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Process Reward Models (PRMs) are vulnerable to reward hacking and require expensive, large-scale annotation of reasoning steps.
Approach: They propose a reward model approach which evaluates both individual and consecutive reasoning steps from fine-grained and coarse-grounded level.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed model performs better than existing PRMs and is more robust than existing models.
Simultaneous Translation (2020.emnlp-tutorials)

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Challenge: Simultaneous translation is a problem that has long been considered one of the hardest problems in AI . this tutorial will provide a deep understanding of the history and the recent advances in simultaneous translation.
Approach: This tutorial will examine the design and evaluation of policies for simultaneous translation . it will provide an overview of the history and recent advances in simultaneous translation.
Outcome: This tutorial will examine the design and evaluation of policies for simultaneous translation .
STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework (P19-1)

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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.
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring.
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios.
Understanding Client Reactions in Online Mental Health Counseling (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Communication success relies heavily on reading participants’ reactions, but little research is on how listeners' reactions shape trajectories and outcomes of conversations.
Approach: They propose to use client reactions to predict counseling outcomes by using an annotation framework that encompasses counselors’ strategies and client reaction behaviors.
Outcome: The proposed framework can predict counselors' strategies and client reaction behaviors against a large-scale text-based counseling dataset.
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese.
Approach: They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks.
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints.
Approach: They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly.
Outcome: The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives.
WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing web agents only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a large multimodal model-powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites.
Outcome: The proposed agent achieves 59.1% task success rate, surpassing both GPT-4 and WebVoyager setups.
MixRED: A Mix-lingual Relation Extraction Dataset (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing research focuses on monolingual relation extraction, but there is a significant gap in understanding relation extraction in the mix-lingual scenario.
Approach: They propose a task of considering relation extraction in the mix-lingual scenario . they construct a human-annotated dataset to support the task .
Outcome: The proposed task evaluates state-of-the-art supervised models and large language models on the human-annotated dataset MixRED.
Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR) is a problem in content moderation in China.
Approach: They organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile PCR-ToxiCN, a dataset of 500 phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves only an F1-score and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower.
Lexical Diversity-aware Relevance Assessment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, yielding a 10.6% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA.
Approach: They propose a Lexical Diversity-aware RAG method to address the biases in relevant information retrieval and utilization induced by lexical diversity.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks show the proposed method yields a 10.6% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA.
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing LLM reasoning rely on supervisory signals . current methods rely heavily on outcome supervision and auxiliary reward models .
Approach: They propose a gen-eralizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework to enhance LLM reasoning without supervision.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves LLM reasoning without supervision without external supervision.
Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation With Discrete Units (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing direct speech-to-speech translation models rely on text generation as an intermediate step.
Approach: They propose a direct speech-to-speech translation model that translates speech from one language to another without relying on intermediate text generation.
Outcome: The proposed model produces 6.7 BLEUs in the Fisher Spanish-English dataset when trained without any text transcripts and with text supervision.
PivotFEC: Enhancing Few-shot Factual Error Correction with a Pivot Task Approach using Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Factual Error Correction (FEC) use mask-then-correct paradigms . however, the lack of datasets containing false claims has impeded progress .
Approach: They propose a method that enhances few-shot FEC with a pivot task approach using large language models.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms its few-shot counterpart by 7.9 points in SARI . it improves widely-adopted SARI metrics by 11.3 compared to the best-performing methods .
Natural-Language Policies to Executable Decisions: An Interpretable Large Language Model Framework (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: a production-grade pricing system for tourism is challenging due to unstructured nature of travel orders and ever-evolving pricing policies.
Approach: They propose a production-grade pricing system with a strict decision boundary . they propose to combine structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection with interpretable condition trees .
Outcome: The proposed system processed 3,960 orders in six months and reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3 . the system reduced the per-order handling time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes.
Robust Neural Machine Translation with Joint Textual and Phonetic Embedding (P19-1)

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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.
Answer-focused and Position-aware Neural Question Generation (D18-1)

