Papers by Hongru Wang
Improving Factual Consistency for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems via Knowledge Enhancement and Alignment (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Boyang Xue, Weichao Wang, Hongru Wang, Fei Mi, Rui Wang, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pretrained language models generate inconsistent factual knowledge in many conversational tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which explicitly introduces extended feedforward networks (FFNs) in Transformers to enhance factual knowledge expressions given the specific patterns of knowledge-grounded dialogue inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the factual expression capability of feedforward networks (FFNs) in knowledge-grounded dialogue systems by knowledge enhancement and alignment respectively. |
AppBench: Planning of Multiple APIs from Various APPs for Complex User Instruction (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and finetuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ ability to plan and execute multiple APIs from various sources in order to complete the user’s task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well in this situation even with in-context learning and finetuning. |
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%). |
DPDLLM: A Black-box Framework for Detecting Pre-training Data from Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Baohang Zhou, Zezhong Wang, Lingzhi Wang, Hongru Wang, Ying Zhang, Kehui Song, Xuhui Sui, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect pretraining data from large language models are unrealistic to them. |
| Approach: | They propose to detect pre-training data from LLM in a black-box way by using GPT-2 as reference model and feed it with sequence probabilities to detect whether it was used to train it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the benchmark datasets and shows that it is effective on different popular LLMs. |
MCIL: Multimodal Counterfactual Instance Learning for Low-resource Entity-based Multimodal Information Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform multimodal information extraction only investigated entity-based tasks under supervised learning with adequate labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to investigate the entity-based MIE tasks under the low-resource settings by decomposing the features into image, entity, and context factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to perform on two public MIE benchmark datasets and the experimental results confirm it. |
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
ImPart: Importance-Aware Delta-Sparsification for Improved Model Compression and Merging in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to reduce resource requirements for task-specific large language models have been developed. |
| Approach: | They propose a delta compression approach that optimizes for importance of a model . they use SVD to dynamically adjust the sparsity ratios of different vectors based on their importance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art in retaining task-specific knowledge even at high sparsity ratios. |
TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuheng Lu, Qian Yu, Hongru Wang, Zeming Liu, Wei Su, Yanping Liu, Yuhang Guo, Maocheng Liang, Yunhong Wang, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic and interconnected nature of real-world digital environments, authors show . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the transferability of GUI agents across three key dimensions . transBench includes 15 app categories with diverse functionalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic, interconnected environments. |
ToolSpectrum: Towards Personalized Tool Utilization for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on functional tool selection following user instructions while overlooking the critical role of context-aware personalization in tool selection. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ capabilities in personalized tool utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs' capabilities in personalized tool utilization. |
Less is More: Making Smaller Language Models Competent Subgraph Retrievers for Multi-hop KGQA (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that Knowledge Graphs (KGs) contain valuable external knowledge for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to model a conditional subgraph retrieval task handled by small language models and use a subgraph identifier as a special token to retrieve subgraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive retrieval performance compared to state-of-the-art models relying on 7B parameters. |
MlingConf: A Comprehensive Study of Multilingual Confidence Estimation on Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Boyang Xue, Hongru Wang, Rui Wang, Sheng Wang, Zezhong Wang, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Wenxuan Zhang, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM confidence estimations in languages other than English have been limited to English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question-related language to prompt LLMs to assess their confidence in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on question-related language prompts for LS tasks, while English exhibits notable linguistic dominance in confidence estimations. |
Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zeping Li, Hongru Wang, Yiwen Zhao, Guanhua Chen, Yixia Li, Keyang Chen, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai, Zhenfei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks, but in long trajectories, agents often invoke tools excessively or inappropriately, increasing computation cost and derailing the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use entropy reduction as a supervisory signal to reduce tool calls . they propose to design two reward strategies to address the needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward strategies reduce tool calls by 72.07% and improve performance by 22.27%. |
Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialogues (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongru Wang, Minda Hu, Yang Deng, Rui Wang, Fei Mi, Weichao Wang, Yasheng Wang, Wai-Chung Kwan, Irwin King, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems focus on a single knowledge source or ignore the dependency between multiple knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multiple knowledge sources and dependencies between them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can produce persona-consistent and knowledge-enhanced responses on a knowledge-grounded dialogue dataset. |
Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs generate responses based on the dialogue context, overlooking the underlying linguistic cues about the user status exhibited in the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic cue-based chain-of-thoughts method which enhances the LLMs inference with an intermediate reasoning step to find cues exhibited in the dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard prompting methods on in-depth dialogue questions and linguistic cues exhibited in the context. |
