Papers by Jia Zhou

47 papers
RealTalk-CN: A Realistic Chinese Speech Task-Oriented Dialogue Benchmark with Cross-Modal Analysis (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in speech large language models have enabled end-to-end spoken interactions, but their robustness in real-world applications remains unclear.
Approach: They propose a multi-turn, multi-domain speech–text TOD dataset for Chinese users . it contains 5.4k dialogues with annotations for dialogue states, disfluency types, speaker characteristics .
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to evaluate speech large language models in real-world scenarios . the proposed model is based on 5.4k real human-to-human dialogues with annotations .
Selective Differential Privacy for Language Modeling (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to protect sensitive data from leaking are over-pessimistic and undifferentiated.
Approach: They propose a new privacy notion, selective differential privacy, to provide rigorous privacy guarantees on the sensitive portion of the data to improve model utility.
Outcome: The proposed privacy-preserving mechanism achieves better utility while remaining safe under various privacy attacks compared to baselines.
I2E: From Image Pixels to Actionable Interactive Environments for Text-Guided Image Editing (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing text-guided image editing methods rely on end-to-end pixel-level inpainting paradigm . existing models lack such intermediate representations and Reasoning-then-action process .
Approach: They propose a "Decompose-then-Action" paradigm that revisits image editing as an actionable interaction process within a structured environment.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm outperforms existing methods in compositional editing tasks.
Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current language model-driven agents lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to inspect users’ implicit intentions through explicit queries and a model expert as the upstream in agent design to enhance user-agent interaction.
Outcome: The proposed approach excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency.
How to Ask Good Questions? Try to Leverage Paraphrases (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to generate human-like questions rely on paraphrases to generate good questions.
Approach: They propose to integrate paraphrase knowledge into question generation to generate human-like questions by combining paraphrases with a back-translation method.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves obvious performance gain over several strong baselines and human evaluation validates that it can ask questions of high quality by leveraging paraphrase knowledge.
DeepSynth-Eval: Objectively Evaluating Information Consolidation in Deep Survey Writing (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving towards autonomous agents . retrieval capabilities are well-benchmarked, but post-retrieval synthesis is under-evaluated due to open-ended writing.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate information consolidation capabilities using survey papers as gold standards.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark analyzes the post-retrieval synthesis stage of large language models . it leverages high-quality survey papers as gold standards and reverse-engineers research requests . the proposed benchmark outperforms single-turn generation and reduces hallucinations .
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing prompting methods have been used to enhance multistep reasoning capabilities of large language models, but they have overlooked the potential of formulating higher-quality problems.
Approach: They propose a method that starts from the problem side and refines problems to be more comprehensible and solvable for models.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models.
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs).
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact.
Approach: They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency.
Parallelism and Generation Order in Masked Diffusion Language Models: Limits Today, Potential Tomorrow (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Autoregressive (AR) language models dominate modern natural language processing due to strong likelihood-based training objectives and reliable left-to-right decoding.
Approach: They characterize MDLM behavior along two dimensions: parallelism strength and generation order . authors propose a Generate-then-Edit paradigm that mitigates dependency loss .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on tasks that require "backward information" the Generate-then-Edit paradigm improves parallel decoding efficiency while reducing dependency loss.
Neural Gibbs Sampling for Joint Event Argument Extraction (2020.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for event argument extraction cannot adequately model the correlation between event arguments and their roles.
Approach: They propose a Bayesian model to jointly extract event arguments using Gibbs sampling . they train two neural networks to model prior distribution and conditional distribution over event arguments .
Outcome: The proposed model can achieve comparable results to existing methods on two widely-used datasets.
Instance-Guided Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Text Matching (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Few-shot text matching is a more practical technique to determine whether two texts are semantically identical.
Approach: They propose a pluggable prompt learning method for few-shot text matching . they use the semantics of instances to regulate the effects of the gate on the prompt tokens .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on MRPC and QQP.
DIFFA-2: A Practical Diffusion Large Language Model for General Audio Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Autoregressive (AR) large audio language models are expensive in data and computation . prior work shows diffusion-based LALMs can improve audio understanding under matched settings .
