Papers by Ji Zhang
UniCodec: Unified Audio Codec with Single Domain-Adaptive Codebook (2025.acl-long)
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Yidi Jiang, Qian Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yu Xi, Wen Wang, Chong Zhang, Xianghu Yue, ShiLiang Zhang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing neural audio codecs are not capable of handling multi-domain audio data . et al., 2023) integrate speech modality with text-based large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified audio codec with a single codebook to support multi-domain audio data . they propose combining a mix-of-experts strategy and a partitioned domain-adaptive codebook method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing codecs on acoustic and semantic representation capabilities. |
ANAH: Analytical Annotation of Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a comprehensive and fine-grained measurement of the hallucination is crucial for LLMs' wide applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that offers ANalytical Annotation of Hallucinations in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to train and evaluate hallucination annotators. |
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haowei Liu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Yaya Shi, Chaoya Jiang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
When to Trust Tools? Adaptive Tool Trust Calibration For Tool-Integrated Math Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models have performance enhancements but still suffer from shortcomings due to limitations of the underlying language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows the model to choose when to trust or ignore the tool results based on the confidence score of generated code blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the "Tool Ignored" issue by 4.1% to 7.5%. |
Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Jiang, Jiahao Chen, Zhenghao Xiang, Zhixiong Yang, Hanchen Wang, Jiabao Zhuang, Xinmeng Che, Jiajun Sun, Hui Li, Yifei Cao, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Junjie Ye, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, but academic research remains non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning that includes a licensed synthetic dataset and a song generation model, Muse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. |
SafeSwitch: Steering Unsafe LLM Behavior via Internal Activation Signals (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate to fully leverage their internal cognitive processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regulates unsafe outputs by utilizing the prober-based internal state monitor that actively detects harmful intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces harmful outputs by approximately 80% while maintaining strong utility. |
CP-BCS: Binary Code Summarization Guided by Control Flow Graph and Pseudo Code (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work on understanding assembly code is oriented towards generating function names, which involve numerous abbreviations that make them confusing. |
| Approach: | They propose a control flow graph and pseudo code guided binary code summarization framework to learn the comprehensive binary function execution behavior and logic semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of reverse engineering on 3 different binary optimization levels for 3 different computer architectures. |
Graph-GRPO: Stabilizing Multi-Agent Topology Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Yueyang Cang, Xiaoteng Zhang, Erlu Zhao, Zehua Ji, Yuhang Liu, Yuchen He, Zhiyuan Ning, Chen Yijun, Wenge Que, Li Shi
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to optimize communication topology rely on single-sample policy gradients with absolute rewards. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology optimization framework that integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed topology optimization framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on reasoning and code generation benchmarks. |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
OceanGPT: A Large Language Model for Ocean Science Tasks (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the paradigm in ocean science. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically obtain large volume of ocean domain instruction data, which generates instructions based on multi-agent collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a higher level of knowledge expertise for ocean science tasks and gains preliminary embodied intelligence capabilities in ocean technology. |
VideoEraser: Concept Erasure in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that VideoEraser outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in erasure, celebrity erasion, and explicit content erasing tasks. |
Learning to Solve Domain-Specific Calculation Problems with Knowledge-Intensive Programs Generator (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Domain Large Language Models (LLMs) are developed for domain-specific tasks based on general LLMs, but it still requires professional knowledge to facilitate the expertise for some domain- specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to solve domain-specific calculation problems with KIPG . they use it to extract key variables and calculate outcomes dependent on domain knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline solves domain-specific calculation problems more effectively . it generates knowledge-intensive programs according to the domain- specific documents . |
Cross Copy Network for Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of sequence-to-sequence models, dialogue logics are often ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a network architecture to explore the current dialog context and similar dialogue instances’ logical structure simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network architecture is superior to existing state-of-the-art models. |
Efficient Inference for Large Vision-Language Models: Bottlenecks, Techniques, and Prospects (2026.findings-acl)
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Jun Zhang, Yicheng Ji, Feiyang Ren, Yihang Li, Bowen Zeng, Zonghao Chen, Ke Chen, Lidan Shou, Gang Chen, Huan Li
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models are hindered by a systemic efficiency barrier known as visual token dominance. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy of efficiency techniques structured around the inference lifecycle . they examine visual encoding, prefilling, and decoding to understand bottlenecks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques reveal how upstream decisions dictate downstream bottlenecks . the proposed techniques include hybrid compression and modality-aware decoding . |
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
Towards Better Utilization of Multi-Reference Training Data for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a high proportion of Chinese training data is multi-referenced for the grammatical error correction task . however, there are many ways to correct an erroneous input sentence . a systematic study on multi-referencing training data has been proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose two new approaches and a simple two-stage training strategy to better utilize multi-reference training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that Chinese training data contain multiple references. |
See Detail Say Clear: Towards Brain CT Report Generation via Pathological Clue-driven Representation Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Brain CT report generation is important to aid physicians in diagnosing cranial diseases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pathological Clue-driven Representation Learning model to build cross-modal representations based on pathological clues and adapt them for text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods and achieves SoTA performance. |
Retrieval and Reasoning on KGs: Integrate Knowledge Graphs into Large Language Models for Complex Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed impressively in various NLP tasks, but their inherent hallucination phenomena severely challenge their credibility in complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate explainable Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with LLMs to alleviate hallucinations . they construct subgraphs to enhance the retrieval capabilities of KGs via CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two KGQA datasets show that the proposed model achieves convincing performance compared to strong baselines. |
Budget-Constrained Tool Learning with Planning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for budget-constrained tool learning have been overlooked . et al., 2023b) compared tool learning with other methods to improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for budget-constrained tool learning by creating a preferable plan under the budget constraint before utilizing the tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the cost of tool learning and reaches competitive Pass Rate. |
Length Generalization of Causal Transformers without Position Encoding (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Besides Transformers without position encodings, the success of NoPE provides a new way to overcome the challenge of generalizing to longer sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient tuning for searching attention heads’ best temperature hyper-parameters, which substantially expands NoPE’s context size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tuning significantly expands NoPE's context size, allowing it to generalize to longer sentences with state-of-the-art generalization algorithms. |
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)
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Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Gao Xing, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on role-playing agents have focused on enhancing their conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style, but there has been a gap in assessing their social intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. |
Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on neurons focus on emotion and rhetoric, neglecting their intrinsic connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric in large language models . they propose 'neuro-based' masking method that integrates multi-dimensional screening . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. |
Platforms for Non-speakers Annotating Names in Any Language (P18-4)
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| Challenge: | Traditionally, native speakers of a language have been asked to annotate a corpus in that language. |
| Approach: | They propose two annotation platforms that allow an English speaker to annotate names for any language without knowing the language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed annotations achieved state-of-the-art performance on two surprise languages and ten languages at TAC-KBP EDL2017. |
A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific Discovery (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing surveys on scientific LLMs focus on one or two fields or a single modality. |
| Approach: | They survey 260 scientific LLMs and examine their architectures and pre-training techniques . they also discuss commonalities and differences between LLM architectures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model architectures and evaluation techniques are used to improve scientific discovery. |
ServImage: An Image Generation and Editing Benchmark from Real-world Commercial Imaging Services (2026.acl-long)
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Fengxian Ji, Jingpu Yang, Zirui Song, Lang Gao, Junhong Liang, Zhenhao Chen, Jinghui Zhang, Xiuying Chen
| Challenge: | Recent image generation and editing models demonstrate robust adherence to instructions and high visual quality on academic benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that correlates image outputs with economic value in commercial design projects. |
| Outcome: | ServImage benchmarks show image generation models perform well on academic benchmarks but are uncertain on commercial projects. |
DialoGPS: Dialogue Path Sampling in Continuous Semantic Space for Data Augmentation in Multi-Turn Conversations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a context leads to various responses, and a response answers multiple contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments open-domain dialogue generation from a many-to-many perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can augment open-domain dialogue generation tasks with automatic and human evaluation. |
Language Model Pre-Training with Sparse Latent Typing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern large-scale Pre-trained Language Models focus on text reconstruction, but have not sought to learn latent-level interpretable representations of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a new pre-training objective that enables the model to learn latent types . the objective allows the model a self-supervised way to extract sentence-level keywords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns interpretable latent type categories without external knowledge and improves downstream tasks. |
Contrastive Data and Learning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Current NLP models heavily rely on effective representation learning algorithms. |
| Approach: | This tutorial introduces contrastive learning and provides an introduction to the techniques. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial provides an introduction to the fundamentals of contrastive learning approaches and the theory behind them. |
Task-Oriented Conversation Generation Using Heterogeneous Memory Networks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory networks do not perform well when leveraging heterogeneous information from different sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to use user utterances, dialogue history and background knowledge tuples to integrate external knowledge into a neural dialogue model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art data-driven task-oriented dialogue models on real-world datasets. |
Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on pairwise matching, ignoring robustness . current models exhibit frustrating degradation, with a maximum drop of 23.43 F1 score . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the evaluation of open information extraction models in the real world . they perform experiments on typical models published in the last decade and a representative large language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is rated robust on a knowledge-invariant clique with different syntactic and expressive forms. |
Bilingual Dictionary Based Neural Machine Translation without Using Parallel Sentences (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a monolingual speaker can learn to translate by looking up a bilingual dictionary . a novel task of machine translation (MT) is based on no parallel sentences but can refer to a ground-truth bilingual dictionary and large-scale monolingual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of machine translation that uses a bilingual dictionary and large-scale monolingual corpora to translate a monolingual speaker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a bilingual dictionary and large scale monolingual corpora, while being independent on parallel sentences. |
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 . |