DIGAT: Modeling News Recommendation with Dual-Graph Interaction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods lack effective news-user feature interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-graph and user-graph channels to enhance news encodings . they also propose to perform effective feature interaction between news and user graphs based on semantic-augmented graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph attention networks outperform existing NR methods on the benchmark dataset MIND. |
Mitigating Context Interference for Reliable and Efficient Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Boyang Xue, Bin Wu, Shuofei Qiao, Sheng Wang, Rui Wang, Yiming Du, Hongru Wang, Jeff Z. Pan, Emine Yilmaz, Kam-Fai Wong, Aldo Lipani
| Challenge: | Recent research empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) as multi-turn search agents to iteratively retrieve and generate outputs until complex tasks are solved. |
| Approach: | They propose a distill-based context refiner to dynamically mitigate context interference . they also propose RLs that refine contexts to generate outputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed refiner can mitigate context interference in multi-turn search agents. |
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Xinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashuai Zhang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Yao Song
| Challenge: | Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. |
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang, Zhisong Zhang, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems are retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light . current systems lack compositional reasoning, a key component of deep research . |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator to shift agentic paradigm . they use Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge and Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. |
SMART: Self-Aware Agent for Tool Overuse Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)
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Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Avirup Sil, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) lack self-awareness to balance reasoning and tool use, increasing computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enhances an agent’s self-awareness to optimize task handling and reduce tool overuse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces tool use by 24% while improving performance by over 37%. |
Enhancing Large Language Models Against Inductive Instructions with Dual-critique Prompting (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on how LLMs handle inductive instructions, which may stem from users’ false beliefs or malicious intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark of Inductive Instructions where false knowledge is incorporated into instructions in multiple different styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves robustness against inductive instructions, despite different inductive styles and complexity. |
UniRetriever: Multi-task Candidates Selection for Various Context-Adaptive Conversational Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving information from a large corpus of data are sub-optimal and low efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task framework that functions as a universal retriever for three dominant retrieval tasks during the conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform persona selection, knowledge selection, and response selection tasks simultaneously. |
Self-Reasoning Language Models: Unfold Hidden Reasoning Chains with Few Reasoning Catalyst (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that inference-time scaling increases performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various reasoning tasks such as mathematics and complex question answering by increasing the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a model which synthesizes longer CoT data and iteratively improves performance through self-training by incorporating a few demonstration examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average improvement of more than +2.5 points across five reasoning tasks: MMLU, GSM8K, ARC-C, HellaSwag, and BBH on two backbone models. |
SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the potential misuse of large language models (LLMs) however, the ability to align LLMs with human values is still vulnerable to malicious attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM safety by using a framework to design jailbreak prompts automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of 88% and 60% in cold-start scenarios. |
SeRTS: Self-Rewarding Tree Search for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Licheng Zong, Hongru Wang, Jingyan Zhou, Jingjing Li, Yichen Gao, Kam-Fai Wong, Yu Li, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches to large language models face performance limitations due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play LLM-based retrieval method called Self-Rewarding Tree Search based on Monte Carlo Tree Search and a self-rewarding paradigm to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the BM25 retriever and surpasses the baseline of self-reflection in both efficiency and scalability. |
Well Begun is Half Done: Generator-agnostic Knowledge Pre-Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge selection methods are costly to learn and difficult to interpret when errors arise in the generated responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a generator-agnostic knowledge selection method to select context-related knowledge among different knowledge structures and variable knowledge requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can select knowledge accurately in advance and reduce learning, adjustment, and interpretation burden of later models. |
Illusions of Confidence? Diagnosing LLM Truthfulness via Neighborhood Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao, Weihong Xu, Hongru Wang, Xinle Deng, Shumin Deng, Jeff Z. Pan, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on point-wise confidence, which can mask brittle belief. |
| Approach: | They propose a measure of belief robustness that evaluates coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more resistant to interference than existing models. |
Mem2Evolve: Towards Self-Evolving Agents via Co-Evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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Zihao Cheng, Zeming Liu, Yingyu Shan, Xinyi Wang, Xiangrong Zhu, Yunpu Ma, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Wei Lin, Yunhong Wang
