Papers by Jian Li
Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Shuyue Guo, Linzheng Chai, Wei Zhang, Aishan Liu, Chuan Hao, Zhoujun Li, Xin Zhao, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development. |
| Approach: | They propose a proportion-dependent scaling law that prioritizes high-utility languages . they propose PLs to have varying effects during pre-training that affect model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law is based on 1000+ experiments across multiple languages and models. |
Task Facet Learning: A Structured Approach To Prompt Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to prompt optimization are limited to learning multiple facets of a task from training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize a text prompt by considering different facets of a task and including them in the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can generate long, complex prompts that existing methods are unable to generate. |
CULG: Commercial Universal Language Generation (2022.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have improved performance for many NLP tasks in finance and healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale commercial universal language generation model which is pre-trained on a corpus drawn from 10 markets across 7 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models on commercial generation tasks and on other markets, languages, and tasks. |
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. |
FlexQuant: A Flexible and Efficient Dynamic Precision Switching Framework for LLM Quantization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fangxin Liu, Zongwu Wang, Jinhong Xia, Junping Zhao, Shouren Zhao, Jinjin Li, Jian Liu, Li Jiang, Haibing Guan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for quantization of large language models struggle to adapt to dynamic workloads. |
| Approach: | a new framework optimizes the trade-off between inference speed and accuracy . FlexQuant enables fine-grained, layer-wise mixed-precision quantization . |
| Outcome: | a new framework optimizes the trade-off between inference speed and accuracy . it achieves a 1.3 speedup across diverse language tasks with negligible accuracy loss . |
CROP: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Multilingual Labeled Sequence Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jian Yang, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuwei Yin, Li Dong, Dongdong Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Zhoujun Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) suffers from the scarcity of annotated training data, especially for low-resource languages without labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual entity projection framework to enable zero-shot cross-linguistic NER with the help of a multilingual labeled sequence translation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline method on two benchmarks by a large margin of +3 7 F1 scores and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods for knowledge base question answering are either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph retrieval framework that decouples the retrieval from the subsequent reasoning process and trains subgraphs for easier reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval and QA performance over existing methods. |
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Zhang, Xu Yang, Xiao Yang, Bowen Xian, Qizheng Li, Shikai Fang, Jingyuan Li, Jian Wang, Minrui Xu, Yuge Zhang, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering rely on tree search to rank candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a limited budget on a single GPU. |
CodeArena: Evaluating and Aligning CodeLLMs on Human Preference (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jian Yang, Jiaxi Yang, Wei Zhang, Jin Ke, Yibo Miao, Lei Zhang, Liqun Yang, Zeyu Cui, Yichang Zhang, Zhoujun Li, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Code large language models (codeLLMs) focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet, ignoring the alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark code-based on 40 categories and 44 programming languages to emulate real-world coding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that open-source code LLMs perform better than open-sourced ones. |
Temporal Token Matters: Investigating and Interpreting the Consistency of Temporal Ordering in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit notable deficiencies in temporal reasoning . phrasing changes can lead LLMs to produce inconsistent outputs . |
| Approach: | They investigate the mechanistic interpretability of temporal ordering within event temporal reasoning . they identify a sparse subset of attention heads that are causally responsible for reasoning outcomes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models in a variety of tasks and is validated by intervention-based experiments. |
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Yujie Feng, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Xu Chu, Zhaolu Kang, Yiran Liu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinkui Lin, Yuhui Zhang, Yongxiu Xu, Kun Huang, Hongzhang Mu, Yubin Wang, Gaopeng Gou, Li Qian, Li Peng, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for GMNER fail to address semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and long-tail distribution of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to address semantic ambiguity. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets. |
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongcheng Guo, Wei Zhang, Junhao Chen, Yaonan Gu, Jian Yang, Junjia Du, Shaosheng Cao, Binyuan Hui, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work. |
MINER: Multi-Interest Matching Network for News Recommendation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods learn a single user embedding from user’s historical behaviors to represent the reading interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a poly attention scheme to learn multiple interest vectors for each user, which encodes the different aspects of user interest. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the MIND news recommendation benchmark. |
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters. |
Turning the Tide: Repository-based Code Reflection (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) enhance programming by understanding and generating code across languages. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates code understanding and generation in repositories using code large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves code understanding and generation in repositories by evaluating 1,888 test cases across 6 programming languages. |