Bayesian Example Selection Improves In-Context Learning for Speech, Text and Visual Modalities (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks easily and efficiently in a training-free manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to use eBayesian in-context example selection method to extend the inference probability conditioned on in-constitut examples based on Bayes’ theorem to select in-strategy examples . Experimental results show the efficacy and robustness of their method on various models, tasks and modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the eBayesian in-context example selection approach. |
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external information into a given table neglect the structured nature of the table. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information into a given table by first building an augmenting table and then generating a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. |
Early Exit with Disentangled Representation and Equiangular Tight Frame (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing early exit paradigm relies on training parametrical internal classifiers to complete specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decouple two distinct types of representation and introduce a non-parametric tight frame classifier for improvement. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on monolingual and multilingual tasks show that the proposed method improves over existing methods. |
Breaking the Noise Barrier: LLM-Guided Semantic Filtering and Enhancement for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities between two multimodal knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLMguided MMEA framework that prioritizes noise reduction before fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework prioritizes noise reduction before fusion and improves semantics on the noisy FB YG dataset. |
mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Jiabo Ye, Ming Yan, Liang Zhang, Bo Zhang, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models lack general structure understanding abilities for text-rich document images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unified structure learning to boost the performance of MLLMs by encoding structure information into text-rich images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 10 visual document understanding benchmarks. |
OpenEval: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs across Capability, Alignment and Safety (2024.acl-demos)
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Chuang Liu, Linhao Yu, Jiaxuan Li, Renren Jin, Yufei Huang, Ling Shi, Junhui Zhang, Xinmeng Ji, Tingting Cui, Liutao Liutao, Jinwang Song, Hongying Zan, Sun Li, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a rapid development of Chinese large language models poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation platform OpenEval benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
mPLUG-DocOwl2: High-resolution Compressing for OCR-free Multi-page Document Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have improved document understanding performance but generate thousands of visual tokens for a single document image, leading to excessive GPU memory and slower inference times. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-resolution document compression module to generate 324 tokens for a single document image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module reduces first token latency by more than 50% and improves document comprehension performance. |
Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via Prior-LLM Context Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) lack understanding of multi-image and interleaved inputs due to the visual features encoded by frozen encoders before being fed into the LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a two phase paradigm to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively. |
Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Video Captioning via Monte Carlo Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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Linhao Yu, Xingguang Ji, Yahui Liu, Fanheng Kong, Chenxi Sun, Jingyuan Zhang, Hongzhi Zhang, V. W., Fuzheng Zhang, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and evaluation protocols suffer from inadequate or homogeneous creation of key points, exorbitant cost of data creation, and limited evaluation scopes. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic framework which leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search to construct numerous and diverse descriptive sentences that thoroughly represent video content in an iterative way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves MCTS-VCB and DREAM-1K on video captioning tasks by 25.0% and 16.3% respectively. |
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods. |
AudioVSR: Enhancing Video Speech Recognition with Audio Data (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiaoda Yang, Xize Cheng, Jiaqi Duan, Hongshun Qiu, Minjie Hong, Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Zhiqing Hong, Zhimeng Zhang, Tao Jin
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown poor performance with non-Indo-European languages . previous work primarily utilizes video information to build VSR models . |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model for data inflation that integrates synthetic data with authentic visual data to enhance the VSR model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the audio-visual alignment problem in audio-video tasks. |
Why Does New Knowledge Create Messy Ripple Effects in LLMs? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on post-training knowledge editing (KE) for language models to ensure that knowledge remains accurate and up-to-date. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a GradSim indicator to detect when and why updated knowledge ripples in language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed indicator GradSim shows that LMs that fail to handle ripple effects have low GradSIM. |
Text Classification Using Label Names Only: A Language Model Self-Training Approach (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current text classification methods require a large number of labeled documents as training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses only the label name of each class to train classification models on unlabeled data without using any labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 90% accuracy on four benchmark datasets using label names as the only supervision . |
Segment, Mask, and Predict: Augmenting Chinese Word Segmentation with Self-Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Yang Liu, Yuanhang Zheng, Gang Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Ji Zhang, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) effective neural network methods have been used in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) However, the robustness of the previous neural methods is limited by the large-scale annotated corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised Chinese word segmentation approach with a straightforward and effective architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous methods on 9 different CWS datasets with single criterion training and multiple criteria training and achieves better robustness. |
DeepMed: Building a Medical DeepResearch Agent via Multi-hop Med-Search Data and Turn-Controlled Agentic Training & Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihan Wang, Hao Wang, Shi Feng, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Yiqun Zhang, Jinghao Lin, Xiaozhong Ji, Haihua Yang
| Challenge: | Medical reasoning models are constrained by parametric knowledge and can induce hallucinations and spurious attributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a multi-hop med-search QA synthesis method to apply the DR paradigm in medical contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger medical reasoning models on medical benchmarks. |
DISC: Plug-and-Play Decoding Intervention with Similarity of Characters for Chinese Spelling Check (2025.acl-long)
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Ziheng Qiao, Houquan Zhou, Yumeng Liu, Zhenghua Li, Min Zhang, Bo Zhang, Chen Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check (CSC) tasks require that incorrect characters are usually similar to the correct ones in either phonetics or glyph. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play decoding intervention with similarity of characters module for Chinese spelling check (CSC) they propose to incorporate phonetic and glyph similarities only during the inference phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves Chinese spelling check models on benchmarks and on benchmark datasets. |
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context (P19-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Suyi Li, Heyang Er, Irene Li, Bo Pang, Tao Chen, Emily Ji, Shreya Dixit, David Proctor, Sungrok Shim, Jonathan Kraft, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2017): a dataset for cross-domain semantic parsing in context with 4,298 question sequences. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it has greater semantic diversity and can be generalized to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseened databases at test time. |
Human-in-the-loop Schema Induction (2023.acl-demo)
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Tianyi Zhang, Isaac Tham, Zhaoyi Hou, Jiaxuan Ren, Leon Zhou, Hainiu Xu, Li Zhang, Lara Martin, Rotem Dror, Sha Li, Heng Ji, Martha Palmer, Susan Windisch Brown, Reece Suchocki, Chris Callison-Burch
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to event-centric natural language understanding (NLU) have been limited to linear and temporal ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop schema induction system powered by GPT-3 . they show that it transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches and reduces human curation. |
Fine-grained Information Extraction from Biomedical Literature based on Knowledge-enriched Abstract Meaning Representation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Compared with general natural language texts, sentences from scientific papers usually possess wider contexts between knowledge elements. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel biomedical Information Extraction model to extract scientific entities and events from English research papers using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) they construct a sentence-level knowledge graph from an external knowledge base and encode it to improve the model's understanding of complex scientific concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract scientific entities and events from scientific literature and improve its understanding of complex scientific concepts. |
Enhancing Language Model Hypernetworks with Restart: A Study on Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | a comprehensive investigation into optimization strategies for hypernetworks remains lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose restart optimization strategies to improve hypernetworks' performance for language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed restart strategy improves hypernetworks' performance for language models, compared to conventional deep neural networks. |
Efficient Transformer-based Large Scale Language Representations using Hardware-friendly Block Structured Pruning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained large-scale language models have been criticized for their limited weight storage and computational speed on hardware platforms. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient transformer-based large-scale language representation using hardware-friendly block structure pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5.0x accuracy on GLUE benchmarks and 1.79x compression rate on DistilBERT. |
ELISA-EDL: A Cross-lingual Entity Extraction, Linking and Localization System (N18-5)
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| Challenge: | ELISA-EDL is a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for Wikipedia languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual entity extraction, linking and localization system for English speakers . it extracts entities from unstructured text in any of 282 Wikipedia languages and links them to English knowledge bases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts entity mentions from Wikipedia and links them to English knowledge bases and visualizes locations related to disaster topics on a world heatmap. |
Critic-CoT: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic (2025.findings-acl)
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Xin Zheng, Jie Lou, Boxi Cao, Xueru Wen, Yuqiu Ji, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the reasoning performance of large language models rely on intuitive instance-level feedback, which limits the reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that pushes LLMs toward System-2-like critic capability by using a step-wise CoT reasoning paradigm and automatic construction of weak-supervision data without human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves task-solving performance by filtering out invalid solutions or iterative refinement. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
Fisher Information-based Efficient Curriculum Federated Learning with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for learning Large Language Models (LLMs) require adaptive data processing and low-rank adjustment to improve accuracy and fine-tuning speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a fisher information-based adaptive federated curriculum learning framework with two novel methods to improve FL fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and fine-tuning speed compared with baseline approaches. |
Towards Better Generalization in Open-Domain Question Answering by Mitigating Context Memorization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) aims at answering factual questions using an external large-scale knowledge corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented approach to QA that focuses on retrieving relevant knowledge from an external corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to completely different knowledge domains while adapting to updated versions of the same knowledge corpus and switching to completely new knowledge domain. |
Generative Music Models’ Alignment with Professional and Amateur Users’ Expectations (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in text-to-music generation using large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to align AI-generated music with human expressions . they use a dataset of over 1.5 million songs to analyze their content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and facilitates end-to-end generation of songs audio. |
Improving Commonsense Question Answering by Graph-based Iterative Retrieval over Multiple Knowledge Sources (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to facilitate natural language understanding rarely involve commonsense or background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering method that integrates multiple knowledge sources to boost performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other competing methods on the CommonsenseQA dataset and achieves the new state-of-the-art. |
KACE: Generating Knowledge Aware Contrastive Explanations for Natural Language Inference (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches in NLP focus on “WHY A” rather than contrastive “WHA NOT B” Experimental results show that contrastive explanations are beneficial to fit the scenarios by clarifying the difference between the predicted answer and other possible wrong ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate contrastive explanations with counterfactual examples in NLI by identifying key phrases from input sentences and using them as key perturbations to generate counterfacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on SNLI and ETPA models by 91.9%. |
