Papers by Jian Gao
Mixture of Diverse Size Experts (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance in a variety of tasks due to the sub-linearly increasing computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a new MoE architecture with designed layers where experts have different sizes to mitigate this defect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture surpasses existing MoEs by adaptively assigning the parameter budget to experts while maintaining the same total parameter size and number of experts. |
Is Your Language Model Ready for Monetization Decisions? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on shopping-centric scenarios and user-facing data, overlooking intermediate decision stages and robustness considerations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world monetization contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers intent understanding, commercial matching, and user behavior modeling. |
ProQA: Structural Prompt-based Pre-training for Unified Question Answering (2022.naacl-main)
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Wanjun Zhong, Yifan Gao, Ning Ding, Yujia Qin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ming Zhou, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing QA research on question answering is focused on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves QA-centric ability on 11 QA benchmarks. |
Generating then Refining for Reliable Knowledge Base Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering methods generate LFs that are non-executable due to semantic hallucination issue of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a "generate-verify-refine" framework for reliable LF generation . they propose ARI-KBQA to generate query paths based on hop-by-hop reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves model performance with a reduced search space . ARI-KBQA can generate LFs that are non-executable due to semantic hallucination issue . |
Battle of the Large Language Models: Dolly vs LLaMA vs Vicuna vs Guanaco vs Bard vs ChatGPT - A Text-to-SQL Parsing Comparison (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a number of open-source large language models claim to be performing better than commercial ones . however, these models fall short of the performance achieved by closed-source models like GPT-3.5 . |
| Approach: | They evaluate six popular large language models against each other to evaluate their performance . authors say open-source models are not as effective as those built by commercial models . |
| Outcome: | a new set of models claim to match or surpass the language understanding abilities of commercial models . the results show that the models performed far below the performance of closed-source models compared to open-source ones . |
LEAF: Towards Lightweight Explainable Hateful Video Detection via Self-Grounding CoT Guided Stage-Wise Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hateful videos rely on opaque models with no insight into their decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight, explainable video detection framework that distills "explainability" from LMMs into efficient Smaller Multimodal Models (SMMs) they use a self-grounded chain-of-thought mechanism to generate unbiased supervision signals for videos . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in detection accuracy and explainability on three video benchmarks. |
KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing language representation models (PLMs) cannot capture factual knowledge from text. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained LanguagERepresentation which integrates factual knowledge into PLMs and produces effective text-enhanced KE with the strong PLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing pre-trained language representation models and improves their performance on various NLP tasks. |
BacktrackAgent: Enhancing GUI Agent with Error Detection and Backtracking Mechanism (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents focus on enhancing the accuracy of individual actions and lack effective mechanisms for detecting and recovering from errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates a backtracking mechanism to enhance the task completion capabilities of GUI agents by verifier, judger, and reflector components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves task success rate and step accuracy on Mobile3M and Auto-UI benchmarks. |
BadWindtunnel: Defending Backdoor in High-noise Simulated Training with Confidence Variance (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current backdoor attack defenders in NLP typically involve data reduction or model pruning, risking losing crucial information. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor defender that allows precise control over training conditions to model backdoor learning behavior without affecting the final model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the backdoor learning behavior without affecting the final model. |
DialMed: A Dataset for Dialogue-based Medication Recommendation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on medication recommendation mainly rely on EHRs, but some details of interactions between doctors and patients may be ignored or omitted in EHR. |
| Approach: | They propose to use medical dialogues to recommend medications with medical dialogue data . they propose to model dialogue structure and disease knowledge aware network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is a promising solution to recommend medications with medical dialogues. |
Rectified Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Sun, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Yuqing Xia, Jian Chen, Yizhao Gao, Shijie Cao, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency but suffer from KV cache misalignment, resulting in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines block-sparse attention with periodic dense rectification to bound error accumulation and preserve alignment with the pretraining distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning, language modeling, and retrieval tasks show that ReSA achieves near-lossless generation quality with significantly improved efficiency. |
Label-Aware Double Transfer Learning for Cross-Specialty Medical Named Entity Recognition (N18-1)
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Zhenghui Wang, Yanru Qu, Liheng Chen, Jian Shen, Weinan Zhang, Shaodian Zhang, Yimei Gao, Gen Gu, Ken Chen, Yong Yu
