Papers by Hong Wang
HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering datasets focus on dealing with homogeneous information, but using homogenous information alone might lead to coverage problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question-answering dataset that requires reasoning on heterogeneous information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve an EM score of 40% while the existing model is far behind human performance. |
Rhetorical Device-Aware Sarcasm Detection with Counterfactual Data Augmentation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sarcasm is a complex form of sentiment expression widely used in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a device-aware sarcasm dataset with counterfactually augmented data to capture its complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that it is more balanced than zero-shot models. |
Sample Design Engineering: An Empirical Study on Designing Better Fine-Tuning Samples for Information Extraction with LLMs (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Prompt Engineering (PE) is renowned for improving IE performance through prompt modifications, but the realm of sample design for downstream fine-tuning remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a methodical approach to enhancing LLMs’ post-tuning performance by refining input, output, and reasoning designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms heuristic design strategies on three complex IE tasks with four additional LLMs. |
REALM: A Dataset of Real-World LLM Use Cases (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM adoption and their social implications lack empirical grounding, weakening their validity. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a dataset of over 94,000 LLM use cases collected from Reddit and news articles to provide insights into LLM adoption across different domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 94,000 LLM use cases collected from Reddit and news articles. |
FC-KBQA: A Fine-to-Coarse Composition Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) suffer from generalization issues due to coarse-grained modeling of the logical expression. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-to- coarse-grained framework for KBQA to ensure generalization and executability of the logical expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework derives new state-of-the-art performance on GrailQA and WebQSP, and runs 4 times faster than baseline. |
ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chaoyue He, Xin Zhou, Yi Wu, Xinjia Yu, Yan Zhang, Lei Zhang, Di Wang, Shengfei Lyu, Hong Xu, Wang Xiaoqiao, Wei Liu, Chunyan Miao
| Challenge: | ESGenius is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models on ESG and sustainability knowledge. |
| Approach: | They introduce ESGenius, a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing ESG proficiency . they use a rigorous two-stage evaluation protocol and a repository of foundational frameworks . |
| Outcome: | ESGenius is a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in ESG and sustainability-focused question answering. |
Self-Supervised Learning for Contextualized Extractive Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive summarization are usually trained from scratch with a cross-entropy loss . previous work builds an end-to-end system to learn to choose sentences without explicitly modeling document context . |
| Approach: | They propose three auxiliary pre-training tasks that learn to capture the document context in a self-supervised fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on a CNN/DM dataset. |
DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we construct a real-world Chinese dataset - DuReader_robust . |
| Approach: | They introduce a real-world Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness and generalization of MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalisation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to perform well on the challenge test set and may provide suggestions for future model development. |
Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on open-domain multi-hop question answering relies on off-the-shelf information retrieval techniques to retrieve answer passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a new subproblem for open-domain multi-hop question answering . they aim to recognize the anchor from a set of start passages with a reading comprehension model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the baseline method on the open-domain hotpotQA benchmark. |
Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Data (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can generate natural language texts for various domains and tasks, but their potential for clinical text mining is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a pragmatic taxonomy for AD sign and symptom progression based on expert knowledge and train a system to detect AD-related signs and symptoms from EHRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy outperforms existing methods using only the gold dataset and silver datasets. |
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
| 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. |
Steering Knowledge Selection Behaviours in LLMs via SAE-Based Representation Engineering (2025.naacl-long)
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Yu Zhao, Alessio Devoto, Giwon Hong, Xiaotang Du, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Hongru Wang, Xuanli He, Kam-Fai Wong, Pasquale Minervini
| Challenge: | Large language models store factual knowledge in their parameters but their parametric knowledge can conflict with the information provided in the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free representation engineering method that uses pre-trained sparse auto-encoders to control the knowledge selection behaviour of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can control the use of both knowledge sources to resolve knowledge conflict in open-domain question-answering tasks surpassing existing representation engineering methods (+10%) and contrastive decoding methods (+5%). |
MedQA-CS: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-Style Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Skills (2026.eacl-long)
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Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Chaolong Tang, Xingyu Bian, Youxia Zhao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Huixue Zhou, Won Seok Jang, Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Current clinical LLM benchmarks fail to evaluate advanced clinical skills in AI and large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) using two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
Watermark under Fire: A Robustness Evaluation of LLM Watermarking (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Various watermarking methods have been proposed to identify LLM-generated texts . lack of unified evaluation platforms has left many critical questions unanswered . |
| Approach: | They systematize existing LLM watermarkers and watermark removal attacks and develop a unified platform that integrates them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systematizes existing LLM watermarkers and watermark removal attacks, mapping out their design spaces. |
Argumentation Mining on Essays at Multi Scales (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Argumentation mining on essays is a new task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale argumentation mining model which aims to identify the types and locations of argumentation components from essay text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on mining all types of argumentation components on the Persuasive Essay dataset. |