EVEDIT: Event-based Knowledge Editing for Deterministic Knowledge Propagation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches only operate on (subject, relation, object) triple . current methods are limited to (substance, relation) triple, causing low confidence in their answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of event-based knowledge editing that pairs facts with event descriptions to improve model confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model confidence by 55.6% while maintaining the naturalness of generation. |
PEVL: Position-enhanced Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Vision-language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances on self-supervised learning have led to powerful vision-language pre-training models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of cross-modal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-training framework that reformulates discretized object positions and language in a unified language modeling framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on position-sensitive vision-language (VL) tasks and also improves on position insensitive tasks. |
UP5: Unbiased Foundation Model for Fairness-aware Recommendation (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining a foothold in Recommender Systems (RS) but there is growing concern that LLMs perpetuate stereotypes and may result in unfair recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactually-fair-prompt method for LLM-based recommendation that is based on unbiased foundation mOdels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better recommendation performance with a high level of fairness on two real-world datasets. |
The Role of Visual Modality in Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: Challenges and Insights (2025.acl-long)
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Yufang Liu, Yao Du, Tao Ji, Jianing Wang, Yang Liu, Yuanbin Wu, Aimin Zhou, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing models that leverage visual information do not improve math reasoning performance . authors suggest that visual information is important for multimodal reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to require image reliance for problem-solving and challenge models with similar, yet distinct, images that change the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance is unaffected by changes to or removal of images in the dataset. |
Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with impressive capabilities, but they lack domain specificity, real-time information and face challenges in solving specialized problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages in tool learning. |
Delta Embedding Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised word embeddings have limitations to the semantics of words and inadequate fine-tuning of embedded word can lead to suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that optimizes word embeddings by regularizing them incrementally to ensure they are tuned in an incremental way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on various NLP tasks and shows that it absorbs semantic information without "forging" |
Event-Centric Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating the extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks. |
Are Missing Links Predictable? An Inferential Benchmark for Knowledge Graph Completion (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) are unsatisfactory . |
| Approach: | They propose to use rule-guided train/test generation instead of conventional random split to ensure that each testing sample is predictable with supportive data in the training set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing benchmarks in inferential ability, assumptions, and patterns. |
EMCompress: Video-LLMs with Endomorphic Multimodal Compression (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Static, sparse frame sampling either dilutes evidence across task-irrelevant segments at significant cost or misses fine-grained temporal semantics altogether. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that compresses multimodal input while preserving answer invariance across reasonable downstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses prior methods by 0.40 F-1 with competitive query rewriting. |
AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have made it possible to translate images with text in one language into equivalent images displaying that text translated into another language. |
| Approach: | They propose an all-encompassing framework for the task–In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) that incorporates contextual cues from both textual and visual elements during translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be constructed using open-source models and requires no training, making it highly accessible and expandable. |
PALT: Parameter-Lite Transfer of Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (LMs) are a powerful transfer learning approach for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-lite transfer learning approach for pretrained language models for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a knowledge graph completion benchmark by tuning 1% of the parameters. |
Adaptive Feature-based Low-Rank Compression of Large Language Models via Bayesian Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yixin Ji, Yang Xiang, Juntao Li, Qingrong Xia, Zi Ye, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models require a balance between efficiency and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank compression technique that reduces non-essential parameters by decomposing weight matrices into products of two low-ranked matrici. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing pruning and low-rank compression techniques in maintaining model performance at the same compression ratio. |
When Is Thinking Enough? Early Exit via Sufficiency Assessment for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to early exit reasoning often rely on handcrafted or empirical indicators that are unreliable and impractical. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows LRMs to assess the sufficiency of its chain-of-thought and determine the optimal point for early exit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length by 28.9%–34.9% with minimal performance loss, effectively mitigating overthinking. |
On-Policy Self-Alignment with Fine-grained Knowledge Feedback for Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Xinyu Lu, Yuqiu Ji, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit behavior that deviates from the boundaries of their knowledge during response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows large language models to explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
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Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods focus on reactive feedback, where immediate human perception is leveraged to judge sampled model responses as preference data for post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-generated advice could propagate through societal systems on a macroscopic scale over time, enabling more robust alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 20% improvement on existing safety benchmarks and an average win rate exceeding 70% against strong baselines. |
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle to process lengthy inputs due to limited length generalization and attention’s quadratic computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that allows each head to attend to important context chunks instead of allowing each head a full sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks multi-head attention's untapped potential by allowing each head to attend to important context chunks instead of the full sentence. |
ART: rule bAsed futuRe-inference deducTion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Mengze Li, Tianqi Zhao, Bai Jionghao, Baoyi He, Jiaxu Miao, Wei Ji, Zheqi Lv, Zhou Zhao, Shengyu Zhang, Wenqiao Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-based premises and deduce valid conclusions from visual observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-based deductive reasoning task that uses video to deduce the correct future event . they use commonsense knowledge to annotate video and a strong baseline to conduct reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies validate the rationality of ARTNet in deductive reasoning upon visual observations . ART is a method that rigorously follows a set of explicit constraints to deduce valid conclusions from empirical facts . |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
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Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
Improving Consistency for Text Summarization with Energy Functions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Qi Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Sreyashi Nag, Zhengyang Wang, Bing Yin, Heng Ji, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Current abstractive summarization models generate inconsistent content due to the inherently noisy dataset and the discrepancy between maximum likelihood estimation based training objectives and consistency measurements. |
| Approach: | They propose a new consistency taxonomy that categorizes inconsistent content into faithfulness, factuality, and self-supportiveness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on XSUM and CNN/DM datasets show that EnergySum mitigates the trade-off between accuracy and consistency. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
BattleAgent: Multi-modal Dynamic Emulation on Historical Battles to Complement Historical Analysis (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Shuhang Lin, Wenyue Hua, Lingyao Li, Che-Jui Chang, Lizhou Fan, Jianchao Ji, Hang Hua, Mingyu Jin, Jiebo Luo, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, indicating their potential to serve as the foundation for agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a detailed emulation system that combines large vision-language model and multi-agent system to emulate dynamic interactions between multiple agents over a period of time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system combines large vision-language model and multi-agent system to emulate dynamic interactions between agents and their environments over a period of time. |
Demonstration Augmentation for Zero-shot In-context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive capability known as In-context Learning (ICL), which enables them to acquire knowledge from textual demonstrations without the need for parameter updates. |
| Approach: | They propose to use model’s previously predicted historical samples as demonstrations for subsequent ones to improve model’ s performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the previous method and its predecessors in terms of inference cost and time. |
SpecVLM: Enhancing Speculative Decoding of Video LLMs via Verifier-Guided Token Pruning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Video large language models (Vid-LLMs) rely on dense video token representations and require substantial memory and computational overhead in both prefilling and decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free speculative decoding framework that prunes up to 90% of video tokens to enable efficient speculation without sacrificing accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 2.68 speedup on LLaVA-OneVision-72B and 2.11 speed up on Qwen2.5-VL-32B. |
Semi-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural machine translation are typically autoregressive but suffer from low parallelizability and thus slow at decoding long sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-autoregressive Transformer model for fast sequence generation that keeps the autoregressive property in global but relieves in local . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5.58 speedup while maintaining 88% translation quality, significantly better than previous non-autoregressive methods. |
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks. |
MentalBERT: Publicly Available Pretrained Language Models for Mental Healthcare (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing pretrained language models for mental health detection are inadequate . one in four people worldwide suffers from mental disorders . |
| Approach: | They train and release two pretrained masked language models to benefit machine learning for mental healthcare research . they demonstrate that language representations pretrained in the target domain improve the performance of mental health detection tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve mental health detection tasks on several benchmarks and are available for free. |
LLM-Driven Implicit Target Augmentation and Fine-Grained Contextual Modeling for Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Stance Detection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on zero-shot and few-shot stance detection neglect implicit yet semantically important targets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses Large Language Models to annotate implicit targets . they also propose 'DyMCA' to dynamically adjust text-target contributions based on context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on a benchmark dataset. |
COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation (2021.naacl-demos)
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Qingyun Wang, Manling Li, Xuan Wang, Nikolaus Parulian, Guangxing Han, Jiawei Ma, Jingxuan Tu, Ying Lin, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Weili Liu, Aabhas Chauhan, Yingjun Guan, Bangzheng Li, Ruisong Li, Xiangchen Song, Yi Fung, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han, Shih-Fu Chang, James Pustejovsky, Jasmine Rah, David Liem, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Clare Voss, Cynthia Schneider, Boyan Onyshkevych
| Challenge: | a new framework to digest relevant biomedical knowledge is needed to combat COVID-19 . quantity of research results is a bottleneck, and false information promoted in publications . |
| Approach: | a team of researchers has developed a framework to extract multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature to combat COVID-19. |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature . it provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence . the framework is based on a case study of drug repurposing . |
Beware of Model Collapse! Fast and Stable Test-time Adaptation for Robust Question Answering (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in question answering, but their robustness is insufficient to support their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which regularizes the model's output and an efficient side block to reduce its inference time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable or better results than previous TTA methods at a speed close to vanilla forward propagation, which is 1.8 to 4.4 speedup compared to previous methods. |
Granularity Matters: Pathological Graph-driven Cross-modal Alignment for Brain CT Report Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automatic Brain CT reports are limited by coarse-grained supervision and coupled cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a pathological Graph-driven cross-modal alignment model that learns fine-grained visual cues and aligns them with textual words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve the automatic generation of Brain CT reports and contribute to improved cranial disease diagnosis. |
TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models can be useful for chart understanding, but their size limits their use in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient multimodal large language model with only 3B parameters for chart understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several chart-understanding MLLMs with up to 13B parameters on ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart to Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX. |
LaMemo: Language Modeling with Look-Ahead Memory (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model long-term dependencies are limited to long texts with thousands of words. |
| Approach: | They propose a look-ahead memory that augments the recurrence memory by attending to the right-side tokens and interpolating with the old memory states to maintain long-term information in the history. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on widely used language modeling benchmarks show that LaMemo outperforms baseline models with recurrence memory. |
CMMaTH: A Chinese Multi-modal Math Skill Evaluation Benchmark for Foundation Models (2025.coling-main)
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Zhongzhi Li, Ming-Liang Zhang, Pei-Jie Wang, Jian Xu, Rui-Song Zhang, Yin Fei, Zhi-Long Ji, Jin-Feng Bai, Zhen-Ru Pan, Jiaxin Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in various language tasks, while large multimodal models effectively handle visual-language problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multimodal multimodal model evaluation benchmark to evaluate model performance in Chinese K12 classrooms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluation tool is integrated with the CMMaTH dataset. |
HittER: Hierarchical Transformers for Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods to learn representations of knowledge graphs are conceptually simple and can be applied to tasks like factoid question answering (Saxena et al., 2020) and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Transformer model to jointly learn Entity-relation composition and Relational contextualization based on a source entity’s neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple link prediction datasets and can be integrated into BERT and demonstrate its effectiveness on two Freebase factoid question answering datasets. |
Non-Autoregressive Sentence Ordering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing sentence ordering approaches only leverage unilateral dependencies during decoding and cannot fully explore the semantic dependency between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive ordering network that explores bilateral dependencies between sentences and predicts sentences for each position in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing autoregressive sentence ordering approaches and yields competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-arts. |
Document-Level Machine Translation with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can produce coherent, cohesive, relevant, and fluent answers for various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They examine the impact of different prompts on document-level translation quality and discourse phenomena using figures and lines, which are invisible to GPT-4. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform commercial MT systems and advanced document-level MT methods on a number of benchmarks and show potential to become a new paradigm for document- level translation. |
Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight (2026.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Bingxuan Li, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Bingxiang He, Qinyu Luo, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Generative world models could be used to enhance agents' cognition . agents are expected to operate in settings where tasks unfold over long horizons and involve intricate chains of interdependent decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models as external simulators to enhance cognition . they find that agents rarely invoke simulation and misuse predicted rollouts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could be used to predict future states rather than short-horizon reasoning . the model could also be used for real-world planning and robotics . |
COVID-19 Claim Radar: A Structured Claim Extraction and Tracking System (2022.acl-demo)
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Manling Li, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Ziqi Wang, Yi-shyuan Chiang, Tuan Lai, Pengfei Yu, Zixuan Zhang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | a new system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 related news . the system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a COVID-19 Claim Radar system that extracts supporting and refuting claims . the system leverages Wikidata as the hub to consolidate coreferential knowledge elements . |
| Outcome: | The system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 pandemic information . it leverages Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements . |
Keep Meeting Summaries on Topic: Abstractive Multi-Modal Meeting Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive summarization of meetings are unfocused and lack content coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal hierarchical attention model that prioritizes segmentation and summarization . they propose to use multi-level hierarchies to narrow down the focus into topically-relevant segments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art with BLEU and ROUGE measures. |
ACIArena: Toward Unified Evaluation for Agent Cascading Injection (2026.acl-long)
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Hengyu An, Minxi Li, Jinghuai Zhang, Naen Xu, Chunyi Zhou, Changjiang Li, Xiaogang Xu, Tianyu Du, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies consider only limited attack strategies and simplified MAS settings, limiting their generalizability and comprehensive evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the robustness of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) they propose unified evaluation suites spanning attack surfaces and attack objectives . |
| Outcome: | ACIArena provides a benchmark of 1,356 test cases for evaluating MAS robustness . it covers six widely used MAS implementations and provides measurable results . |
Distinguish Before Answer: Generating Contrastive Explanation as Knowledge for Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced methods have trouble obtaining knowledge from different knowledge bases . a concept-centric model can be used to generate a contrastive explanation for QA tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a Concept-centric Prompt-bAsed Contrastive Explanation Generation model which converts obtained symbolic knowledge into the contrastive explanation for better distinguishing the differences among given candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new SOTA on CSQA, QASC, and OBQA. |
EventKE: Event-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embedding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that events can greatly improve the quality of KG embeddings on multiple downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-enhanced KG embedding model that incorporates events into KGs . they first incorporate event nodes by building a heterogeneous network with event argument links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates event nodes into the original knowledge graphs . it can be used to fuse event information into the KG embeddings on multiple tasks . |
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Sophia Pan, Ming Cheng, Shubham Mohole, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi, Michael Macy
| Challenge: | Rhetorical strategies are important to persuasive communication, but their analysis relies on human annotation, which is costly, inconsistent and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate and label debate data . they fine-tune transformer-based classifiers on this dataset and validate it against human data a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high performance and strong generalization across topical domains. |
Visualizing Group Dynamics based on Multiparty Meeting Understanding (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | During a discussion, participants might adjust their own opinions and tune their attitudes towards others’ opinions based on the unfolding interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-party meeting opinion mining system that visualizes real-time opinion extraction and group dynamics using bipartite graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts opinions from speech and visualizes an influence factor for each participant using current and previous utterances in real time. |
Enhancing LLM-Based Persuasion Simulations with Cultural and Speaker-Specific Information (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Qichao Wang, Ivory Yang, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to persuasive dialogue generation suffer from stance oscillation and low informativeness. |
| Approach: | They propose reinforced instructional prompting, a method that ensures speaker characteristics consistently guide all stages of dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ensures speaker characteristics guide all stages of dialogue generation and aligns language use with speakers’ native languages to better capture cultural nuances. |
RESIN-EDITOR: A Schema-guided Hierarchical Event Graph Visualizer and Editor (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Khanh Duy Nguyen, Zixuan Zhang, Reece Suchocki, Sha Li, Martha Palmer, Susan Windisch Brown, Jiawei Han, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing IE tools for atomic events are limited when applied to such complex events. |
| Approach: | They propose to use event schemas to guide the organization of complex events and to edit hierarchical graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms existing IE visualization tools in both IE result analysis and general model improvements. |
R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say ‘I Don’t Know’ (2024.naacl-long)
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Hanning Zhang, Shizhe Diao, Yong Lin, Yi Fung, Qing Lian, Xingyao Wang, Yangyi Chen, Heng Ji, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning force the model to complete a sentence no matter whether it knows the knowledge or not. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to tuning large language models to refrain from answering questions beyond its parametric knowledge by identifying the disparity in parametric and parametric information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves a model’s ability to answer known questions and refrain from answering unknown questions. |
TUNA: Comprehensive Fine-grained Temporal Understanding Evaluation on Dense Dynamic Videos (2025.acl-long)
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Fanheng Kong, Jingyuan Zhang, Hongzhi Zhang, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Linhao Yu, Xingguang Ji, Yu Tian, V. W., Fuzheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for video understanding often focus on specific aspects, overlooking the holistic nature of video content. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-oriented benchmark for fine-grained understanding on dense dynamic videos with two complementary tasks: captioning and QA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on diverse video scenarios and dynamic videos, with interpretable and robust evaluation criteria. |
FinReporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial Disclosure (2026.acl-demo)
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Fan Zhang, Mingzi Song, Rania Elbadry, Yankai Chen, Shaobo Wang, Yixi Zhou, Xunwen Zheng, Yueru He, Yuyang Dai, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Ayesha Gull, Muhammad Usman Safder, Fan Wu, Liyuan Meng, Fengxian Ji, Junning Zhao, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, YU Chen, Xue Liu, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
| Challenge: | FinReporting is an agentic workflow for localized cross-jurisdiction financial reporting . existing approaches assume a single-market setting and overlook structural differences across jurisdictions . |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow that decomposes financial reporting into auditable stages . they use Large Language Models to extract and summarize corporate disclosures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system decomposes reporting into auditable stages . it improves consistency and reliability under heterogeneous reporting regimes. |
Discrete Argument Representation Learning for Interactive Argument Pair Identification (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on monological argumentation covers claims generation, argument structure prediction, and essay scoring. |
| Approach: | They propose to identify argument pairs from two posts with opposite stances to a certain topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing models on a large-scale dataset . it also proves that it is useful for analyzing argument pairs from two posts . |
CDD: A Large Scale Dataset for Legal Intelligence Research (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on predicting crimes, predicting outcomes of judicial debates, and extracting information from legal documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-size Court Debate Dataset to analyze court debates . they invite experienced judges to design appropriate labels for data records . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 30,481 court cases, totaling 1,144,425 utterances. |
Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate source code summaries are coarse-grained and noise-filled . however, they do not capture contextual code semantics and are often outdated in continuous software iteration. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained Token-level retrieval-augmented mechanism on the decoder side to enhance performance of neural models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more low-frequency tokens and is interpretable. |
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Grace Ziqi Zhou, Haiyang Zhang, Tao Shen, Wei Wang, John Torous, Shaoxiong Ji, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Psychological defenses are strategies people use to manage distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level and a DMRS Co-Pilot pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation time by 24.0% in a counterbalanced study. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
TWIST: Text-encoder Weight-editing for Inserting Secret Trojans in Text-to-Image Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Trojan attacks require extensive training data and poor generalization, limiting effectiveness and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for embedding Trojans into plugins using a single edit layer . they find that the method reduces modified parameters by 8-fold and cuts injection time to 25 seconds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average attack success rate of 91%, a 78% improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. |
A Unified Generative Framework for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing complicated ABSA models focus on subtasks, which leads to complicated solutions . et al., j. c. d. r., and j dr. s. v. present a unified approach to solve seven subtask tasks in one framework. |