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Challenge: Recent neural network-based approaches generate interrogative words that do not match the answer type.
Approach: They propose an answer-focused and position-aware neural question generation model to address these issues.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline and outperformed the state-of-the-art system.
Unsupervised Text Style Transfer for Controllable Intensity (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (UTST) aims to transfer the stylistic properties of a given text without parallel text pairs.
Approach: They propose a SFT-then-PPO paradigm to fine-tune an LLM with parallel data and reward functions for distinguishing stylistic intensity in hierarchical levels.
Outcome: The proposed system can transfer stylistic properties without parallel text pairs even for adjacent levels of intensity.
PrAd: Prompt Adaptive Tuning for Decoder-only Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Prompt-based methods suffer from increased input lengths and sensitivity to weight initialization . adapter-based approaches can substantially increase inference time .
Approach: a new paradigm for prompt-based tuning addresses the problem of fine tuning pretrained models . prompt--based methods suffer from increased input lengths and sensitivity to weight initialization . a prompt-oriented approach employs adapters for flexible input transformation .
Outcome: a proposed framework can achieve comparable or better performance and higher inference efficiency even in multi-task scenarios.
Fine-Mem: Fine-Grained Feedback Alignment for Long-Horizon Memory Management (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to memory management rely on final task performance as the primary reward, resulting in severe reward sparsity and ineffective credit assignment.
Approach: They propose a framework for fine-grained feedback alignment using a Chunk-level step reward and Evidence-Anchored Reward Attribution to redistribute global rewards based on memory items utilized as evidence in reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines and supports generalization across different model configurations and backbones.
Safety in Large Reasoning Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have a high level of advanced reasoning capabilities, but they are vulnerable and vulnerable.
Approach: This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of Large Reasoning Models . it explores the new safety risks, attacks, and defense strategies specific to LRMs based on reasoning .
Outcome: The proposed study examines the safety and security risks of large reasoning models.
MTR-DuplexBench: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Round Conversations for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating single-round interactions, neglecting other critical aspects.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate full-duplex speech language models in multi-round settings . they segment continuous full-dual dialogues into discrete turns for evaluation .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark compared full-duplex speech language models with full-dual speech models . the results show that the models perform better in multi-round settings than standard models compared to benchmarks .
Scattered Hypothesis Generation for Open-Ended Event Forecasting (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for event forecasting focus on the most probable outcomes, neglecting the intrinsic uncertainty of real-world events.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes inclusiveness and diversity of the hypothesis by integrating validity-gated score into the overall objective.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two real-world benchmark datasets.
Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for embodied reasoning are coarse-grained and expensive . branch-and-browse framework enables fine-grounded, memory-guided, and efficient multi-branch reasoning.
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves task success rate of 35.8% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4% relative to state-of-the-art methods.
QuALITY: Question Answering with Long Input Texts, Yes! (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for natural language understanding are limited to processing only a few hundred words at a time.
Approach: They propose a dataset with context passages in English that have an average length of 5,000 tokens.
Outcome: a new dataset with long-text comprehension questions is used to test models on long-document comprehension . the questions are validated by contributors who have read the entire passage, not just excerpts . only half of the questions can be answered by annotators working under tight time constraints .
Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent years have witnessed an explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs), with impressive performance on various NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose to use image-based representations to compare LLMs' performance on table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking to determine their effectiveness.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better on image-based representations than on text-based models.
User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to broaden user experiences beyond established preferences and reinforce feedback loops.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical approach that combines hierarchic planning with LLM inference-time scaling to improve recommendation relevancy without compromising novelty.
Outcome: The proposed approach shows significant gains in both user satisfaction and exploration diversity.
PEAR: Planner-Executor Agent Robustness Benchmark (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies examine isolated attack surfaces or specific scenarios, leaving a lack of holistic understanding of MAS vulnerabilities.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the utility and vulnerability of planner–executor MAS.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates planner–executor MAS on a widely adopted design.
Diff4TST: Masked Diffusion Language Model for Text Style Transfer (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text style transfer rely on task-specific training and expensive training stages.
Approach: They propose a diffusion-based language model that formulates text style transfer as an explicit copy-and-edit process.
Outcome: The proposed model improves style accuracy and controllability while maintaining strong content preservation and fluency.
SimRPD: Optimizing Recruitment Proactive Dialogue Agents through Simulator-Based Data Evaluation and Selection (2026.acl-industry)