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Taolin Zhang, Pukun Zhao, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Chen Chen, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency of multi-agent systems rely on aggressive graph topology evolution . however, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for "zombie" agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution that manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling. |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
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Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
Disentangle to Decay: Linear Attention with Trainable Decay Factor (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing linear attention models use a decay factor based positional encoding (PE), but the decay factor is manually designed and non-trainable, limiting further optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a PE-based positional encoding that disentangles decay factor into two parts to achieve further optimization and stable training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves stable training of decay factor and improves inference efficiency in normal context and extrapolation scenarios. |
Generating User-Engaging News Headlines (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Personalized news recommendation systems present the same headline to all users, making it difficult for them to understand the connection between their interests and the recommended article. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates user profiling to generate personalized headlines and a combination of automated and human evaluation methods to determine user preference for personalized headline generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate personalized headlines that meet the needs of a diverse audience. |
QG-CoC: Question-Guided Chain-of-Captions for Large Multimodal Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods for multimodal large language models lack fine-grained perception across disparate images . existing methods fail to integrate perception and reasoning, causing problems with general multi-image reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized prompting method that integrates perception and reasoning . they evaluate the method on open-source and closed-source MLLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows competitive performance across tasks and improves in challenging scenarios. |
Exploiting the Index Gradients for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite advances in training Large Language Models, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak, an adversarial attack method. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial jailbreak algorithm that exploits the gradient information of the suffix tokens to accelerate the optimization process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 1.5x speedup while maintaining high attack success rates. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, particularly with Chain-of-Thought-style prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search) it achieves optimum balance between exploration and exploitation, while achieving high-reward reasoning paths efficiently. |
Zero-Shot Information Extraction as a Unified Text-to-Triple Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of information extraction tasks require task-specific training. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-triple translation framework for information extraction tasks . they propose enabling task-agnostic translation by leveraging latent knowledge of a pre-trained language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing methods on open information extraction tasks. |
ReCreate: Reasoning and Creating Domain Agents Driven by Experience (2026.acl-long)
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Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jian Luo, Jianqing Zhang, Yuyan Zhou, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Hande Dong, Jiawei Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape, but tasks differ widely, making them labor-intensive to build. |
| Approach: | They propose an experience-driven framework for the automatic creation of domain agents . they leverage agent interaction histories to provide rich concrete signals on success or failure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms human-designed agents and existing methods in experiments across diverse domains. |
Hierarchical Representation-based Dynamic Reasoning Network for Biomedical Question Answering (2022.coling-1)
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Jianguo Mao, Jiyuan Zhang, Zengfeng Zeng, Weihua Peng, Wenbin Jiang, Xiangdong Wang, Hong Liu, Yajuan Lyu
| Challenge: | Existing models of biomedical question answering are limited in their ability to predict answers . a new model improves the performance of existing models, but the code will be released after the paper is published. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical representation-based dynamic reasoning network to solve biomedical problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on three mainstream biomedical datasets . the code will be released after the paper is published . |
Unregulated Chinese-to-English Data Expansion Does NOT Work for Neural Event Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that cross-language data expansion results in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They leverage cross-language data expansion and retraining to enhance neural Event Detection on English ACE corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ED performance by 1.6% over the straight data combination. |
LlamaCare: An Instruction Fine-Tuned Large Language Model for Clinical NLP (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable abilities in generating natural texts . applying LLMs to clinical domain still poses significant challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a method of instruction fine-tuning for adapting large language models to clinical domains . they generate instructions, inputs, and outputs covering a wide spectrum of clinical services . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline LLMs on clinical tasks . it requires domain adaptation, task-specific learning, and reliability . |
Self-Error-Instruct: Generalizing from Errors for LLMs Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Qi Zhu, Boyang Xue, Minghui Xu, Baojun Wang, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes more generalized training data from isolated bad cases by extrapolating from isolated cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes more generalized training data to address these model weaknesses. |
AssistedDS: Benchmarking How External Domain Knowledge Assists LLMs in Automated Data Science (2025.findings-emnlp)
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An Luo, Xun Xian, Jin Du, Fangqiao Tian, Ganghua Wang, Ming Zhong, Shengchun Zhao, Xuan Bi, Zirui Liu, Jiawei Zhou, Jayanth Srinivasa, Ashish Kundu, Charles Fleming, Mingyi Hong, Jie Ding
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the automation of data science workflows, yet it remains unclear whether they can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate how large language models handle external domain knowledge in tabular prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluates whether it can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. |
PrinciplismQA: A Philosophy-Grounded Approach to Assessing LLM-Human Clinical Medical Ethics Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack systematic approaches to integrate philosophical frameworks and expert validation for ethical reasoning assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a philosophy-grounded approach to assess medical ethics alignment . PrinciplismQA comprises 3,648 expert-validated questions spanning knowledge assessment and clinical reasoning . |
| Outcome: | PrinciplismQA provides a philosophy-grounded approach to assessing medical ethics alignment. |