| Approach: | They redefine every subtask target as a sequence mixed by pointer indexes and sentiment class indexe . they exploit the pre-training sequence-to-sequence model BART to solve all ABSA subtasks in an end-to end framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves substantial performance gain and provides a real unified solution for the whole ABSA subtasks. |
TRIDENT: Enhancing Large Language Model Safety with Tri-Dimensional Diversified Red-Teaming Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks but are vulnerable to harmful content and being exploited for malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures risk coverage across Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing (2024.naacl-short)
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Jiabao Ji, Bairu Hou, Zhen Zhang, Guanhua Zhang, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks can cause LLMs to make wrong predictions on downstream tasks or generate harmful content misaligned with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose to use randomized smoothing to add noise to the input and then make predictions based on these denoised versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods in both empirical and certified robustness in defending against adversarial perturbations for both downstream tasks and human alignments (i.e., jailbreak attacks). |
Zero-Shot Event Detection Based on Ordered Contrastive Learning and Prompt-Based Prediction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot event detection methods do not work for unseen types . supervised methods require predefined event types or external tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect events from unstructured text without annotating samples . they propose to use ordered contrastive learning and prompt-based prediction to identify trigger words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects events more effectively and accurately than state-of-the-art methods. |
A Game-Theoretica Negotiation Framework for Cross-Cultural Consensus (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit pronounced WEIRD cultural bias, marginalizing diverse viewpoints and posing challenges for reconciling diverse populations with varying cultural backgrounds and value systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for cross-cultural fairness using a Nash Equilibrium . they propose equilibriums that iteratively propose and refine natural-language guidelines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates higher-quality and more balanced consensus . it finetunes diverse LLM architectures with negotiation data, reducing cultural distances by 95.53%. |
A Simple yet Effective Training-free Prompt-free Approach to Chinese Spelling Correction Based on Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using an LLM for Chinese spelling correction tasks is completely different from previous approaches . given a Chinese character, there may exist many others with the same or similar pronunciations, or with similar shapes. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free prompt-free approach to leverage large language models for Chinese spelling correction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves performance on five public datasets, enabling them to compete with state-of-the-art domain-general CSC models. |
M3AV: A Multimodal, Multigenre, and Multipurpose Audio-Visual Academic Lecture Dataset (2024.acl-long)
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Zhe Chen, Heyang Liu, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hongcheng Liu, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emerging approach to sharing knowledge online. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset with human annotations for multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. |
Paper Abstract Writing through Editing Mechanism (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | a paper abstract writing system can automatically generate an abstract from a title . a typical recurrent neural network (RNN) based approach easily loses focus. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper abstract writing system that automatically generates an abstract from a title. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system passes Turing tests by junior domain experts and non-experts at a rate up to 80%. |
Complex Question Decomposition for Semantic Parsing (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that ignore the decompositionality of complex questions are not suitable for complex question semantic parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical semantic parsing method which utilizes the decompositionality of complex questions for semantic paring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a large scale complex question semantic parsing dataset. |
CycleAlign: Iterative Distillation from Black-box LLM to White-box Models for Better Human Alignment (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models that generate harmful responses are constrained by their inherent capability. |
| Approach: | They propose to align large language models with human preferences from AI feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the alignment of large language models with human preferences from AI feedback. |
Error Analysis of Uyghur Name Tagging: Language-specific Techniques and Remaining Challenges (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | despite efforts at name tagging, there is limited understanding on the performance ceiling . despite the high-resource language, there are very few natural language processing tools available . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a machine learning model to identify Uyghur name tagger errors . they conclude that such a model is unlikely to be effective for Uygur, or low-resource languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is unlikely to be effective for Uyghur, or low-resource languages in general, the authors argue . they show that the proposed model can be used for high-res languages with superficial features . |
Incorporating Causal Analysis into Diversified and Logical Response Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generation-based models generate generic and safe responses such as "So am I" or "I don't know" |
| Approach: | They propose to predict the mediators to preserve relevant information and auto-regressively incorporate the mediator into generating process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates relevant and informative responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of automatic metrics and human evaluations. |
UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising potential for performing end-to-end KIE directly from document images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) using a constrained-category KIE track and an open-categorical KIE Track. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 state-of-the-art LMMs show performance degradation under diverse schema definitions, long-tail key fields, and complex layouts, along with pronounced performance disparities across different document types and scenarios. |
Chem-FINESE: Validating Fine-Grained Few-shot Entity Extraction through Text Reconstruction (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for fine-grained few-shot entity extraction are difficult to implement in the chemical domain due to the information overload of scientific papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence based few-shot entity extraction approach . it uses a seq2seq entity extractor and a self-validation module to reconstruct original input sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 8.26% and 6.84% performance gains on two datasets. |
End to End Chinese Lexical Fusion Recognition with Sememe Knowledge (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new task for coreference recognition is presented in linguistics . the fusion word is always out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in downstream paragraph-level tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese lexical fusion recognition task which could be regarded as one kind of coreference recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective and competitive for the proposed task. |
IPIGuard: A Novel Tool Dependency Graph-Based Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks rely on assumptions about the model's inherent security, which lacks structural constraints on agent behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task execution paradigm that models the agents’ task execution process as a traversal over a planned Tool Dependency Graph (TDG). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces unintended tool invocations triggered by injected instructions, enhancing robustness against IPI attacks. |
GRAPHIA: Harnessing Social Graph Data to Enhance LLM-Based Social Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Social graphs provide high-quality supervision signals that encode local interactions and global network structure, yet they remain underutilized for LLM training. |
| Approach: | They propose a general LLM-based social graph simulation framework that leverages graph data as supervision for LLM training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves micro-level alignment by 6.1% on three real-world networks compared to the strongest baseline. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
HiTrans: A Transformer-Based Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Model for Emotion Detection in Conversations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion detection in conversations is to detect the emotion for each utterance in conversations that have multiple speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based context- and speaker-sensitive model for EDC . they utilize a low-level transformer to generate local utterance representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three benchmark datasets. |
Training Long-Context LLMs Efficiently via Chunk-wise Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in long-context large language models have demonstrated superior retrieval quality compared to retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient training paradigm that partitions lengthy inputs into manageable chunks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model expands maximum sequence length from 1K to 16K tokens on a single RTX 3090 GPU, while SpaCO achieves accelerated training speed. |
Code Membership Inference for Detecting Unauthorized Data Use in Code Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Code pre-trained language models (CPLMs) are trained on open-source code, raising concerns about data infringement. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for detecting unauthorized code use in CPLMs . they use signal extraction from pre-training tasks and weighted inference to identify code membership status accurately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects unauthorized code use with high accuracy. |
Towards Interpretable Mental Health Analysis with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models lack adequate evaluations and prompting strategies for explainability. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the mental health analysis and emotional reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) using 11 datasets across 5 tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows strong in-context learning ability but still has a significant gap with advanced task-specific methods. |
MGIMN: Multi-Grained Interactive Matching Network for Few-shot Text Classification (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text classification fail to generalize to unseen classes with very few labeled text instances per class. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning method which performs instance-wise comparison followed by aggregation to generate class-wise matching vectors instead of prototype learning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods under both the standard and generalized FSL settings. |
MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding (2026.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Shengfeng Lou, Chi Chen, Ziyue Wang, Chenliang Li, Weizhou Shen, Jiyue Guo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for MLLMs struggle with fine-grained temporal reasoning . despite advances in video understanding, current methods struggle with time-sensitive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a time-stamp-aware multi-segment grounding method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on time-sensitive tasks and generalizes well across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. |
TextEE: Benchmark, Reevaluation, Reflections, and Future Challenges in Event Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Kuan-Hao Huang, I-Hung Hsu, Tanmay Parekh, Zhiyu Xie, Zixuan Zhang, Prem Natarajan, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that event extraction evaluations may not accurately reflect the true performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a standardized, fair, and reproducible benchmark for event extraction . they use standardized scripts and splits for 16 datasets spanning eight domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. |
SegTune: Structured and Fine-Grained Control for Song Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yuejiao Wang, Zihao Ji, Pengfei Cai, Xu Li, Haorui Zheng, Zewen Song, Zhongliang Liu, Chen Zhang, Pengfei Wan
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural song generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from lyrics and global textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to specify local musical descriptions aligned to song segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in musicality and controllability. |
Combining Static Word Embeddings and Contextual Representations for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) aims to map words in one language to their translations in another. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism to combine static word embeddings and contextual representations to utilize the advantages of both paradigms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on supervised and unsupervised BLI benchmarks on all language pairs by average improving 3.2 points over baselines. |
Unsupervised Sounding Pixel Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sounding source localization is a challenging task due to the difficulty of cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method which enables pixel-level sounding source localization in unsupervised paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves pixel-level sounding source localization without annotations. |
Minimize Exposure Bias of Seq2Seq Models in Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Ranran Haoran Zhang, Qianying Liu, Aysa Xuemo Fan, Heng Ji, Daojian Zeng, Fei Cheng, Daisuke Kawahara, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation triplets from plain text introduce exposure bias . prior work has focused on pipeline methods that ignore intrinsic interactions between subtasks and propagate classification errors through the tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reduces the decoding length to three within a triplet and removes the order among triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overfits to both datasets while showing better generalization. |
Don’t Go To Extremes: Revealing the Excessive Sensitivity and Calibration Limitations of LLMs in Implicit Hate Speech Detection (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Several studies have examined whether large language models exhibit bias or discrimination against individuals or groups in terms of protected attributes like race, gender, or religion. |