A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sub-Slot based task-oriented dialogs provide slot values segment by segment over multiple turns. |
| Approach: | They define a task called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) they build a Chinese dialog dataset SSD for boosting research on SSTOD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) it includes 40K dialogs and 500K utterances from Chinese names, phone numbers, ID numbers and license plate numbers . the dataset is well annotated with sub-slot values, slot values, dialog states and actions . |
PAEG: Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for adversarial example generation are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level adversarial example generation framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model by adopting a sentence-level substitution strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation performance and robustness to noise on three benchmarks. |
Multilingual Agreement for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that only use auxiliary languages to encourage multilingual agreement ignore the relationships between different language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual agreement-based method which explicitly models the agreement between different translation directions by randomly substituting some fragments of the source language with their counterpart translations of auxiliary languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the multilingual translation task of 10 language pairs. |
Demystifying Small Language Models for Edge Deployment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhenyan Lu, Xiang Li, Dongqi Cai, Rongjie Yi, Fangming Liu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Xiwen Zhang, Nicholas D. Lane, Mengwei Xu
| Challenge: | Small language models (SLMs) are a promising solution for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and the Web of Things. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SLMs to build and optimize a set of small language models that are publicly accessible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform 7B models in general tasks, while their in-context learning capabilities remain limited and their efficiency has significant optimization potential. |
Generative Table Pre-training Empowers Models for Tabular Prediction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to use table pre-training to boost tabular prediction performance remain open . a bachelor's degree earns less than 50K, and a generative LM can be used to unify tasks via one LM. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages table pre-training to empower tabular prediction models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on 12 datasets and can be easily combined with various backbone models. |
Tailoring Diagnostic Modeling to Individual Learners: Personalized Distractor Generation via MCTS-Guided Reasoning Reconstruction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current distractor generation methods produce shared distractors for all students, ignoring individual variations in reasoning, which limits their diagnostic effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which tailors distractors to each student’s specific cognitive flaws, inferred from their past question-answering (QA) history. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in generating plausible distractors and adapts to group-level settings. |
MTRec: Multi-Task Learning over BERT for News Recommendation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods learn news representations solely based on news titles. Existing methods only utilize title information and neglect other valuable news information such as categories and entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task method to incorporate multi-field information into BERT, which improves its news encoding capability. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on the MIND news recommendation benchmark show the proposed method is effective. |
Towards Reliable Large Audio Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
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Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yakun Song, Wenxi Chen, Chenpeng Du, Jian Wu, Yuanzhe Chen, Zhuo Chen, Yuping Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large audio language models (LALMs) have demonstrated impressive results and promising prospects in universal understanding and reasoning across speech, music, and general sound. |
| Approach: | They propose to use training-free and training-based methods to enhance LALM reliability to different extents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the reliability of large audio language models to different extents. |
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. |
Eliciting Implicit Acoustic Styles from Open-domain Instructions to Facilitate Fine-grained Controllable Generation of Speech (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work relies on pre-defined rules or templates to control the style of speech. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-domain instructions to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on their instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to generate speech with the acoustic style that meets users’ needs based on open-domain instructions. |
Public Sentiment Drift Analysis Based on Hierarchical Variational Auto-encoder (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting public sentiment drift are not designed for sentiment drift detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Variational Auto-Encoder model to learn better distribution representation and a new drift measure to directly evaluate distribution changes between historical and new data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than three existing state-of-the-art methods. |
From Pseudo-Balancing to True Specialization: Memory-Aware Routing for Mixture-of-Experts (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize expert-centered load balancing fail to account for pseudo-balance phenomenon . severe knowledge overlap among experts leads to redundant representations and inefficient parameter utilization . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prioritizes expert utilization over semantic alignment . they use memory-aware routing to ensure expert load balancing is consistent . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that MAR improves expert specialization by 35% and accuracy by 2%-25% . MAR matches baseline performance with only half the experts . |
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. |