SEP-MLDC: A Simple and Effective Paradigm for Multi-Label Document Classification (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on optimizing document features, overlooking the potential of high-quality label features to enhance classification performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-label document classification paradigm that utilizes large language models to expand the label content and generate pseudo-samples for the tail categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
Limitations of Language Models in Arithmetic and Symbolic Induction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that large pretrained Language Models (LMs) can perform remarkably well on a range of NLP tasks but they have limitations on basic symbolic manipulation tasks such as copy, reverse, and addition. |
| Approach: | They propose to use explicit positional markers, fine-grained computation steps, and LMs with callable programs to teach large pretrained Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform 100% accuracy in OOD and repeating symbols. |
Reflect, Rewrite, Repeat: How Simple Arithmetic Enables Advanced Reasoning in Small Language Models (2026.findings-eacl)
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Mengdie Flora Wang, Haochen Xie, Mun Young Kim, Baishali Chaudhury, Meghana Ashok, Suren Gunturu, Sungmin Hong, Jae Oh Woo
| Challenge: | Recent advances in language model reasoning require computationally intensive reinforcement learning and massive datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines Direct Preference Optimization and Supervised Fine-Tuning with selective guidance from larger models and iteratively refining solutions through a "reflect, rewrite, repeat" cycle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvements across arithmetic, symbolic and cognitive reasoning benchmarks. |
From Scores to Steps: Diagnosing and Improving LLM Performance in Evidence-Based Medical Calculations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Benlu Wang, Iris Xia, Yifan Zhang, Junda Wang, null Feiyun Ouyang, Shuo Han, Arman Cohan, Hong Yu, Zonghai Yao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess only the final answer with a wide numerical tolerance, overlooking systematic reasoning failures and potentially causing serious clinical misjudgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a new step-by-step evaluation pipeline that assesses formula selection, entity extraction, and arithmetic computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of large language models on medical benchmarks from 16.35% to 53.19%. |
Exploiting Edited Large Language Models as General Scientific Optimizers (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for solving optimization problems in scientific scenarios use observational feedback as additional textual descriptions, but these methods struggle to utilize it effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized approach to boost mathematical optimization in scientific scenarios by using observational feedback from LLMs as additional textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on six different tasks using six different LLM backbones. |
AdaDHP: Fine-Grained Fine-Tuning via Dual Hadamard Product and Adaptive Parameter Selection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Increasing number of parameters can be challenging under resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method with fewer parameters and finer granularity that can adaptively select important parameters for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can fine-tune important parameters for each task, while maintaining the same weights. |
SubDocTrans: Enhancing Document-level Machine Translation with Plug-and-play Multi-granularity Knowledge Augmentation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Document translations generated by large language models suffer from poor consistency, weak coherence, and omission errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level machine translation framework that extracts knowledge from documents to produce high-quality translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves consistency and coherence, reduces omission errors, and mitigates hallucinations. |
ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) depend on costly fine-tuning and additional expert knowledge, which limits their scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time safeguard for Large Reasoning Models that injects safety aha moments into the reasoning process to guide the model towards harmless yet helpful reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed safeguard outperforms nine existing safeguards while avoiding common exaggerated safety issues. |
Achieving Multi-Hop Calculation and Safe Abstention in Financial Numerical Reasoning by Metric Graph Constrained LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are prone to forced generation when confronting ambiguous evidence or complex recursive dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that imposes semantic and structural constraints via a financial metric knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | a neuro-symbolic framework outperforms existing models on financial metric knowledge graphs. |
SGSH: Stimulate Large Language Models with Skeleton Heuristics for Knowledge Base Question Generation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods have significantly boosted the performance of Knowledge Base Question Generation (KBQG) through pre-trained language models thanks to the richly endowed semantic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to Stimulate GPT-3.5 with Skeleton Heuristics to enhance KBQG by combining skeleton heuristic guidance with a soft prompting approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates "skeleton heuristics" which provides more fine-grained guidance associated with each input to stimulate LLMs to generate optimal questions. |
DSM: Question Generation over Knowledge Base via Modeling Diverse Subgraphs with Meta-learner (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods on knowledge base question generation learn a one-size-fits-all model by training together all subgraphs without distinguishing the diverse semantics of subgraph. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph contrastive learning-based retriever to model diverse subgraphs with meta-learner to learn semantics-specific and semantics agnostic knowledge on and across these tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces learning difficulty and improves performance on two widely-adopted benchmarks on KBQG. |
SOLAR: Serendipity Optimized Language Model Aligned for Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zichen Yuan, Lifan Sun, Yucen Zhuang, Yue Wang, Xinyuan Song, Tianqi Xu, Siyuan Li, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Sirui Hong, Jiaqi Chen, Joemon M. Jose, Yongxin Ni
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have shown strong potential in recommendation tasks . however, their application to serendipity-oriented recommendations remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptive instruction tuning method that aligns Large Language Models with recommendation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the domain gap between LLMs and recommendation tasks. |
Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation extraction require a fixed set of relations . Existing methods assume a closed set of relationships and perform once-and-for-all training on a set of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the stochastic gradient methods with a replay memory to alleviate the forgetting problem by anchoring the sentence embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks. |
QueueEDIT: Structural Self-Correction for Sequential Model Editing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can be effective for correcting factual inaccuracies but can still suffer from hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a queue-based self-correction framework that addresses parameter bias during sequential model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while maintaining competitive performance in single-turn editing. |