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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)

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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.
NILE: Internal Consistency Alignment in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances show that the world knowledge in the Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) dataset, which is incompatible with LLMs’ internal knowledge, can greatly hurt the IFT performance.
Approach: They propose a framework to optimize the effectiveness of IFT by carefully aligning the world and internal knowledge of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework can significantly improve performance across multiple LLM ability evaluation datasets.
JARVIS-VLA: Post-Training Large-Scale Vision Language Models to Play Visual Games with Keyboards and Mouse (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Visual Language Action models have shown promise in decision-making tasks, but have been neglected in previous work .
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for visual language action models that enhances the foundation model prior to action-specific tuning by first post-training it on a curated set of visual and linguistic tasks using self-supervised learning.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the best agent baseline on a diverse set of atomic tasks and surpasses imitation learning-based policies in Minecraft.
Prompt Consistency for Zero-Shot Task Generalization (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models can perform zero-shot generalization to new tasks without annotated examples.
Approach: They propose to regularize prompt consistency to encourage consistent predictions over a diverse set of prompts.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot learner, T0, on 9 out of 11 datasets across 4 NLP tasks by 10.6 absolute points in terms of accuracy.
RECAP: An End-to-End Platform for Capturing, Replaying, and Analyzing AI-Assisted Programming Interactions (2026.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Deployed in a university software engineering course, RECAP captured 2,034 prompts and 8,239 code edits from 41 students across a multi-week project.
Approach: They propose an open-source platform that passively records AI chat sessions and fine-grained code edits inside VS Code without disrupting the developer’s workflow.
Outcome: The open-source platform captures 2,034 prompts and 8,239 code edits from 41 students across a multi-week project.
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)

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Challenge: **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs.
Approach: They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing .
Outcome: The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs.
Boundary Matters: Leveraging Structured Text Plots for Long Text Outline Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating readable outlines are inability to segment long texts .
Approach: They propose an unsupervised framework to guide large language model outline generation . framework ensures each structured plot encapsulates complete causality by accurately identifying plot boundaries.
Outcome: The proposed framework ensures that each structured plot encapsulates complete causality by accurately identifying plot boundaries.
MSMO-ABSA: Multi-Scale and Multi-Objective Optimization for Cross-Lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has seen success with English texts, but real-world social media interactions often involve multiple languages.
Approach: They propose a framework for cross-lingual ABSA that incorporates code-switched bilingual sentences into the language discriminator and consistency training modules to enhance cross-linguistic alignment.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves cross-lingual sentence-level and aspect-level alignment, aligning features of aspect terms in different contextual environments.
How Can Synthetic Data Improve Multilingual Language Model Pretraining? A Data Quality Perspective (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Low-resource languages are a long-tail problem for multilingual LLMs due to limited high-quality training data.
Approach: They propose a method that translates high-quality, knowledge-rich English data into low-resource languages . they propose SynRank, which leverages synthetic data as positive samples to train a classifier .
Outcome: The proposed method matches handcrafted rule-based filtering by human experts and significantly improves knowledge-intensive tasks with less data.
On Leakage of Code Generation Evaluation Datasets (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: In this paper, we discuss contamination by code generation test sets in large language models.
Approach: They propose to use Python to test code generation test sets for contamination . they find that code generation is an important skill for large language models to master .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are uncontaminated and provide a new insight into code generation.
TimeTraveler: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on reasoning at past timestamps to complete the missing facts, and there are only a few works of reasoning on known TKGs to forecast future facts.
Approach: They propose a time-shaped reward method that captures historical knowledge graph snapshots and a new representation method for unseen entities to improve the inductive inference ability of the model.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on four benchmark datasets with higher explainability, less calculation, and fewer parameters when compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.
From Informal to Formal – Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies in formal mathematical reasoning have shown an unstoppable growth trend.
Approach: They constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five mainstream formal specification languages and evaluated them against ten open-sourced LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed model compared instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages and found that the LLMs were good at writing proof segments when given either the code, or the detailed description of proof steps.
KEPL: Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Learning for Chinese Hypernym-Hyponym Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on hypernym-hyponym (“is-a”) relations is mostly in the English language.
Approach: They propose a Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Learning method for Chinese hypernym-hyponym relation extraction using Hearst-like patterns as the prior knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method is able to extract hypernym-hyponym relations from Chinese unstructured texts using Hearst-like patterns and embed patterns and text simultaneously.
Challenges in Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: despite well-reasoned intuitions, most context-aware neural machine translation models show only modest improvements over sentence-level systems.
Approach: They propose a more realistic setting for document-level translation called paragraph-to-paragraph (PARA2PARA) they collect a dataset of Chinese-English novels to promote future research .
Outcome: The proposed model improves translation quality across document-level metrics and discourse phenomena.
Hierarchical Visual Agent: Managing Contexts in Joint Image-Text Space for Advanced Chart Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing MLLMs are strong at understanding single plots, but struggle with multi-step reasoning . Existing approaches to manage context in chart reasoning include text-based chain-of-thought prompting .
Approach: They propose a hierarchical visual agent framework that iteratively constructs a working context in an image–text space.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on strong multimodal baselines.
Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning (P19-1)