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that focus on static tools and static assets are ineffective for self-evolving agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm of co-evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation that leverages accumulated experience to guide dynamic creation of assets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in single-task and cross-task settings by 18.53% over standard LLMs, 11.80% over agents evolving solely through experience, and 6.46% over those evolving solelly through asset creation. |
Self-DC: When to Reason and When to Act? Self Divide-and-Conquer for Compositional Unknown Questions (2025.naacl-long)
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Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Baohang Zhou, Tianhua Zhang, Cunxiang Wang, Huimin Wang, Guanhua Chen, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on leveraging internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer known questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows LLMs to choose between internal and external knowledge . they use a dataset to analyze compositional questions that are composed of unknown sub-questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve comparable or even better performance with much fewer external calls compared with several strong baselines. |
JTAV: Jointly Learning Social Media Content Representation by Fusing Textual, Acoustic, and Visual Features (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on learning social media content focus on single modal or bi-modal learning, but this approach is non-trivial and challenging because content is multi-modal and involves several types of data, including text, audio, and image. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine textual, acoustic, and visual information to learn social media content by fusing them jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on real-world datasets by a large margin. |
Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that ChatGPT has limitations such as failing to ask clarifying questions to ambiguous queries or refusing problematic user requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains to trigger proactivity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains to trigger the proactivity of LLM-based proactive dialogue systems. |
SELF-GUARD: Empower the LLM to Safeguard Itself (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have investigated methods to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs) safety training involves fine-tuning the LLM with adversarial samples, which activate the LRM’s capabilities against jailbreak. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety training approach that integrates safety training and safeguards to train the LLM to perform harmfulness detection on its own outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces harmful output and adds a [harmful] or [harmless] tag to the end of the LLM's response. |
DecisionFlow: Advancing Large Language Model as Principled Decision Maker (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current language models lack the structured deliberation needed for high-stakes tasks such as healthcare and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a decision-making framework that guides models to reason over structured representations of actions, attributes, and constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 30% accuracy gains over strong prompting baselines and enhances alignment in outcomes. |
ModelingAgent: Bridging LLMs and Mathematical Modeling for Real-World Challenges (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Cheng Qian, Hongyi Du, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Avirup Sil, ChengXiang Zhai, Kathleen McKeown, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models fail to reflect real-world complexity . existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-life problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features real-world-inspired, open-ended problems from competitions . they propose 'ModelingBench' that supports multiple valid solutions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and produces well-grounded, creative solutions. |
NILE: Internal Consistency Alignment in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Minda Hu, Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Bowei He, Hongru Wang, Jingyan Zhou, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Chen Ma, Irwin King
| 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. |
Medical Dialogue System: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
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Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du, Yuxuan Wang, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Tong Ruan, Jie Xu, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have significant potential to simplify diagnostic procedure and reduce the cost of collecting information from patients. |
| Approach: | They analyze 325 papers from well-known computer science, natural language processing conferences and journals to find out the major challenges of medical dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems have been surveyed in the medical community but have not been evaluated from a technical perspective. |
Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | This survey examines knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs) this survey aims to shed light on strategies for improving the robustness of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They focus on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-membry conflict. |
| Outcome: | The findings highlight the challenges faced by large language models when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. |
SafeToolBench: Pioneering a Prospective Benchmark to Evaluating Tool Utilization Safety in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches fail to fully capture all risks in tool utilization, resulting in financial loss or privacy leaking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess the safety of LLM tool utilization in a prospective manner, covering malicious user instructions and diverse practical toolsets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly enhances LLMs’ self-awareness, enabling a more safer and trustworthy tool utilization. |
ReadPrompt: A Readable Prompting Method for Reliable Knowledge Probing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to prob pre-trained language models (PLMs) lack readability and credibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify meaningful sentences to serve as prompts to assess the knowledge encoded within pre-trained language models (PLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the current knowledge probing benchmark. |