GAPO: Robust Advantage Estimation for Real-World Code LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianqing Zhang, Zhezheng Hao, Wei Xia, Hande Dong, Hong Wang, Chenxing Wei, Yuyan Zhou, Yubin Qi, Qiang Lin, Jian Cao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, but in real-world code editing scenarios, reward distributions are often skewed with unpredictable noise, leading to distorted advantage computation and increased rollout outliers. |
| Approach: | They propose a group-relative method that finds an interval with the highest SNR and uses the median of that interval as an adaptive Q to replace the group mean in advantage calculation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on nine instruction-tuned LLMs while remaining plug-and-play and efficient. |
RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengzuo Wu, Yuhang Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Chao Ye, Hong Gu, Xu Lu, Ruixuan Xiao, Bowen Bao, Yijing He, Liangyu Zha, Wentao Ye, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models focus on simple, flat table structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of both Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of LLMs and Multimodal LLM models across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Jiale Cheng, Yusen Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Yulin Fei, Wenyi Hong, Ruiliang Lyu, Weihan Wang, Zhe Su, Xiaotao Gu, Xiao Liu, Yushi Bai, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) traditionally represent text as sequences of discrete tokens . a long-context scaling problem requires processing more tokens more efficiently . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that renders long texts into compact visual pages and processes them with a vision-language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework renders long texts into compact visual pages and processes them with a vision-language model. |
CHROMIC: Chronological Reasoning Across Multi-Panel Comics (2026.eacl-long)
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Bingxuan Hou, Jiayi Lin, Chenyang Zhang, Dapeng Yin, Shuyue Zhu, Qingqing Hong, Mengna Gao, Junli Wang
| Challenge: | Large-scale vision–language models have achieved remarkable progress on various reasoning tasks, but most studies focus on natural photographic images and pay limited attention to multi-panel visual narratives such as comics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for chronological reasoning in multi-panel comics that covers six types of reasoning questions and spans both Western and Japanese comic styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers six types of reasoning questions and spans both Western and Japanese comic styles. |
Is the Attention Matrix Really the Key to Self-Attention in Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In multivariate long-term time series forecasting, it is widely believed that the effectiveness of self-attention arises from its attention matrix. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch MLP that isolates the ‘multi-brain mapping with element-wise operation’ structure from the Transformer and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms three classic and three latest Transformer models and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
Speech-to-Speech Translation with Discrete-Unit-Based Style Transfer (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to translate spoken utterances from one language to another are unable to preserve speaker timbre of source speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline with style-transfer capability on the basis of self-supervised speech representations and codec units. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves zero-shot cross-lingual style transfer on previously unseen source languages. |
Dynamic Model-Bank Test-Time Adaptation for Automatic Speech Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing ASR TTA methods struggle with instability under continual and long-term distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a continuous adaptive model-bank framework that adapts to domain shifts in ASR test-time scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse, continuously shifting ASR benchmarks show that DMSUTA outperforms existing continual TTA baselines. |
PATIENT-𝜓: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionals (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ruiyi Wang, Stephanie Milani, Jamie Chiu, Jiayin Zhi, Shaun Eack, Travis Labrum, Samuel Murphy, Nev Jones, Kate Hardy, Hong Shen, Fei Fang, Zhiyu Chen
| Challenge: | Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a patient simulation framework for cognitive behavior therapy training that uses large language models to act as a simulated therapy patient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the skill acquisition and confidence of mental health trainees beyond textbooks, videos, and role-play with non-patients. |
Using Subtext to Enhance Generative IDRR (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Arguments contain subtexts, but they are connotative and need prompts to be recognized . a lightweight subtext generator is helpful when the prompt doesn't raise a complex CoT. |
| Approach: | They leverage LLaMA to generate subtexts for argument pairs and verify their effectiveness . they construct a baseline IDRR using the decoder-only backbone LLama . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves higher F1 scores on two benchmarks than previous models. |
ODD: A Benchmark Dataset for the Natural Language Processing Based Opioid Related Aberrant Behavior Detection (2024.naacl-long)
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Sunjae Kwon, Xun Wang, Weisong Liu, Emily Druhl, Minhee Sung, Joel Reisman, Wenjun Li, Robert Kerns, William Becker, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Opioid related aberrant behaviors (ORABs) present novel risk factors for opioid overdose. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a biomedical natural language processing benchmark dataset to classify ORABs from patients’ EHR notes into nine categories: confirmed aberrant behavior, suggested aberrant behaviors, Opioids, indication, diagnosed opioid dependency, Benzodiazepines, medication changes, and Central Nervous System-related. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms two state-of-the-art models in most categories and the gains are especially higher among uncommon classes. |
View-R1: Asymmetric Policy Optimization for Difficulty-Aware Multimodal Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are powerful at integrating diverse data but struggle with complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which separates responses into positive and negative groups to stabilize training and preserve knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model View-R1 achieves a 10.55% improvement in reasoning and outperforms larger models while maintaining and improving performance on general tasks. |
Empirical Studies of Institutional Federated Learning For Natural Language Processing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | federated learning is a promising ideology to unite isolated datasets for machine learning problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use federated natural language processing networks to train a popular NLP model with applications in sentence intent classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is sensitive to imbalanced data load and tested against a federated model under imbalanced datasets. |