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Challenge: Cross-lingual transfer is a useful tool for improving performance of natural language processing (NLP) on low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose to use cross-lingual transfer to improve accuracy of low-resource languages . they build models that consider features to perform prediction on such languages based on ranking problem .
Outcome: The proposed model predicts good transfer languages much better than baselines considering single features in isolation.
Route Sparse Autoencoder to Interpret Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract interpretable and monosemantic features in large language models . prior work focused on feature extraction from a single layer, failing to capture activations that span multiple layers.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates a routing mechanism with a shared SAE to efficiently extract features from multiple layers.
Outcome: The proposed framework extracts features from multiple layers while incurring minimal parameter overhead while achieving high interpretability and flexibility.
RevCore: Review-Augmented Conversational Recommendation (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing conversational recommendation systems lack item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items.
Approach: They propose a framework where reviews are seamlessly incorporated into conversational recommendation systems.
Outcome: The proposed framework yields better performance on recommendation and conversation responding.
PROM: A Phrase-level Copying Mechanism with Pre-training for Abstractive Summarization (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing summarization strategies are abstractive and extractive, but are hard to control.
Approach: They propose a PhRase-level cOpying Mechanism that enhances attention on n-grams and calculates an auxiliary loss for the copying prediction.
Outcome: Empirical studies show that PROM improves copying accuracy and faithfulness on benchmarks.
BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches often fail to leverage the linguistic intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing models lack the ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS).
Approach: They propose a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan - explicit vocal features.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms open- and closed-source models in speech synthesis and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual generalization.
E3-TIR: Enhanced Experience Exploitation for Tool-Integrated Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from inefficient exploration and mode degradation due to a lack of prior guidance, while SFT-then-RL is limited by high data costs and capability plateaus caused by low-entropy collapse.
Approach: They propose an Enhanced Experience Exploitation paradigm that integrates expert prefixes, expert guided, and self-exploration to improve agent training.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves a 6% performance improvement over traditional paradigms on tool-use tasks while requiring less than 10% of the synthetic data.
ContextCheck: Sentence-Level Faithfulness Verification with Context-Aware Disambiguation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models often hallucinate, producing content that is factually incorrect or not grounded in the sources.
Approach: They propose a framework for sentence-level faithfulness verification with context-aware disambiguation.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves Macro F1 by over 10 points compared to baselines on three context-dependent datasets.
Multimodal Self-Instruct: Synthetic Abstract Image and Visual Reasoning Instruction Using Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using large language models, large multimodal models struggle with basic tasks like reading time from a clock and planning a route using a road map.
Approach: They propose a multimodal self-instruct that synthesizes massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions.
Outcome: The proposed model synthesizes 11,193 abstract images and reasoning instructions across eight visual scenarios.

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