Instruct Once, Chat Consistently in Multiple Rounds: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Dialogue (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tuning language models for dialogue generation has been a prevalent paradigm for building capable dialogue agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-round interactive dialogue tuning framework that models the speaker roles of agent and user separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs superior to fine-tuning and improves dialogue consistency. |
Doc2Bot: Accessing Heterogeneous Documents via Conversational Bots (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend . user information needs are often underspecified, and the nature of heterogeneous documents poses challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations . their dataset contains over 100,000 turns based on Chinese documents from five domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks are challenging and worthy of further research. |
Smart-Start Decoding for Neural Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation models adopt a monotonic decoding order of either left-to-right or right-to left. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts decoding target words from the right side of a median word and generates words on the left. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three datasets. |
TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zhaopeng Feng, Yan Zhang, Hao Li, Bei Wu, Jiayu Liao, Wenqiang Liu, Jun Lang, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in Machine Translation (MT). human evaluations reveal that LLM-generated translations still contain various errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based self-refinement framework that feeds error information back into LLMs to facilitate self-finement, leading to enhanced translation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms internal refinement and feedback methods while ensuring a robust translation quality baseline. |
Preview, Attend and Review: Schema-Aware Curriculum Learning for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog state tracking models neglect rich structural information in a dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose to use curriculum learning to leverage dialog state tracking data . they propose a model-agnostic framework that pre-trains a DST model with schema information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over a transformer-based and RNN-based model on WOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1. |
New Intent Discovery with Attracting and Dispersing Prototype (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting new intents with labeled data are not cluster-friendly . a robust prototypical attracting learning (RPAL) method is designed to compel instances to gravitate toward their corresponding prototype . |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and adaptive prototypical learning framework for globally distinct decision boundaries for both known and new intent categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on CLINC, BANKING, and StackOverflow benchmarks on three challenging benchmarks. |
POWSM: A Phonetic Open Whisper-Style Speech Foundation Model (2026.acl-long)
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Chin-Jou Li, Kalvin Chang, Shikhar Bharadwaj, Eunjung Yeo, Kwanghee Choi, Jian Zhu, David R. Mortensen, Shinji Watanabe
| Challenge: | Phone-level modeling of speech is a common approach to speech recognition, but it relies on task-specific architectures and datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a phonetic framework capable of performing multiple phone-related tasks . they propose 'Phonetic Open Whisper-style Speech Model' that can perform these tasks together . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or matches specialized PR models of similar size while supporting G2P, P2G, and ASR. |
GanLM: Encoder-Decoder Pre-training with an Auxiliary Discriminator (2023.acl-long)
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Jian Yang, Shuming Ma, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Haoyang Huang, Yuwei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Liqun Yang, Furu Wei, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods underutilize the benefits of language understanding for generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a GAN-style model for encoder-decoder pre-training with an auxiliary discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing pre-trained models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning for Open NER with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on integrating large language models (LLMs) with information extraction (IE) however, the best approach to incorporate information with LLMs for IE remains an open question. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese IT dataset to perform RA-IT for IE . they use semantically similar examples from the training dataset as the context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is evaluated in English and Chinese scenarios. |
HeteroCache: A Dynamic Retrieval Approach to Heterogeneous KV Cache Compression for Long-Context LLM Inference (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing static compression methods suffer from coarse-grained caching and high I/O overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free dynamic compression framework that uses a sparse attention mechanism to categorize attention heads based on stability and similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-context benchmarks and accelerates decoding by up to 3 compared to the original model with a 224K context. |
AdaMARP: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Interaction Framework for General Immersive Role-Playing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack immersion and adaptability, resulting in limited character orchestration and on-the-fly character introduction. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based framework that allows actors to interact with users in an ongoing narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms commercial LLMs in character consistency, environment grounding, and narrative coherence. |
Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show language agents lack human-level planning abilities . limitations and mechanisms to address them remain insufficiently understood . |
| Approach: | They apply a feature attribution study to identify key factors hindering agent planning . they identify the limited role of constraints and diminishing influence of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 15.6% on a real-world planning benchmark. |