FACT: Examining the Effectiveness of Iterative Context Rewriting for Multi-fact Retrieval (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at retrieving single facts from extended contexts, but struggle with tasks requiring simultaneous retrieval of multiple facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that refines context through successive rounds of rewriting to address this problem by finding all Crucial Texts (FACT) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multi-fact retrieval performance across tasks, though improvements are less notable in general-purpose QA scenarios. |
NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Patient-Physician Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | NoteChat is a cooperative multi-agent framework for generating patient-physician dialogues . evaluator finds it outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . clinical documentation is largely done by physicians at both steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models to generate patient-physician dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . it can engage patients directly and help clinical documentation, a leading cause of physician burnout . |
Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DPL significantly enhances LLM personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that emphasizes extracting inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
Variational Language Concepts for Interpreting Foundation Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Foundation Language Models (FLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational Bayesian framework to provide word-level interpretations for FLMs . they propose valc to find optimal language concepts to interpret FLM predictions . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework can provide conceptual interpretations for foundation language models. |
FusionFlow: Enabling Deep Structural Exploration for Automated Agentic Workflow Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing workflow generation methods rely on incremental refinement or tree-based search over a single evolving workflow. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework centered on workflow fusion that synthesizes multiple independently evolved workflows and allows exploration of deeper regions of the workflow space within a finite budget. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FusionFlow outperforms existing workflow generation methods on six reasoning benchmarks. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Curing Miracle Steps in LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Rubric Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Youliang Yuan, Qiuyang Mang, Jingbang Chen, Hong Wan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Junjielong Xu, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Pinjia He
| Challenge: | Existing models are susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model's reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rubric Reward Model that rewards the entire reasoning trajectory against problem-specific rubrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms outcome-only supervision on four math benchmarks and boosts Verified Pass@1024 from 26.7% to 62.6% and reduces the incidence of Miracle Steps by 71%. |
CoSafe: Evaluating Large Language Model Safety in Multi-Turn Dialogue Coreference (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not noticed the safety risks of large language models . authors evaluated 1,400 questions in multi-turn dialogue coreference . |
| Approach: | They are the first to evaluate LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference . they created a dataset of 1,400 questions and tested five open-source models . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that model safety decreases in multi-turn dialogue coreference scenarios . the highest success rate was with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was with mistral-7B-Instruct model . |
Progressively Pretrained Dense Corpus Index for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering systems are insufficient to capture deep semantic matching that goes beyond lexical overlaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-efficient method to pretrain the paragraph encoder using an existing pretraining model instead of heuristically created pseudo question-paragraph pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a strong dense retrieval baseline that uses 6 times more computation for training. |
MultiAgentBench : Evaluating the Collaboration and Competition of LLM agents (2025.acl-long)
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Kunlun Zhu, Hongyi Du, Zhaochen Hong, Xiaocheng Yang, Shuyi Guo, Zhe Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Cheng Qian, Robert Tang, Heng Ji, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities as autonomous agents, yet existing benchmarks focus on single-agent tasks or are confined to narrow domains, failing to capture the dynamics of multi-agent coordination and competition. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based multi-agent systems across diverse, interactive scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures task completion and quality of collaboration and competition using novel, milestone-based key performance indicators. |
LLMEdgeRefine: Enhancing Text Clustering with LLM-Based Boundary Point Refinement (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | LLMEdgeRefine is an iterative clustering method enhanced by large language models . existing clustering methods struggle with domain-specific fine-tuning and outliers . |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative clustering method enhanced by large language models focusing on edge points refinement . authors propose to use LLMs to iterate clusters and iterating to improve semantic coherence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and offers robustness, adaptability, and cost-efficiency for diverse text clustering applications. |
Adaptive Gating in Mixture-of-Experts based Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models employ a fixed gating network where each token is computed by the same number of experts. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible training strategy that allows tokens to be processed by a variable number of experts based on expert probability distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces training time and inference quality while maintaining sparsity while maintaining inference accuracy. |
Scaling Unverifiable Rewards: A Case Study on Visual Insights (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to scale complex, open-ended tasks with unverifiable rewards are not scalable to multi-stage pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-based refinement framework that scales inference across stages of a multi-agent pipeline, instead of refining a single output over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework scales inference across stages of a multi-agent pipeline, instead of refining a single output over time as in prior work. |
Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-context Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate annotated dialogues require crowdsourcing, which is expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue simulation method based on large language model in-context learning that generates new dialogues and annotations in a controllable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can expand a small set of dialogue data with minimum or zero human involvement and parameter update. |
Dynamic Multistep Reasoning based on Video Scene Graph for Video Question Answering (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing video QA models lack the capacity for deep video understanding and flexible multistep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a video question answering model which performs dynamic multistep reasoning between questions and videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three widely used video QA datasets and displays better interpretability by backtracing along with the attention mechanisms to the video scene graphs. |
User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2025.acl-industry)