| Challenge: | NER is a fundamental problem for medical text mining because of the difference of specialties and cost of human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-aware double transfer learning framework for medical NER from electronic medical records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy over strong baselines on 12 cross-specialty NER tasks. |
MBA-RAG: a Bandit Approach for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Question Complexity (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG frameworks either indiscriminately perform retrieval or rely on rigid single-label classifiers to select retrieval methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically selects the most suitable retrieval strategy based on query complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple single-hop and multi-hop datasets while reducing retrieval costs. |
Prompt Conditioned VAE: Enhancing Generative Replay for Lifelong Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative replay methods use only a single task-specific token to control their models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture task-specific distributions with a conditional variational autoencoder, conditioned on natural language prompts to guide the pseudo-sample generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on natural language understanding tasks of advanced task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems. |
Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models at Practical Scale: An Empirical Study (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown continuously improving multilingual capabilities. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the ability of open LLMs to handle multilingual machine translation tasks using a parallel-first monolingual-second data mixing strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models and achieves competitive performance with Google Translate and GPT-4-turbo. |
Context-Fidelity Boosting: Enhancing Faithful Generation through Watermark-Inspired Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Weixu Zhang, Fanghua Ye, Qiang Gao, Jian Li, Haolun Wu, Yuxing Tian, Sijing Duan, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li
| Challenge: | Large language models produce content that contradicts or overlooks information provided in the input context, a phenomenon known as faithfulness hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that boosts the generation probability of context-relevant tokens by boosting the generation of tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves faithfulness metrics with minimal generation overhead. |
Towards Less Generic Responses in Neural Conversation Models: A Statistical Re-weighting Method (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Sequence-to-sequence models tend to generate generic/dull responses . |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical re-weighting method that assigns different weights for multiple responses of the same query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves acceptance rate of generated responses and significantly reduces generated generic responses. |
Text2Tree: Aligning Text Representation to the Label Tree Hierarchy for Imbalanced Medical Classification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to medical text classification are struggling with imbalanced data distribution and rare labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework-agnostic algorithm that only utilizes internal label hierarchy in training deep learning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs better on public datasets and real-world medical records than existing methods. |
TACR: A Table Alignment-based Cell Selection Method for HybridQA (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Hybrid Question-Answering datasets lack a robust reasoning model for text-based QA. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-question-alignment-based cell-selection and reasoning model for hybrid text and table QA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on HybridQA and WikiTableQuestions datasets on cell selection and argumentation. |
CodeTool: Enhancing Programmatic Tool Invocation of LLMs via Process Supervision (2025.acl-long)
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YifeiLu YifeiLu, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Qiang Gao, Cheng Liu, Haibo Luo, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li, Feiliang Ren
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool invocation are often unnecessarily long and require lengthy reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for stepwise code generation that improves LLM tool invocation . they incorporate two distinct process rewards: the On-the-spot and the Latent Reward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM tool invocation by leveraging the concise nature of code. |
Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network for Multi-aspect Multi-sentiment Classification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) focus on aspect terms with the same sentiment polarity . current methods focus on sentences with only one aspect term or multiple aspect terms . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to model inter-aspect relationships and aspect-context relationships simultaneously using a heterogeneous graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict sentiments towards the given aspect term in a sentence . it can provide more detailed predictions compared with sentence-level sentiment analysis. |
Rethinking Multiple-Choice Questions for RLVR: Unlocking Potential via Distractor Design (2026.findings-acl)
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Xu Guo, Qiming Ge, Jian Tong, Kedi Chen, Jin Zhang, Xiaogui Yang, Xuan Gao, Haijun Lv, Zhihui Lu, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RLVR use multiple-choice questions as verifiable rewards . however, not all tasks provide reliable verification . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that actively constructs high-quality distractors to block elimination shortcuts and promote deep reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. |
Revisiting Entropy in Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Renren Jin, Pengzhi Gao, Yuqi Ren, Zhuowen Han, Tongxuan Zhang, Wuwei Huang, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a positive-advantage reweighting approach that regulates model entropy by adjusting the loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach regulates model entropy by adjusting loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training while maintaining competitive performance. |
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. |