Hierarchical Enhancement Framework for Aspect-based Argument Mining (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods have primarily treated ABAM as a nested named entity recognition problem, overlooking the need for tailored strategies to effectively address the specific challenges of ABA M tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-based Hierarchical Enhancement Framework (HEF) for Aspect-Based Argument Mining and introduce three new components to improve the performance and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple datasets and tasks verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework and components. |
Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on coding tutoring, but their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent workflow, Trace-and-Verify, which combines knowledge tracing to estimate a student’s knowledge state and turn-by-turn verification to ensure effective guidance toward task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent workflow achieves significantly higher success rates than existing tutoring agents. |
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. |
Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) aim to provide patients with medical services, such as diagnosis and prescription. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Flow enhanced Medical (DFMed) dialogue generation framework that extracts the medical entities and doctor's dialogue acts used in the dialogue history and models their transitions with an entity-centric graph flow and a sequential act flow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exceeds baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations on two datasets. |
Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Yinhe Zheng, Bowen Yu, Zhiliang Tian, Dongkyu Lee, Jian Sun, Yongbin Li, Nevin L. Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn languages only focus on supervised learning, and unlabeled data is underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised lifelong language learning setting where a model learns sequentially arriving language tasks with both labeled and unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various language tasks and is effective and superior to existing models. |
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. |
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. |
RPC-Bench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Research Paper Comprehension (2026.acl-long)
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Yelin Chen, Fanjin Zhang, Suping Sun, Yunhe Pang, Yuanchun Wang, Jian Song, XiaoYan Li, Lei Hou, Shu Zhao, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for understanding research papers offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review–rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on human-verified QA pairs and contains 15K questions. |
Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Deng, Weikai Xu, Hongda Sun, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujianfeng Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Rui Yan, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for LLM-based mobile agents are insufficient to evaluate their capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based mobile agents' planning capabilities . they expand UI operations by incorporating 103 APIs to accelerate task completion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 103 collected APIs and real user queries . the data is categorized into three distinct groups: SAST, SAMT, and MAMT . |
FactVerse: A Benchmark for Factual Consistency in Interleaved Image–Text Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yubo Shan, Kun Zhang, Qiming Xu, Liping Cao, Yingying Cao, Jian Zhang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Li, Yuanzhuo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack effective mechanisms to evaluate factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dedicated to evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods in evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
Certified Robustness to Word Substitution Attack with Differential Privacy (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples can be easily fooled by DNNs, making the robustness and security of NLP models significantly important. |
| Approach: | They propose a differential privacy-based algorithm to achieve certified robustness against word substitution at- tacks in text classification via differential privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves higher accuracy and more than 30X efficiency improvement over existing defense algorithms. |
C-ICL: Contrastive In-context Learning for Information Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for in-context learning with large language models focus on using correct or negative examples, ignoring the potential value of incorrect or negative samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot technique that leverages both correct and incorrect sample constructions to create in-context learning demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms previous few-shot in-context learning methods on a broad spectrum of related tasks. |
Controlled Text Generation Using Dictionary Prior in Variational Autoencoders (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely applied in text generation tasks, but they suffer from insufficient representation capacity and poor controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven prior that has expressivity and controllability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prior enjoys expressivity and controllability and can be used in language modeling and controlled text generation. |
Unifying Discrete and Continuous Representations for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Jie Fu, Jian Lan, Mei Li, Baosong Yang, Jun Xie, Yidan Zhang, Dezhong Peng, Jiancheng Lv
| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised paraphrase generation methods require large-scale, manually annotated paraphrase datasets, which are labor-intensive to build. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised pseudo-data construction method that generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
The Mark Fades: Adaptive Evolutionary Paraphrase-based Attack against LLM Watermarks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paraphrase-based watermark removal methods struggle to balance efficacy with text quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free evolutionary framework that models watermark removal as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem by using a Pseudo-Log-Likelihood-guided mutation to precisely target and modify watermark-carrying tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on a Qwen3 series watermark scheme while maintaining high semantic fidelity. |