Approach: They propose a diffusion-based LALM that upgrades the speech encoder and employs dual semantic and acoustic adapters.
Outcome: a new model improves over existing autoregressive large language models and is competitive to strong AR models . the proposed model can make use of limited training data and improve inference efficiency . a recent study shows that diffusion-based models can improve audio understanding .
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing LRMs often suffer from "overthinking" and excessively long reasoning traces . a dual-level framework for length compression of LRM is proposed .
Approach: They propose a framework for prefix-protected and difficulty-aware compression under hierarchical supervision.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces token usage while improving accuracy on math benchmarks.
Skin-in-the-Game: Decision Making via Multi-Stakeholder Alignment in LLMs (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in tasks such as summarization, arithmetic reasoning, and question answering.
Approach: They propose a framework that explores decisions’ consequences from multiple stakeholder perspectives and a SKIG framework to enhance moral reasoning in large language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework exhibits marked improvements compared to baselines across different language models and benchmarks.
Separation and Fusion: A Novel Multiple Token Linking Model for Event Argument Extraction (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for event argument extraction (EAE) lack cross-event information and require longer role sequences . et al. (2017): outperforms state-of-the-art methods for EE.
Approach: They propose a separation-and-fusion paradigm to separate the acquisition of cross-event information and fuse it into the argument extraction of a target event.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on four widely used datasets.
LSDC: An Efficient and Effective Large-Scale Data Compression Method for Supervised Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are expanding in scale and size, increasing computational costs . large-scale data compression techniques can reduce the size of training datasets while maintaining data integrity.
Approach: They propose a large-scale data compression method to reduce the size of training data . they use a bifurcated quantization strategy to maximize the diversity of samples .
Outcome: The proposed method significantly reduces the size of training data while maximizing the submodular gain.
ICLEval: Evaluating In-Context Learning Ability of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks focus on language abilities and knowledge, often overlooking the assessment of ICL ability.
Approach: They propose to evaluate the ICL ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) using the ICLEval benchmark.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark demonstrates that ICL ability is universally present in different LLMs and model size is not the sole determinant of ICL efficacy.
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities require large-scale data or significant training efforts.
Approach: They introduce an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms models trained on long-CoT distilled data with 3.1k initialization samples and achieves an accuracy improvement of 51.0% to 81.6%.
Regularized Attentive Capsule Network for Overlapped Relation Extraction (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to extract relations from distant supervision contain low-quality instances with noisy words and overlapped relations.
Approach: They propose a Regularized Attentive Capsule Network to better identify overlapped relations in informal sentences . they embed multi-head attention into the capsule network as the low-level capsules .
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that the proposed model improves relation extraction.
Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) rely on English data for training, but are often not comparable across other languages.
Approach: They propose to develop a family of open language models for SEA languages . they use BPE dropout, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication to improve model robustness .
Outcome: The proposed models perform well across four benchmarks, including commonsense reasoning, question answering, reading comprehension and examination.
BMInf: An Efficient Toolkit for Big Model Inference and Tuning (2022.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved promising results on various NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose an open-source toolkit for big model inference and tuning which can support big model tuning at extremely low computation cost.
Outcome: The proposed toolkit can support big model inference and tuning at extremely low computation cost.
YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: prevailing pre-training approaches for large language models involve several complexities.
Approach: They propose a low-cost training recipe and a robust optimization approach to mitigate training instability . they also propose synthesis, curriculum, and data selection pipelines to integrate data .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves top-tier performance among models with similar parameter scale . it is comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data .
Automatic Slide Updating with User-Defined Dynamic Templates and Natural Language Instructions (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing automation methods follow fixed template filling and cannot support dynamic updates for diverse, user-authored decks.
Approach: They propose a framework that combines multimodal slide parsing, natural language instruction grounding, and tool-augmented reasoning for tables, charts, and textual conclusions.
Outcome: The proposed framework updates content while preserving layout and style while maintaining a strong reference baseline on DynaSlide.
Deep Differential Amplifier for Extractive Summarization (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to extract summary from document with a disproportionate ratio of selected and unselected sentences are far from human performance.