Iterative Constrained Back-Translation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing back-translation methods focus on in-domain lexical knowledge, which may lead to poor translation of unseen in- domain words. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative constrained back-translation method to incorporate in-domain lexical knowledge into synthetic parallel data from BT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the BLEU score by up to 3.08 on four domains. |
STEP: Success-Rate-Aware Trajectory-Efficient Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing GRPO-based methods allocate sampling uniformly across tasks regardless of difficulty, propagate misleading learning signals and incur high sample-collection costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allocates sampling based on per-task success rates and performs fine-grained step-level optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves sample efficiency and training stability over existing GRPO variants and three ablation variants on OSWorld and AndroidWorld. |
An Exploratory Study on Model Compression for Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL translates user queries into SQL statements that can retrieve relevant answers from relational databases. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply model compression techniques to sketch-based and sequence-to-sequence Text-toSQL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models have higher inference efficiency and respond better to model compression than sequence-to-sequence models. |
Contrastive Learning for Prompt-based Few-shot Language Learners (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has shown that GPT-3 fine-tuning models with limited examples is effective . a contrastive learning framework clusters inputs from the same class under different augmented “views” and repels those from different classes. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised contrastive framework that clusters inputs from the same class under different augmented "views" they combine a contrastive loss with the standard masked language modeling loss in prompt-based few-shot learners . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the state-of-the-art methods in a diverse set of 15 language tasks. |
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. |
KaeDe: Progressive Generation of Logical Forms via Knowledge-Aware Question Decomposition for Improved KBQA (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for answering natural language questions are difficult to generate . lack of a logical form for complex graphs can negatively impact overall performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a generate-then-retrieve method that converts questions into structured LF queries . they propose to combine knowledge-aware question decomposition and progressive LF generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on WebQuestionSP and ComplexWebQuestions benchmarks. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
LongDocURL: a Comprehensive Multimodal Long Document Benchmark Integrating Understanding, Reasoning, and Locating (2025.acl-long)
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Chao Deng, Jiale Yuan, Pi Bu, Peijie Wang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Jian Xu, Xiao-Hui Li, Yuan Gao, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding benchmarks only handle a small number of pages . existing models are limited to handling only a limited number of documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a long document understanding benchmark that integrates three primary tasks and 20 sub-tasks based on different primary tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on open-source and closed-source models . the model outpersforms other models on more than 33,000 pages of documents . |
LaoBench: A Large-Scale Multidimensional Lao Benchmark for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jian Gao, Richeng Xuan, Zhaolu Kang, Dingshi Liao, Wenxin Huang, Zongmou Huang, Yangdi Xu, Bowen Qin, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, null Changjinli, Yonghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing SEA-focused benchmarks miss Lao-specific cultural grounding and linguistic properties. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for assessing large language models in Lao . they use open-source and held-out subsets to evaluate languages with a hybrid pipeline . |
| Outcome: | LaoBench is the first large-scale, high-quality, and multidimensional benchmark for assessing LLM language understanding and reasoning in Lao. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
Embedding Hallucination for Few-shot Language Fine-tuning (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained language models can cause severe over-fitting. |
| Approach: | They propose an Embedding Hallucination method which generates auxiliary embedding-label pairs to expand the fine-tuning dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current fine-tuning methods in a wide range of language tasks. |
Can LLMs See Without Pixels? Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence from Textual Descriptions (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhongbin Guo, Zhen Yang, Yushan Li, Xinyue Zhang, Wenyu Gao, Jiacheng Wang, Chengzhi Li, Xiangrui Liu, Ping Jian
| Challenge: | Existing advances in Spatial Intelligence rely on vision-Language Models . however, a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models without pixel-level input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark challenges large language models to perform symbolic reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. |
HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns (2026.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Jian Yang, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xie, Jen-tse Huang, Jun Gao, Shuai Huang, Yueping Kang, Yuanli Guo, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats psychological patterns as interacting causal forces and synthesizes 113 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4 fewer parameters. |
MobileBench-OL: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Mobile GUI Agents in Real-World Environment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents highlight the growing need for comprehensive evaluation benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an online benchmark with 1080 tasks from 80 Chinese apps that measures task execution, complex reasoning, noise robustness and auto-eval framework with a reset mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures task execution, complex reasoning, and noise robustness of agents by including 5 subsets, which set multiple evaluation dimensions. |