Finding RELIEF: Shaping Reasoning Behavior without Reasoning Supervision via Belief Engineering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for shaping large reasoning models rely on reinforcement learning or fine-tuning with gold-standard reasoning traces. Existing techniques for behavior shaping rely only on additional reward modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns a model's self-concept with a target belief blueprint and internalizes desired traits by fine-tuning on synthesized, self-reflective QA pairs that affirm the target belief. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms behavior-supervised and preference-based models while requiring significantly lower training costs. |
Multi-Stage LLM Fine-Tuning with a Continual Learning Setting (2025.findings-naacl)
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Changhao Guan, Chao Huang, Hongliang Li, You Li, Ning Cheng, Zihe Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jian Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in knowledge-intensive applications, but they may face a multi-stage continuous learning scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage continuous learning paradigm that includes a preference-based learning bias to identify potential knowledge conflicts and a self-distillation-based data augmentation strategy to expand and enrich the training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm achieves a significant improvement in accuracy after 7 stages of fine-tuning compared to previous methods while preserving general knowledge. |
DIGAT: Modeling News Recommendation with Dual-Graph Interaction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods lack effective news-user feature interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-graph and user-graph channels to enhance news encodings . they also propose to perform effective feature interaction between news and user graphs based on semantic-augmented graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph attention networks outperform existing NR methods on the benchmark dataset MIND. |
AnchorSeg: Language Grounded Query Banks for Reasoning Segmentation (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Qian, Chuanhang Deng, Qiang Huang, Jian Xiong, Mingxuan Li, Yingbo Zhou, Wei Zhai, Jintao Chen, Dejing Dou
| Challenge: | Existing models rely on a single segmentation token whose hidden state implicitly encodes both semantic reasoning and spatial localization . Existing methods rely only on SEG>, which encodes semantic reasoning, limiting the model's ability to explicitly disentangle what to segment from where to segment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformulates reasoning segmentation as a structured conditional generation process over image tokens conditioned on language grounded query banks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges token-level predictions and pixel-level supervision by decoupling spatial grounding from semantic reasoning through structured language grounded query banks. |
FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing financial question answering datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset for long-form question answering in finance to evaluate QA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites. |
EBERT: Efficient BERT Inference with Dynamic Structured Pruning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pruning has been demonstrated as an effective way of reducing computational complexity for deep networks, especially CNNs for computer vision tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic structured pruning algorithm that prunes model weights at run-time . they propose to prune the unimportant heads in multi-head self-attention layers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on different tasks. |
ReEvalMed: Rethinking Medical Report Evaluation by Aligning Metrics with Real-World Clinical Judgment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Automatically generated radiology reports often receive high scores from existing evaluation metrics but fail to earn clinicians’ trust. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-evaluation framework that uses criteria spanning discrimination, robustness, and monotonicity to evaluate existing metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers guidance for building more clinically reliable evaluation methods. |
CVRH: Cross-modal Variational Role Hypergraph Network via Semantic Enhancement for Multi-modal Event Argument Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on weakly aligning uni-modal representations and generatively data augmentation techniques, but they ignore the potential impact of event role information on MEAE. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal variational role hypergraph network via semantic enhancement to model high-order role correlations among cross-mod arguments in multi-modal documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 6.9% improvement in F1-score on the M2E2 benchmark compared to current state-of-the-art methods. |
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. |
From Misleading Queries to Accurate Answers: A Three-Stage Fine-Tuning Method for LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on correcting the output but overlook the ability of LLMs to detect and correct misleading content in the input itself. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage fine-tuning method that improves LLMs' ability to detect and correct misleading information in input queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and factuality of LLM responses while also reducing hallucinations. |
Prototype Tuning: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (FSDLRE) aims to develop models capable of generalizing to new categories with minimal support examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-training approach to train Large Language Models to improve their ICL capabilities . they construct simulated episodes using relation types that do not overlap with test corpus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline models on few-shot tasks. |
MUR: Momentum Uncertainty guided Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Yan, Fangzhi Xu, Rongman Xu, Yifei Li, Jian Zhang, Haoran Luo, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Haiteng Zhao, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for optimizing reasoning quality are limited by overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%. |