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Jianling Wang, Yifan Liu, Yinghao Sun, Xuejian Ma, Yueqi Wang, He Ma, Zhengyang Su, Minmin Chen, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Ningren Han, Haokai Lu
| 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. |
Dissecting Fine-Tuning Unlearning in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning-based unlearning are ineffective at completely erasing model-embedded knowledge, but their true effectiveness remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use activation patching and parameter restoration experiments to examine the limitations of fine-tuning-based unlearning methods for erasing harmful, sensitive, or copyrighted information within large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods alter the model’s knowledge retrieval process rather than genuinely erasing the problematic knowledge embedded in the model parameters. |
AlphaContext: An Evolutionary Tree-based Psychometric Context Generator for Creativity Assessment (2026.acl-long)
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Yixuan Wang, Yue Huang, Hong Qian, Yunzhao Wei, Yifei Ding, Wenkai Wang, Zhi Liu, Zhongjing Huang, Aimin Zhou, Jiajun Guo
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based tools struggle with insufficient assessment cues, weak narrative coherence, limited stylistic diversity, and poor support for creative thinking. |
| Approach: | They propose an evolutionary tree-based psychometric context generator that integrates rule-guided outline planning, sentence-level MCTS generation, MAP-Elites quality-diversity optimization and assessment-guide refiner simulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms strong LLMs and structured frameworks on 7 evaluation dimensions and shows higher alignment with expert-designed contexts. |
Plug-and-Play Data Module for Code RL: Adaptive Ambiguity Replay (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Correct after Answer: Enhancing Multi-Span Question Answering with Post-Processing Method (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior work focuses on designing specific methods or applying heuristic strategies to encourage models to predict more correct predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a post-processing strategy to handle incorrect predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the Exact Match scores on multiple MSQA datasets. |
Knowledge Injected Prompt Based Fine-tuning for Multi-label Few-shot ICD Coding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ICD coding are limited due to the high-dimensional space of multi-label assignment and the long-tail challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based fine-tuning technique with label semantics to solve this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark dataset of code assignment in 14.5% of cases. |
SYNFAC-EDIT: Synthetic Imitation Edit Feedback for Factual Alignment in Clinical Summarization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that leverages >100B parameter GPT variants to act as synthetic experts to generate edit feedback without additional human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline aims to improve the quality of clinical note summarizations by generating edit feedback without human annotations. |
MedHallu: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Detecting Medical Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) generate plausible but factually incorrect outputs, posing serious risks to patient safety and clinical decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for medical hallucination detection using 10,000 question-answer pairs derived from PubMedQA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an F1 score as low as 0.625 for detecting 'hard' category hallucinations. |
RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Hieu Tran, Zonghai Yao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Yifan Zhang, Shuo Han, null Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing work aims to improve reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for knowledge-intensive tasks such as medical and commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile extension to the mutual reasoning framework (rStar) that enhances reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension to the mutual reasoning framework improves reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entropy Change Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
Prompt-Singer: Controllable Singing-Voice-Synthesis with Natural Language Prompt (2024.naacl-long)
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Yongqi Wang, Ruofan Hu, Rongjie Huang, Zhiqing Hong, Ruiqi Li, Wenrui Liu, Fuming You, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent singing-voice-synthesis methods lack ability to control style attributes of synthesized singing. |
| Approach: | They propose a singing-voice-synthesis method that enables attribute controlling on singer gender, vocal range and volume with natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves favorable control ability and audio quality. |
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline. |
CoRAG: Enhancing Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation through a Cooperative Retriever Architecture (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base, which often miss relevant information located further away from a global view. |
| Approach: | Hybrid-RAG combines textual documents and graph-structured relational information for RAG . existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | Hybrid-RAG combines textual documents and graph-structured relational information . existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base . |
PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preference (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaming Ji, Donghai Hong, Borong Zhang, Boyuan Chen, Josef Dai, Boren Zheng, Tianyi Alex Qiu, Jiayi Zhou, Kaile Wang, Boxun Li, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Yaodong Yang
| Challenge: | Using large-scale annotation data, large language models can generate noise, errors and biases, leading to unexpected behaviours. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to promote safety alignment in large language models . they separate helpfulness and harmlessness annotations for question-answering pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides 44.6k prompts and 265k question-answer pairs with safety meta-labels for 19 harm categories and three severity levels, with answers generated by Llama-family models. |
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing latent reasoning methods that use chain of thought (CoT) are limited to selecting one discrete token at each reasoning step, which potentially induces information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that injects controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves richer information for more comprehensive reasoning and is compatible with Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
Lifelong Learning of Hate Speech Classification on Social Media (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on automated hate speech classification assumes that the dataset is fixed and the classes are pre-defined. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Variational Representation Learning and a load-balancing self-organizing inductive neural network to learn hate speech classification on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the lifelong learning techniques on social media. |
LEAF: Learning and Evaluation Augmented by Fact-Checking to Improve Factualness in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle with factual accuracy in knowledge-intensive domains like healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for improving LLM factuality in medical question answering . RAFE, Fact-Check-then-RAG and Learning from Fact Check are components . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LEAF outperforms Factcheck-GPT in detecting inaccuracies and corrects errors without labeling . the framework provides a scalable solution for industrial applications requiring high factuality scores. |