Approach: They propose a model that rebalances sentence-level extractive summarization by amplifying the semantic difference between each sentence and all other sentences and applying the residual unit as the second item of the differential amplifier to deepen the architecture.
Outcome: The proposed model performs competitively against state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.
VCSearch: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have improved the performance of Large language models on well-defined mathematical benchmarks, but they often overlook ill-defined problems.
Approach: They develop a large-scale benchmark that contains over 5,000 ill-defined mathematical problems.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability.
Beyond Transcription: Unified Audio Schema for Perception-Aware AudioLLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs) excel at reasoning tasks, but struggle at elementary auditory perception.
Approach: They propose a framework that organizes audio information into three explicit components in a unified JSON format.
Outcome: The proposed framework boosts fine-grained perception by 10.9% on MMSU over state-of-the-art models while preserving robust reasoning capabilities.
Neural Relation Extraction via Inner-Sentence Noise Reduction and Transfer Learning (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for extracting relations are slow and lack precision . a novel approach to extract relations is proposed to reduce noise between sentences .
Approach: They propose a word-level distant supervised approach for relation extraction using New York Times and Freebase.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the area of precision/call(PR) from 0.35 to 0.39 over the state-of-the-art methods.
EffiQA: Efficient Question-Answering with Strategic Multi-Model Collaboration on Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches that integrate LLMs and KGs either underutilize the reasoning abilities of LLM or suffer from prohibitive computational costs due to tight coupling.
Approach: They propose a framework that can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm.
Outcome: The proposed framework can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm.
ODTQA-FoRe: An Open-Domain Tabular Question Answering Dataset for Future Data Forecasting and Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing tabular question answering systems cannot perform future-oriented numerical prediction . open-domain tabular questions are a popular approach for QA tasks .
Approach: They propose a task that covers time-series forecasting and forecast-based reasoning scenarios using real estate data.
Outcome: The proposed framework decomposes the problem into three collaborative roles that synthesize the results to construct a precise and consistent final answer.
Decoding Knowledge Attribution in Mixture-of-Experts: A Framework of Basic-Refinement Collaboration and Efficiency Analysis (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing attribution methods for dense models fail to capture dynamic routing-expert interactions in sparse MoE architectures.
Approach: They propose to analyze sparse MoE architectures against dense models to capture dynamic routing-expert interactions.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm shows that sparse models achieve higher efficiency per layer . it also shows that deep Qwen-MoE mitigates expert failures while minimizing complexity .
VoxMind: An End-to-End Agentic Spoken Dialogue System (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research on end-to-end spoken dialogue models has focused on core perception and generation, with limited exploration of tool-augmented extensions.
Approach: They propose a framework to equip end-to-end spoken dialogue models with comprehensive agentic abilities by leveraging a 470-hour AgentChat dataset.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-2.5-Pro on spoken agent tasks while maintaining general conversational quality.
Neural Topic Model with Reinforcement Learning (D19-1)

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Challenge: Experimental results show superior performance on perplexity and topic coherence measures compared to state-of-the-art topic models.
Approach: They propose to incorporate topic coherence measures as reward signals to guide the learning of a VAE-based topic model.
Outcome: The proposed model is able to separating background words dynamically from topic words eliminating the pre-processing step of filtering infrequent and/or top frequent words, typically required for learning traditional topic models.
Expanding the Boundaries of Vision Prior Knowledge in Multi-modal Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, but the impact of vision encoder’s prior knowledge is seldom investigated.
Approach: They propose a metric to quantify the effect of prior knowledge on MLLM performance by integrating prior knowledge at the vision encoder level into a training framework.
Outcome: The proposed training framework incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level, and significantly boosts visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs.
Can LLMs Act as Historians? Evaluating Historical Research Capabilities of LLMs via the Chinese Imperial Examination (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks assess basic knowledge breadth or lexical understanding, failing to capture higher-order skills that are central to historical research.
Approach: They propose a benchmark anchored in the Chinese Imperial Examination system that assesses historical knowledge and lexical understanding.
Outcome: The new benchmark aims to assess the ability of LLMs to process historical materials and documents.