| Approach: | They evaluate LLMs' ability to detect implicit hate speech and express confidence in their responses by considering prompt patterns and mainstream uncertainty estimation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models exhibit two extremes: (1) excessive sensitivity towards groups or topics that may cause fairness issues, resulting in misclassifying benign statements as hate speech; (2) confidence scores for each method excessively concentrate on a fixed range, remaining unchanged regardless of the dataset’s complexity. |
Cross-modal Contrastive Attention Model for Medical Report Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for medical report generation are unable to capture useful information from historical cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that captures both visual and semantic information from similar cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on almost all metrics on IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR benchmarks. |
JurisBench: A Deep Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models in Professional Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Ziang Chen, Guannan Li, Fanlin Ji, Yipeng Kang, Jiaqi Li, Muhan Zhang, Yangtao Zhang, Li Tianjiao, Jiannan Wang, Xin Guo, Song-Chun Zhu, Bin Ling
| Challenge: | Existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated tasks or exam-style questions, failing to capture the procedural interdependencies and adjudicative rigor inherent in professional practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical, depth-oriented, domain-specific benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in Chinese civil litigation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that large language models exhibit an "illusion of competence" the results highlight a critical gap between fluent linguistic output and judicial reliability . |
RoBGuard: Enhancing LLMs to Assess Risk of Bias in Clinical Trial Documents (2025.coling-main)
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Changkai Ji, Bowen Zhao, Zhuoyao Wang, Yingwen Wang, Yuejie Zhang, Ying Cheng, Rui Feng, Xiaobo Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to assess the risk of bias in RCTs focus on manually crafted prompts and a restricted set of simple questions, limiting their accuracy and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing Large Language Models to assess the risk of bias in RCTs by reformulation, document parsing and multi-expert collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the RoB-Item and RoB domains. |
Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models through Spectral Modulation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains, garnering significant attention from both academia and industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct spectral modulation in the parameter space of LLMs to integrate with various models in a plug-and-play manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance by 10.12% with spectral modulation. |
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. |
Constructing contrastive samples via summarization for text classification with limited annotations (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Various contrastive learning methods have been developed and lead to state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct efficient contrastive samples using text summarization to gain better representations of text classification tasks with limited annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework gains better representations on text classification tasks with limited annotations and is compared with existing methods on real-world text classification datasets. |
ToolEyes: Fine-Grained Evaluation for Tool Learning Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-world Scenarios (2025.coling-main)
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Junjie Ye, Guanyu Li, SongYang Gao, Caishuang Huang, Yilong Wu, Sixian Li, Xiaoran Fan, Shihan Dou, Tao Ji, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of tool learning focus on validation of tools for large language models with expected outcomes, but this focus ignores the complex capabilities required for LLMs to effectively use tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained system for evaluation of large language models’ tool learning capabilities in authentic scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system examines seven real-world scenarios, analyzing five dimensions crucial to LLMs in tool learning: format alignment, intent comprehension, behavior planning, tool selection, and answer organization. |
HalluLens: LLM Hallucination Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Yejin Bang, Ziwei Ji, Alan Schelten, Anthony Hartshorn, Tara Fowler, Cheng Zhang, Nicola Cancedda, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate responses that deviate from user input or training data, a phenomenon known as "hallucination" . |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination benchmark HalluLens that includes both extrinsic and intrinsic evaluation tasks to distinguish between extrindic and intrinsic hallucines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles LLM hallucination from "factuality" and distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic hallucines to promote consistency and facilitate research. |
Isotropic Representation Can Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer on Multilingual Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing mPLMs can align representations well for myriads of cross-lingual transfer tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose enhanced isotropy and constrained code-switching for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to alleviate the problem of misalignment caused by anisotropic representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks and over existing methods. |
LeCoDe: A Benchmark Dataset for Interactive Legal Consultation Dialogue Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Weikang Yuan, Kaisong Song, Zhuoren Jiang, Junjie Cao, Yujie Zhang, Jun Lin, Kun Kuang, Ji Zhang, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Current systems for legal consultation are insufficient to handle the knowledge-intensive nature of real-world consultations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn benchmark dataset to evaluate LLMs in legal consultation settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses LLMs’ consultation capabilities in terms of (1) clarification capability and (2) professional advice quality. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
Speculative Decoding for Multi-Sample Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yiwei Li, Jiayi Shi, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Ji Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding method exploits consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a speculative decoding method that exploits the consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or databases. |
Increasing Visual Awareness in Multimodal Neural Machine Translation from an Information Theoretic Perspective (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on extracting multi-granularity visual features for integration or designing model architectures for better message passing across various modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the informative visual signals into two parts: source-specific information and target-specific info. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance the visual awareness of MMT models against strong baselines. |
Submodular-based In-context Example Selection for LLMs-based Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on the role of well-chosen examples in in-context learning . |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple translational factors for in-context example selection by using monotone submodular function maximization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms random selection and robust single-factor baselines across various NLP tasks. |
Keep it Consistent: Topic-Aware Storytelling from an Image Stream via Iterative Multi-agent Communication (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual storytelling construct text description independently for each image and roughly concatenate them as a story, which leads to the problem of generating semantically incoherent content. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic description task to detect the global semantic context of an image stream and a story is then constructed with the guidance of the topic description. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate stories with higher quality compared to state-of-the-art methods on a VIST dataset. |
LegalReasoner: Step-wised Verification-Correction for Legal Judgment Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Weijie Shi, Han Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Mengze Li, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing legal judgment prediction methods struggle with logical errors when conducting complex legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which enhances LJP reliability through step-wise verification and correction of the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves concordance with court decisions from 72.37 to 80.27 on LLAMA-3.1-70B. |
Taming Text-to-Image Synthesis for Novices: User-centric Prompt Generation via Multi-turn Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yilun Liu, Minggui He, Feiyu Yao, Yuhe Ji, Shimin Tao, Jingzhou Du, Justin Li, Jian Gao, Zhang Li, Hao Yang, Boxing Chen, Osamu Yoshie
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for text-to-image synthesis are sensitive on textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasizes user experience for novice users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model emphasizes user experience for novice users . it improves user-centricity score while maintaining a competitive quality of synthesized images. |
Uncertainty-Calibrated Elastic Alignment for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modalities (2026.findings-acl)
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Kang He, Yuzhe Ding, Rao Fu, Yukang Feng, Kaipeng Zhang, Yiming Liu, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis are often dynamically incomplete. |
| Approach: | They propose a new uncertainty-calibrated elastic alignment framework to address these issues by employing probabilistic imputation to capture cross-modal ambiguity and leverage the estimated uncertainty to drive elastic alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in multiple benchmarks and consistently outperformed existing models. |
Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Xuchao Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning have focused on quantifying the uncertainty associated with the model's response, but they neglect the complexity of the LLM and the uniqueness of in-constitut learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the uncertainty associated with in-context learning and propose corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. |
Abstract Meaning Representation Guided Graph Encoding and Decoding for Joint Information Extraction (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (IE) and Information Extraction (IE), both focus on extracting the main information from natural language texts. |
| Approach: | They propose an AMR-guided framework for joint information extraction using a pre-trained AMR parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on all IE subtasks. |
Applying Contrastive Learning to Code Vulnerability Type Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to classification of vulnerabilities ignore their relationships and treat each class in isolation, resulting in non-scalable code vector representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning framework to bring vector representations of related CWEs closer together and use max-pooling to enable the model to handle longer vulnerability code inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.97%-17.90% on accuracy and 0.98%-22.27% on weighted-F1 with even better performance on higher-quality datasets. |
SGDPO: Self-Guided Direct Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aligning Large Language Models with human values are limited and results of DPO are not resilient. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided direct preference optimization algorithm that incorporates a pilot term to steer the gradient flow during the optimization process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate human-preferred response up to 9.19% higher than previous methods. |
Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with High-Quality Translated Training Corpus (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to semantic role labeling (SRL) are focusing on the English language. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for semantic role labeling that uses corpus translation to build training datasets from SRL annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is highly effective and can improve the target-language performance significantly. |
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. |
Improving Seq2Seq Grammatical Error Correction via Decoding Interventions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to grammatical error correction (GEC) are sequence-to-sequence and sequence-edit. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified decoding intervention framework that employs an external critic to assess the appropriateness of the token to be generated incrementally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art methods on English and Chinese datasets. |
Incorporating Argument-Level Interactions for Persuasion Comments Evaluation using Co-attention Model (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing research explores different text features of reply comments on word level and ignores interactions between participants. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-attention mechanism based neural network to capture interactions between participants on argument level to better model dialogical argumentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a publicly available dataset showing that it extracts interactive argument pairs from the original post and the reply. |
WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a web page and a question, a machine can't understand the contents of web pages. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel dataset for web-based structural reading comprehension that consists of 400K question-answer pairs and a dataset of 6.4K web pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 400K question-answer pairs, collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. |
CARFT: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Contrastive Learning with Annotated Chain-of-Thought-based Reinforced Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) ignore annotated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and incorporate unstable reasoning path sampling. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive learning with annotated CoT-based Reinforced Fine-Tuning approach to enhance the reasoning performance of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach exploits annotated CoT and stabilizes the fine-tuning procedure by incorporating an additional unsupervised learning signal. |
A Span-Based Model for Joint Overlapped and Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) focus on overlapped or discontinuous entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based named entity recognition model that can recognize both overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
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Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
BalanceSFT: Improving LLM Function Calling with Balanced Training Signals and Data Hardness (2026.findings-acl)