PACAR: Automated Fact-Checking with Planning and Customized Action Reasoning Using Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on idealized "gold" evidence for predictions, which is unrealistic due to its limited availability in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-checking framework based on planning and customized action reasoning using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods across three datasets and with varying complexity levels. |
DuQM: A Chinese Dataset of Linguistically Perturbed Natural Questions for Evaluating the Robustness of Question Matching Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a comprehensive evaluation of QM models should be conducted on natural texts, not on artificial adversarial examples . ral models are often not robust to adversarials, which means they predict unexpected outputs . |
| Approach: | They use a Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness of QM models . they show that the effect of artificial adversarial examples does not work on natural texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more robust than other models on natural questions with 32 linguistic perturbations. |
MoPrune: Scene-Guided Motion-Aware Token Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior approaches to token pruning ignore video dynamics and the fact that different scenes exhibit different redundancy patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a token pruning framework that is train-free and scene-guided to accelerate VideoLLMs by removing redundant visual information from video frames. |
| Outcome: | MoPrune is a training-free, scene-guided and motion-centric token pruning framework for accelerating VideoLLMs. |
TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset (P19-1)
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Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Social media is becoming an important realtime information source, especially during natural disasters and emergencies. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale dataset for question answering over social media data . they gather tweets used by journalists and ask human annotators to write questions upon them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that neural models that perform well on formal texts are limited in their performance . the proposed model is still lagging behind human performance with a large margin . |
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Inversion Learning for Highly Effective NLG Evaluation Prompts (2026.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating natural language generation systems is challenging due to the diversity of valid outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an inversion learning method that learns effective reverse mappings from model outputs back to their input instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method requires only a single evaluation sample and eliminates manual prompt engineering. |
OpenRubrics: Towards Scalable Synthetic Rubric Generation for Reward Modeling and LLM Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models rely on scalar or pairwise judgments that fail to capture multifaceted nature of human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a rubric-based reward model that uses a large collection of prompt, rubric pairs to generate a scalar score or preference label for each response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses strong size-matched baselines by 8.4% across multiple benchmarks. |
Self-Supervised Singing Voice Pre-Training towards Speech-to-Singing Conversion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on speech-to-singing voice conversion (STS) are limited by the scarcity of paired speech-song data and the suboptimal quality of outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised singing voice pre-training model that transforms a speech-to-singing voice into a paired singing voice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves both STS and singing voice synthesis tasks by combining spoken language and a self-supervised singing voice pre-training model. |
Getting More Juice Out of Your Data: Hard Pair Refinement Enhances Visual-Language Models Without Extra Data (2025.naacl-long)
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Haonan Wang, Minbin Huang, Runhui Huang, Lanqing Hong, Hang Xu, Tianyang Hu, Xiaodan Liang, Zhenguo Li, Hong Cheng, Kenji Kawaguchi
| Challenge: | Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is a standard for cross-modal image-text representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances pre-trained CLIP models by exploiting challenging text-image pairs within existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves CLIP models by exploiting text-image pairs in training. |
Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities by Instruction Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for implicit discourse relation recognition are based on generative models, but some studies suggest they do not perform as well as generic encoder-only models for NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification method that is solely based on generative models and utilize Chain-of-Thoughts to partition the inference process into a sequence of three successive stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a natural language understanding task. |
CopyNE: Better Contextual ASR by Copying Named Entities (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transcribe contextual named entities (NEs) treat entities as tokens and generate them token-by-token, which may result in incomplete transcriptions of entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that can copy entities from the NE dictionary and reduce errors during entity transcription. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism can copy entities from the NE dictionary, reducing errors during entity transcription, ensuring the completeness of the entity. |
Explainable Question Answering based on Semantic Graph by Global Differentiable Learning and Dynamic Adaptive Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-hop Question Answering have improved the implicit reasoning ability, but the black box nature of pure neural networks has hindered the construction of explainable intelligent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a global differentiation strategy to explore optimal reasoning paths from latent probability space and a Dynamic Adaptive Reasoner to enhance generalization of unseen questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 17% improvements in F1-score against BreakRC and shows better interpretability. |
Robust Singing Voice Transcription Serves Synthesis (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current AST methods struggle with accuracy and robustness when used for practical annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that converts singing recordings into note sequences for automatic annotation of singing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on enlarged, automatically annotated datasets. |
SAM Decoding: Speculative Decoding via Suffix Automaton (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) methods are inefficient and rely on single retrieval resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based speculative decoding method that adapts the suffix automaton for efficient draft generation by utilizing the generating text sequence and static text corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can find the longest suffix match and can be integrated with existing methods to generalize to broader domains. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