MirrorQA: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Mirror-Orientation Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, yet their ability to perform left–right reasoning in mirror contexts remains underexplored.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate MLLMs' ability to distinguish left from right from a subject-centered perspective.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that even the best performing models achieve only 65.40% accuracy, far below the 99.28% accuracy of humans.
ODUTQA-MDC: A Task for Open-Domain Underspecified Tabular QA with Multi-turn Dialogue-based Clarification (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to tabular QA are limited to closed-domain scenarios . existing approaches do not solve the core challenge of generating correct answers without user clarification .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to tackle underspecified or uncertain queries in tabular question answering . they propose ODUTQA-MDC task and a multi-agent framework to detect ambiguities .
Outcome: The proposed framework excels at detecting ambiguities, clarifying them through dialogue, and refining answers.
PPTAgent: Generating and Evaluating Presentations Beyond Text-to-Slides (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating presentations from documents focus on improving and evaluating content quality in isolation, overlooking visual appeal and structural coherence.
Approach: They propose an edit-based presentation generation system that analyzes and iterates on slides to create new slides.
Outcome: The proposed presentation generation tool outperforms existing methods in three dimensions . it analyzes slides, iterates and generates edit actions based on selected slides .
FinDABench: Benchmarking Financial Data Analysis Ability of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but their proficiency and reliability in the specialized domain of financial data analysis remain uncertain.
Approach: FinDABench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the financial data analysis capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) it comprises 15,200 training instances and 8,900 test instances, all meticulously crafted by human experts.
Outcome: FinDABench measures the financial data analysis capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across three dimensions: 1) Core Ability; 2) Analytical Ability; 3) Technical Ability.
RCBSF: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Contract Revision via Stackelberg Game (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: despite the adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), contract revision remains impeded because generic models treat strict legal constraints as mere suggestions.
Approach: They propose a risk-constrained bilevel Stackelberg framework that models high-stakes revision as a strategic interaction rather than an open-ended conversation.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average RRR of 84.21% and enhanced token efficiency.
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)

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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.
Self-Correcting RAG: Enhancing Faithfulness via MMKP Context Selection and NLI-Guided MCTS (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to retrieval-augmented generation still face problems with low context utilization and frequent hallucinations.
Approach: They propose a framework that reformulates retrieval and generation as constrained optimization and path planning.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves reasoning accuracy on complex queries while reducing hallucinations.
Making RALM Robust to Irrelevant Contexts via Layer Knowledge Guided Attention (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) face factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks.
Approach: They propose a layer-knowledge guided attention method which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of large language models to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks.
CPRM: A LLM-based Continual Pre-training Framework for Relevance Modeling in Commercial Search (2025.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Relevance modeling between queries and items is a key component of commercial search engines.
Approach: They propose a framework for continual pre-training of LLMs to enhance domain knowledge . they employ queries and multi-field item to jointly pre-train for enhancing domain knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves convincing performance compared to strong baselines.
SADA: Bridging In-Context Learning and Fine-Tuning via State-Aligned Distillation Adapters (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Prompt-based in-context learning and parameter fine-tuning are dominant paradigms for incorporating external information into large language models, but they incur high inference costs or require expensive retraining.
Approach: They propose to convert prompts into temporary adapter weights to bridge this gap by converting prompts to temporary adapters.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on long-context language modeling and downstream NLU and summarization benchmarks while significantly reducing memory footprint and latency.
Just Fine-tune Twice: Selective Differential Privacy for Large Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to protect language models from privacy leakage suffer from limited user control and low utility . et al., 2018: a novel framework that achieves SDP for state-of-the-art large transformer-based models.
Approach: They propose a framework that applies differential privacy to large language models . they use redacted in-domain data to fine-tune the model with original in- domain data .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves strong utility compared to baselines.
Crabs: Consuming Resource via Auto-generation for LLM-DoS Attack under Black-box Settings (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on white-box attacks focus on black-box LLMs, leaving black- box scenarios underexplored.
Approach: They propose an automated algorithm designed for black-box LLMs that constructs the DoS Attack Tree and expands the node coverage to achieve effectiveness under black- box conditions.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm can be used to build a DoS Attack Tree and expand the node coverage to achieve effectiveness under black-box conditions.

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