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Bingguang Hao, Zengzhuang Xu, Maolin Wang, Yuntao Wen, Yicheng Chen, Cunyin Peng, Long Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jinjie Gu, Chenyi Zhuang, Ji Zhang
| Challenge: | Currently, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the prevailing method for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with function calling capabilities, but its effectiveness is often compromised by two challenges: 1) lengthy Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning tokens dominate training signals over concise function calls in the learning objective; 2) scarcity of hard training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a self-adjusted signal balancing loss and a hard data re-sampling strategy to selectively generate new, high-quality complex data guided by model errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art models like GPT-5 in function calling performance. |
IPL: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for Intelligent Product Listing (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Kang Chen, Qing Zhang, Chengbao Lian, Yixin Ji, Xuwei Liu, Shuguang Han, Guoqiang Wu, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen
| Challenge: | Unlike professional Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms, consumer-to consumer (C2C), is mainly targeting individual sellers. |
| Approach: | They develop an intelligent product listing tool that generates product descriptions using various product attributes such as category, brand, color, condition, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms the base model in domain-specific tasks while producing less hallucination. |
Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Type Induction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing event extraction methods require predefined event types and their annotations to learn event extractors. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent each event type as a cluster of predicate sense, object head> pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can discover salient and high-quality event types on three datasets from different domains. |
Visual Attention Model for Name Tagging in Multimodal Social Media (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Name tagging is a key task for language understanding, but is often limited by the short textual components. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model architecture based on visual attention that outperforms other methods . they use multimodal datasets to analyze the name tagging task on social media . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and significantly outperformed existing methods. |
LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies to build long context language models focus on context extension and continual training on long text. |
| Approach: | They propose a recipe for instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length . they adopt packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-uning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by 30% while maintaining proficiency in handling short, generic tasks. |
Simple and Effective Text Matching with Richer Alignment Features (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models only use a single inter-sequence alignment layer to make full use of this process. |
| Approach: | They propose to keep three key features available for inter-sequence alignment . they conduct experiments on four well-studied benchmark datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to perform on four well-studied datasets with fewer parameters and the inference speed is at least 6 times faster than similar models. |
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Yang, Honglin Guo, Li Ji, Jiazheng Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhikai Lei, Shuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shichun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
| Outcome: | The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
DROWN: Towards Tighter LiRPA-based Robustness Certification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for certifying the robustness of deep neural networks suffer from precision or scalability issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to certify the robustness of deep neural networks . they propose to use two pairs of linear bounds to refine pre-activation bounds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher certified robustness than the baseline on CNNs and 4.68 times larger certified radii than the Transformers. |
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chenliang Li, Haiyang Xu, Junfeng Tian, Wei Wang, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Jiabo Ye, He Chen, Guohai Xu, Zheng Cao, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. |
L-CiteEval: A Suite for Evaluating Fidelity of Long-context Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-context models (LCMs) have seen remarkable advancements in recent years, facilitating tasks like long-document QA. |
| Approach: | They propose an out-of-the-box suite that can assess both generation quality and fidelity in long-context understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed suite can assess both generation quality and fidelity in long-context understanding tasks. |
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality. |
Enhancing Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning with BranchLoRA (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine tune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are prone to Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) existing approaches rely on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LoRA framework to preserve previous instruction alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose an asymmetric tuning-freezing mechanism to mitigate parameter inefficiency . branch-specific routers are introduced to ensure optimal branch distribution over time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks on the latest MCIT benchmarks. |
Towards Economical Inference: Enabling DeepSeek’s Multi-Head Latent Attention in Any Transformer-based LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Tao Ji, Bin Guo, Yuanbin Wu, Qipeng Guo, Shenlixing Shenlixing, Chenzhan Chenzhan, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-efficient fine-tuning method for transitioning from MHA to MLA using a latent vector cache. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the KV cache size of Llama2-7B by 92.19%, with only 1% drop in LongBench performance. |
Target-Guided Structured Attention Network for Target-Dependent Sentiment Analysis (2020.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | TDSA aims to classify the sentiment of a text towards a given target. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Target-Guided Structured Attention Network (TG-SAN) which captures target-related contexts for TDSA in a fine-to-coarse manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and Marco-F1 on three benchmarks with three major findings. |
AMR Parsing with Latent Structural Information (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) capture sentence-level semantics structural representations to broad-coverage natural sentences. |
| Approach: | They investigate parsing AMR with explicit dependency structures and interpretable latent structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves best results on both AMR 2.0 and AMR 1.0 . the proposed model has been adopted in downstream NLP tasks, including text summarization and question answering. |
Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch (2025.acl-long)
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Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, XingYu XingYu, Yuqiu Ji, Guohai Xu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Debing Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese resources are small in scale and limited to specific domains, making them insufficient for LLM post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-annotated reward model and a preference dataset to address this gap . they evaluate Chinese RMs on CheemsBench and construct an RM that captures human preferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed RM achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench and CheeMePreference. |
Stand on The Shoulders of Giants: Building JailExpert from Previous Attack Experience (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xi Wang, Songlei Jian, Shasha Li, Xiaopeng Li, Bin Ji, Ma Jun, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Wang, Jianfeng Zhang, Jie Yu, Feilong Bao, null Wangbaosheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate human-aligned content with a “jailbreak prompt” are inefficient and repetitive, causing inefficiency and a lack of experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates past attack experiences to aid current jailbreak attempts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves both attack effectiveness and efficiency compared to the current black-box jailbreak method. |
Revisiting Self-Consistency from Dynamic Distributional Alignment Perspective on Answer Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yiwei Li, Ji Zhang, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Jiayi Shi, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies on self-consistency show that it improves reasoning abilities by aggregating diverse stochastic samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-driven mechanism that dynamically calibrates temperature to align with high probability modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fixed-diversity baselines on reasoning tasks and improves both average and best-case performance. |
IAD: In-Context Learning Ability Decoupler of Large Language Models in Meta-Training (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | In-context Learning (ICL) is a paradigm in which LLMs acquire task-specific knowledge by processing input-output pairs provided as prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose an In-context learning Ability Decoupler to separate ICL ability from general ability of LLMs in meta-training phase . they first identify parameters suitable for ICL by transference-driven gradient importance and propose a new max-margin loss to emphasize the separation of the two abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model separates the ICL ability from the general ability of LLMs in the meta-training phase, where the I-related parameters are tuned to adapt for ICL tasks. |
Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization with Cross-Document Graph-based Information Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Information extraction (IE) and summarization (summarization) are closely related, but both aims to abstract the most salient information into a generated text summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to use structured IE graphs to enhance the abstractive summarization task by using cross-document IE output to incorporate an alignment loss between IE nodes and their text spans to reduce inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate summaries that are more factual while not losing abstractiveness. |
Relaxing the Constraints: A Dual-Importance Projection Mechanism for Lifelong Model Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenghai Chen, Senbin Xu, Jiaxi Tan, Xinhua Wu, Yan Zhang, Xiawu Zheng, Shengchuan Zhang, Ke Li, Sicheng Zhao, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on strict orthogonal projection to preserve previously edited knowledge, but this constraint limits gradient expressiveness, resulting in degradation of model generalization and overall performance as the number of edits increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages Singular Value Decomposition to identify critical gradient subspaces and introduces a dual mechanism comprising "accumulated importance" and "projection importance" |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five mainstream LLMs show that the proposed method achieves an average comprehensive performance improvement of 10.36% and effectively maintains the model’s general capabilities on downstream tasks. |
The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuji Zhang, Sha Li, Cheng Qian, Jiateng Liu, Pengfei Yu, Chi Han, Yi R. Fung, Kathleen McKeown, ChengXiang Zhai, Manling Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%). |
Enhancing Dual-Encoders with Question and Answer Cross-Embeddings for Answer Retrieval (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve question answering (QA) problems are limited by the need for text generation and answer retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method on multiple answer retrieval datasets. |
Genre Separation Network with Adversarial Training for Cross-genre Relation Extraction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract genre-specific and genre-agnostic features require great human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two encoders to explicitly extract genre-specific and genre-agnostic features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.7% on three distinct genres. |
Communication Makes Perfect: Persuasion Dataset Construction via Multi-LLM Communication (2025.naacl-long)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Ivory Yang, Shiyu Ji, Joice Chen, Farnoosh Hashemi, Shubham Mohole, Ethan Gearey, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in generating persuasive dialogue, yet concerns about the fluency and sophistication of their outputs persist. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM communication framework that facilitates the efficient production of high-quality, diverse linguistic content with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels in naturalness, linguistic diversity, and the strategic use of persuasion, even in complex scenarios involving social taboos. |
DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Yuhan Wu, Jinsong Zhang, Shengqiong Wu, Jingye Li, Yijiang Liu, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | a new task of conversational aspect-based sentiment analysis (DiaASQ) is designed to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis to detect the quadrangle of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a high-quality dataset in Chinese and English . it improves the end-to-end quadruple prediction and integrates rich feature representations . |
Multi-lingual Common Semantic Space Construction via Cluster-consistent Word Embedding (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a new approach to multilingual word embedding is needed to achieve this goal . a multilingual common semantic space is a language-agnostic semantic continuous space . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual common semantic space where words from multiple languages are mapped into a shared space so that resources and knowledge can be shared across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 14.6% absolute F-score gain over state-of-the-art methods on cross-lingual direct transfer. |
Taming Actor-Observer Asymmetry in Agents via Dialectical Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of powerful autonomous systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model trained through dialectical alignment to enforce perspective-invariant reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model mitigates attribution inconsistency and significantly improves fault resolution rates in ambiguous scenarios. |