Bold Claims or Self-Doubt? Factuality Hallucination Type Detection via Belief State (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on detecting the presence of hallucinations but lack a systematic classification approach, which hinders deeper exploration of their characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to categorize hallucinations into two types: Overconfident and Unaware . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method categorizes factuality hallucination into two types: Overconfident and Unaware Hallucinations. |
MoCa: Modality-aware Continual Pre-training Makes Better Bidirectional Multimodal Embeddings (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to embed multimodal models face limitations such as suboptimal causal attention in VLMs and limited diversity in training objectives and data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for transforming pre-trained VLMs into bidirectional multimodal embedding models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance across MMEB and ViDoRe-v2 benchmarks and exhibits strong scalability with both model size and training data on MMEF. |
Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Suyuchen Wang, Jinlin Wang, Xinyu Wang, Shiqi Li, Xiangru Tang, Sirui Hong, Xiao-Wen Chang, Chenglin Wu, Bang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fidelity to contexts rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches without improving utilization of the given context. |
| Approach: | They propose a native retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that integrates in-context evidence with the model’s own retrieval capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation methods, and external retrieval solutions on multiple real-world and counterfactual QA benchmarks. |
AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Taolin Zhang, Dongyang Li, Chen Chen, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AMATA outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLMs on knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
CPRM: A LLM-based Continual Pre-training Framework for Relevance Modeling in Commercial Search (2025.naacl-industry)
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Kaixin Wu, Yixin Ji, Zeyuan Chen, Qiang Wang, Cunxiang Wang, Hong Liu, Baijun Ji, Xu Jia, Zhongyi Liu, Jinjie Gu, Yuan Zhou, Linjian Mo
| Challenge: | Relevance modeling between queries and items is a key component of commercial search engines. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for continual pre-training of LLMs to enhance domain knowledge . they employ queries and multi-field item to jointly pre-train for enhancing domain knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves convincing performance compared to strong baselines. |
Harnessing and Evaluating the Intrinsic Extrapolation Ability of Large Language Models for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) have advanced their application in autonomous vehicle research. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages LLMs’ built-in extrapolation capabilities for vehicle trajectory prediction, enabling them to understand traffic agents' behavior and interactions over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables off-the-shelf, frozen LLMs to achieve competitive trajectory prediction performance with qualitative analyses revealing their enhanced understanding of complex, multi-agent traffic scenarios. |
VenusFactory: An Integrated System for Protein Engineering with Data Retrieval and Language Model Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-demo)
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Yang Tan, Chen Liu, Jingyuan Gao, Wu Banghao, Mingchen Li, Ruilin Wang, Lingrong Zhang, Huiqun Yu, Guisheng Fan, Liang Hong, Bingxin Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained protein language models have been used in protein engineering, but their adoption is limited due to data collection, task benchmarking, and application challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile engine that integrates biological data retrieval, standardized task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed engine integrates biological data retrieval, task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. |
DeepStruct: Pretraining of Language Models for Structure Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models perform structural understanding tasks that focus on understanding one aspect of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models by pretraining them to generate structures from the text on task-agnostic corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on 21 of 28 datasets. |
Text-to-Song: Towards Controllable Music Generation Incorporating Vocal and Accompaniment (2024.acl-long)
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Zhiqing Hong, Rongjie Huang, Xize Cheng, Yongqi Wang, Ruiqi Li, Fuming You, Zhou Zhao, Zhimeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on singing voice synthesis and music generation independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task called Text-to-Song synthesis which incorporates both vocal and accompaniment generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can synthesize songs with comparable quality and style consistency. |
Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Chenyan WU, Hengyu Sun, Haiwen Hong, Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Shumin Deng, Zhixuan Chu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs) are often studied in isolation, obscuring connections and making comparison difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference and utility, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves preference while preserving utility. |
CoAlign: Uncertainty Calibration of LLM for Geospatial Repartition (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize geospatial repartition rely on manual adjustments by experts or algorithmic optimization using limited offline operational metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that calibrates LLM uncertainty to enable robust geospatial repartition by integrating historical data with LLM-generated candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework calibrates LLM uncertainty to enable robust geospatial repartition by integrating historical data with LLM-generated candidates. |
P2 Law: Scaling Law for Post-Training After Model Pruning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pruning has become a widely adopted technique for reducing the hardware requirements of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use model pruning techniques to maintain high performance while reducing hardware requirements for large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model pruning law can be generalized to larger dataset sizes, larger model sizes, and higher pruning rates, offering valuable insights for resource allocation in pruned LLMs. |
LAMB: A Training-Free Method to Enhance the Long-Context Understanding of SSMs via Attention-Guided Token Filtering (2025.acl-short)
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Zhifan Ye, Zheng Wang, Kejing Xia, Jihoon Hong, Leshu Li, Lexington Whalen, Cheng Wan, Yonggan Fu, Yingyan Celine Lin, Souvik Kundu
| Challenge: | Recent work attributes performance degradation to an exponential decay in hidden-state memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a token filtering strategy that is training-free and attention-guided . they propose 'LAMB' to preserve critical tokens during inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed token filtering improves long-context performance by 30.35% over state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks. |
Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies require massive labeled data to train models for multimodal data analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multimodal prompt model that captures specific aspect terms in a few-shot scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on two MABSA-related tasks on a few-shot dataset. |