JoTR: A Joint Transformer and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Dialogue Policy Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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Wai-Chung Kwan, Huimin Wang, Hongru Wang, Zezhong Wang, Bin Liang, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Dialogue policy learning (DPL) aims to determine an abstract representation (also known as action) to guide what the response should be. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint Transformer-based model that generates a token-grained policy that allows more dynamic dialogue action generation without the need for predefined action candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models showing improvements of 9% and 13% in success rate and 34% and 37% in diversity of dialogue actions across two benchmark dialogue modeling tasks. |
TInR: Exploring Tool-Internalized Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on external tool documentation during reasoning, leading to tool mastery difficulty, tool size constraints, and inference inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-internalized reasoning framework for unified reasoning and tool usage that integrates external tools into Large Language Models (LLMs) to address these issues, they propose 'tool-internet-based' reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance across in-domain and out-of-domain settings, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency. |
Rethinking Stateful Tool Use in Multi-Turn Dialogues: Benchmarks and Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongru Wang, Wenyu Huang, Yufei Wang, Yuanhao Xi, Jianqiao Lu, Huan Zhang, Nan Hu, Zeming Liu, Jeff Z. Pan, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with stateful tool interactions considering the whole life cycle of tool use across six key tasks in three stages . they also build VirtualMobile – an embodied virtual mobile evaluation environment to simulate API calls and assess the robustness of the created APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates 13 open- and closed-source LLMs and provides detailed analysis at each stage. |
Can LLMs Evaluate Complex Attribution in QA? Automatic Benchmarking using Knowledge Graphs (2025.acl-long)
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Nan Hu, Jiaoyan Chen, Yike Wu, Guilin Qi, Hongru Wang, Sheng Bi, Yongrui Chen, Tongtong Wu, Jeff Z. Pan
| Challenge: | Attributed Question Answering (AQA) has attracted wide attention, but there are several limitations in evaluating the attributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark containing comprehensive attribution categories . they compare 25 automatic evaluators with human evaluers and tested LLM evalators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can compare attributions with subtle differences and provide feedback to improve them. |
UAlign: Leveraging Uncertainty Estimations for Factuality Alignment on Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to accurately express factual knowledge, especially in cases where the knowledge boundaries are ambiguous. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Uncertainty estimations to represent knowledge boundaries and incorporates these representations into prompts for LLMs to Align with factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the LLMs’ capacities to confidently answer known questions and refuse unknown questions on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. |
Self-Sum: Teaching an Agent to Decide Itself When and What to Summarize (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongru Wang, Rui Wang, Jushi Kai, Boyang Xue, Yongqi Li, Shijue Huang, Xiaoteng Ma, Jeff Z. Pan, Amos Storkey
| Challenge: | Existing methods for summarizing long-horizon agents rely on fixed, rule-based summarization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that empowers agents to autonomously decide when and what to summarize by modeling it as an internal cognitive action unified with environmental actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms no-summarization and rule-based training methods on long-horizon benchmarks and shows strong generalization gains. |
Towards Robust Personalized Dialogue Generation via Order-Insensitive Representation Regularization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on developing persona consistent dialogue models . order sensitivity affects the quality and consistency of generated response . |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework to improve persona consistent dialogue response generation by concatenating persona texts and dialogue history as a single input sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on the Persona-Chat dataset and shows that it is more robust under different persona orders and more consistent with the persona profile. |
Retrieval-free Knowledge Injection through Multi-Document Traversal for Dialogue Models (2023.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Jianzhu Bao, Fei Mi, Yi Chen, Hongru Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yitong Li, Lifeng Shang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Existing research on retrieval-augmented and retrieval free dialogue models focuses on retrieving knowledge from external sources and rely on finely annotated retrieval training data and knowledge-grounded responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-free approach by turning knowledge documents into simulated multi-turn dialogues using a Multi-Document Traversal algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms retrieval-augmented models while being cheaper and faster at domain transfer. |
VLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation for Generalizability of Text-to-Image Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics, such as CLIP, measure the semantic alignment between single prompts and their corresponding images, but they fail to evaluate a model’s generalizability across a broad spectrum of textual inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that leverages the power of Large Language Models to sample from the visual text domain and assess its generalizability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric evaluates the generalizability of T2I models and provides valuable insights during the finetuning process. |
Role Prompting Guided Domain Adaptation with General Capability Preserve for Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer catastrophic forgetting when tailored to specific domains . authors present a novel approach to manage multi-domain LLM adaptation . |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to manage multi-domain LLM adaptation using self-distillation and role integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model alleviates catastrophic forgetting and inter-domain confusion while maintaining robust general capabilities. |
Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Early approaches focus on text-based reasoning, but they often follow a single task-specific reasoning pattern. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative multimodal reasoning paradigm that unifies diverse reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model unifies diverse multimodal reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. |