Building an Ellipsis-aware Chinese Dependency Treebank for Web Text (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | ellipsis is a common linguistic phenomenon that some words are left out as they are understood from the context, especially in oral utterance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dependency treebank to facilitate the parsing of web text . they propose to restore omissions and reserve contexts in the web text to improve dependency parsers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables the parsing of web text from online microblogs. |
Isotropy-Enhanced Conditional Masked Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive models with auto-regressing decoding paradigms have been used for various text generation tasks to accelerate inference but at the cost of generation quality to some extent. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Look Neighbors strategy to enhance learning of target token representations during training to achieve a good balance between inference speedup and generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform current models on 4 WMT datasets and outperformed the current SoTA results. |
Calibrating Verbal Uncertainty as a Linear Feature to Reduce Hallucinations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziwei Ji, Lei Yu, Yeskendir Koishekenov, Yejin Bang, Anthony Hartshorn, Alan Schelten, Cheng Zhang, Pascale Fung, Nicola Cancedda
| Challenge: | LLMs often use assertive language when making false claims, resulting in harm and loss of trust. |
| Approach: | They find that a mismatch between semantic and verbal uncertainty is a better predictor of hallucinations than semantic uncertainty alone. |
| Outcome: | a new study shows that mismatch between semantic and verbal uncertainty is better predictor of hallucinations than semantic uncertainty alone. |
Continual Few-shot Intent Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing intent detection systems are trained with lots of labeled data over a predefined set of intent classes. |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-guided lightweight encoder with three auxiliary strategies to prevent catastrophic forgetting and negative knowledge transfer across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system prevents catastrophic forgetting and encourages positive knowledge transfer across tasks. |
From Scores to Preferences: Redefining Evaluation Paradigm for Speech Quality Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Cao, Changhao Jiang, Jiabao Zhuang, Jiajun Sun, Ming Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Hui Li, Shihan Dou, Yuran Wang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
| Approach: | They propose a MOS-aware reward model that incorporates MOS gap into reward function during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
Benchmarking Multi-National Value Alignment for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Chengyi Ju, Weijie Shi, Chengzhong Liu, Jiaming Ji, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jiajie Xu, Yaodong Yang, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models focus on ethical reviews, failing to capture the diversity of national values. |
| Approach: | They propose a national value extraction pipeline to efficiently construct value assessment datasets and a model-based model with instruction tagging to process raw data sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the alignment of LLMs with the values of five major nations: China, the United States, the UK, France, and Germany. |
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. |
Capturing Latent Modal Association For Multimodal Entity Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal entity alignment overlook the quality of input modality embeddings during modality interaction, amplifying noise propagation while suppressing discriminative feature representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for capturing latent modal association for multimodal entity alignment using a self-attention mechanism to enhance salient information while attenuating noise within individual modality embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an absolute 3.1% higher Hits@1 score than the sota method. |
Pre-training CLIP against Data Poisoning with Optimal Transport-based Matching and Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are vulnerable to data poisoning and backdoor attacks due to massive training image-caption pairs crawled from the Internet. |
| Approach: | They propose an Optimal Transport-based framework to reconstruct image-caption pairs and propose an optimal transport-based distance measure to re-assign new captions based on the proposed optimal transport distance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the attack success rates of poisoning attacks to 0% in most cases. |
Rescorla-Wagner Steering of LLMs for Undesired Behaviors over Disproportionate Inappropriate Context (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | Incorporating external context can enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). however, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Poisoned Context Testbed to pair queries with real-world contexts . they propose 'rw-Steering' to internalize inappropriate signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses undesirable behavior curve. |
Large Language Models are Complex Table Parsers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments and results on Complex Table QA datasets, i.e., the open-domain dataset HiTAB and the aviation domain dataset AIT-QA show that our approach significantly outperforms previous work on both datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 to address the specific challenges posed by Complex Table QA by reconstructing tables into tuples and using prompt templates to create dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous work on complex table parsing datasets and leads to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. |
ARGUS: Policy-Adaptive Ad Governance via Evolving Reinforcement with Adversarial Umpiring (2026.acl-industry)
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Deyi Ji, Junyu Lu, Xuanyi Liu, Liqun Liu, Hailong Zhang, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang, Tianrun Chen, Lanyun Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing regulatory policies create label inconsistencies and reasoning ambiguities in historical datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a policy-adaptive governance system that enables evolving reinforcement through multi-agent adversarial umpiring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms fine-tuning baselines on industrial and public datasets . it enables evolving reinforcement through multi-agent adversarial umpiring . |
MCC-KD: Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in complex reasoning through chain of thought (CoT) prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate multiple rationales for each question and enforce consistency among their predictions by minimizing the bidirectional KL-divergence between the answer distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance on in-distribution and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. |
Generating Visual Spatial Description via Holistic 3D Scene Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing VSD work focuses on skewed spatial understanding of target objects . Existing work merely models the 2D geometrical vision features . |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate 3D scene features into visual spatial description tasks by sampling topologically-diverse subgraphs from Go3D-S2G. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two VSD datasets and produces more spatially-diversified generation. |
Escaping the Echo Trap: On Credit Assignment Failure in Multi-turn LLM Self-Reflection (2026.acl-long)
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Linxuan Du, Guangquan Xue, Xiaobo Liang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Xinyu Shi, Zhang Yijun, Ji Qi, Wenpeng Zhu, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-turn self-reflection are limited by the Echo Trap problem . the model is limited by its inherent capabilities and repeats earlier reflections to preserve reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured extension of GRPO for multi-turn self-reflection which enables more accurate advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates behavior collapse and improves performance across benchmarks. |
Do LVLMs Understand Charts? Analyzing and Correcting Factual Errors in Chart Captioning (2024.findings-acl)
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Kung-Hsiang Huang, Mingyang Zhou, Hou Pong Chan, Yi Fung, Zhenhailong Wang, Lingyu Zhang, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | LVLMs are known for producing text that is factually inconsistent with visual input . factuality of generated captions for structured visuals has not been studied as much . |
| Approach: | They propose a typology of factual errors in captions generated by large vision-language models . they propose CHOCOLATE, a visual entailment model that outperforms current models based on this analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current models in evaluating caption factuality. |
TOI-CNN: a Solution of Information Extraction on Chinese Insurance Policy (N19-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Element Tagging on insurance policies can be used to streamline manual review of hundreds of contracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-of-interest convolutional neural network (TOI-CNN) to replace traditional pooling layer for processing nested phrasal or clausal elements in insurance policies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can automatically convert a massive amount of insurance policies into structural archives for management and comparison. |
Voice Query Auto Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
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Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Ji Xin, Liming Zhang, Wenyan Li, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Junho Shin, Geoffrey Craig Murray, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing methods fail to complete voice queries from incomplete prefixes because they use orthographic prefix and substrings instead of the true phonetic prefix. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition QAC approaches on intermediate transcriptions to complete voice queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method obtains an 18% relative improvement over previous methods on a speech-enabled smart television with real-life voice search traffic. |
FinMME: Benchmark Dataset for Financial Multi-Modal Reasoning Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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Junyu Luo, Zhizhuo Kou, Liming Yang, Xiao Luo, Jinsheng Huang, Zhiping Xiao, Jingshu Peng, Chengzhong Liu, Jiaming Ji, Xuanzhe Liu, Sirui Han, Ming Zhang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced rapid development in recent years, but there is a notable lack of effective and specialized multimodal evaluation datasets in the financial domain. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinMME, a multimodal large language model with 11,000 financial research samples and 20 annotators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than state-of-the-art models, highlighting its challenging nature. |
Health-ORSC-Bench: A Benchmark for Measuring Over-Refusal and Safety Completion in Health Context (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment benchmarks fail to evaluate Safe Completion: the model’s ability to maximise helpfulness on dual-use or borderline queries without crossing into actionable harm. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark to measure Over-Refusal and Safe Completion quality in healthcare. |
| Outcome: | The framework evaluates 30 state-of-the-art LLMs including GPT-5 and Claude-4. |
ReviewGrounder: Improving Review Substantiveness with Rubric-Guided, Tool-Integrated Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuofeng Li, Yi Lu, Dongfu Jiang, Haoxiang Zhang, Yuyang Bai, Chuan Li, Yu Wang, Shuiwang Ji, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. |
| Approach: | They propose a peer review benchmarking tool based on paper-specific rubrics and a rubric-guided framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines with stronger/larger backbones in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. |
Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition models require abundant high-quality annotations to train . distant supervision may induce incomplete and noisy labels, making supervised learning ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-robust learning scheme for training named entity recognition models using only distantly-labeled data and a self-training method that uses contextualized augmentations created by pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing supervised NER models on three datasets by significant margins. |
PANDA: Preference Adaptation for Enhancing Domain-Specific Abilities of LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated considerable capabilities across various tasks . however, they often fall short of the performance achieved by domain-specific state-of-the-art models . |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free method to augment domain-specific abilities of Large language models . they leverage insights from the response preference of expert models to augment LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the expert model on 4 ScienceWorld tasks. |
See the Forest for the Trees: Loosely Speculative Decoding via Visual-Semantic Guidance for Efficient Inference of Video LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video understanding suffer from autoregressive generation of tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free loosely SD framework for Video-LLMs that uses visual-relevant tokens to accurately pinpoint the latter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the accepted length and speedup ratio by 136% and 35% compared to SOTA training-free SD methods for Video-LLMs. |
Exploring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning for Generative Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have incredible instruction-following capabilities while maintaining strong task completion ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to encourage LLMs to Forget Spurious correlations and Learn from In-context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate shortcut learning by forging spurious correlations and learning from in-context information. |
Certified Error Control of Candidate Set Pruning for Two-Stage Relevance Ranking (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In information retrieval, candidate set pruning is used to speed up two-stage relevance ranking but lacks accurate error control and empirical guarantees. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that guarantees the test error after pruning is controlled under a user-specified threshold with high probability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the average set size from 1000 to 27, increasing reranking speed by about 37 times while keeping MRR@10 greater than a pre-specified value of 0.38 with about 90% empirical coverage. |
Evaluating Robustness of Large Audio Language Models to Audio Injection: An Empirical Study (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are increasingly being deployed in real-world applications, yet their robustness against malicious audio injection remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They quantitatively assess their vulnerabilities and resilience using metrics: the Defense Success Rate, Context Robustness Score, and Judgment Robustic Index. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models demonstrate significant performance disparities across four attack scenarios. |