A Survey on Personalized Alignment—The Missing Piece for Large Language Models in Real-World Applications (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their transition to real-world applications reveals a critical limitation: the inability to adapt to individual preferences while maintaining alignment with universal human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables LLMs to adapt their behavior within ethical boundaries based on individual preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes implementation approaches and evaluates their effectiveness across various scenarios. |
M2C: Towards Automatic Multimodal Manga Complement (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal manga analysis focuses on enhancing manga understanding with visual and textual features. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to enhance manga understanding with visual and textual features by providing a shared semantic space for vision and language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task provides a shared semantic space for vision and language understanding. |
Document-Level Event Extraction via Information Interaction Based on Event Relation and Argument Correlation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level Event Extraction (DEE) is a vital task in NLP . current approaches overlook intricate relationships among events and subtle correlations among arguments within a document . |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction tool that integrates event relationships and argument correlation graphs to model the relationship among events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network outperforms existing models and large language models in terms of F1-score across two benchmark datasets. |
Option Symbol Matters: Investigating and Mitigating Multiple-Choice Option Symbol Bias of Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a widely used task in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free, causal effect driven debiasing method which intervenes the activations of identified components according to their causal effects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the aforementioned bias and improves the performance of LLMs. |
PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models lack generative and reasoning capabilities, resulting in poor performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-aware task-adaptive reward model that enables pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7% over the base models on RewardBench and RMBench. |
Visual Attention Reasoning via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification and replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on hallucination and safety benchmarks. |
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. |
Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenhe Wu, Jian Yang, Zhongjiang He, Changzai Pan, Jiaheng Liu, Xianjie Wu, Yu Zhao, Shuangyong Song, Yongxiang Li, Zhoujun Li, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Tables are a widely used data format that poses unique challenges for language models due to their structured row-column interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a region-based reinforcement learning approach that integrates region evidence into reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three benchmark datasets and significantly reduces the reasoning token consumption by 67.5%. |
Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have used meta-learning to simulate the few-shot task . however, this sample-wise comparison may be severely disturbed by the various expressions in the same class. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning-based induction network to learn a generalized class-wise representation of each class in a support set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on a sentiment and dialogue intent datasets. |
XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser (2025.coling-main)
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Xianfu Cheng, Hang Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiang Li, Weixiao Zhou, Fei Liu, Kui Wu, Xiangyuan Guan, Tao Sun, Xianjie Wu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Document AI parsing semi-structured image form is a key information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal and multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER which integrates SER and relation extraction into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 1.79% improvement on RE tasks in multilingual and zero-shot settings. |
Humans Need Context, What about Machines? Investigating Conversational Context in Abusive Language Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we examine the role of conversational context in abusive language detection . prior studies have ignored the contextual nature of abusive language, ignoring this aspect . toxicity, hate speech, harmful stereotypes are among the forms of harmful language . |
| Approach: | They propose to use conversational context to analyze abusive language detection using two methods . they use "abusive language" as an umbrella term to refer to various forms of harmful language . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on two datasets in English and a new dataset of French tweets annotated for hate speech and stereotypes. |
Uncovering Strategic Egoism Behaviors in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 9 proprietary LLMs reveal that SE behaviors are widespread . study identifies egoistic decision-making as a risk for large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to measure egoistic behavior in large language models . they propose toxicity, jailbreak vulnerability and a lightweight mitigation that reinforces situational constraints . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has a 67.96% occurrence rate and frequently manifests as manipulative coercion. |
Foresight Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jessie Wang, Jiawen Duan, Jian Wang, Kaitao Song, Chunpu Xu, Johnny K. W. Ho, YU Fenggang, Johan F. Hoorn, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning enhancement methods do not capture foresight in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate opponent modeling principles into policy optimization to enhance strategic reasoning in LLMs by integrating opponent modeling into policy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing reasoning-based LLMs in out-of-domain scenarios and shows that it significantly enhances strategic reasoning across LLM of varying sizes and origins. |
Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Bang Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Qingxuan Jiang, Peisong Wang, Jiaqi Chen, Zheng Xie, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Yifan Yang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have evolved from statistical sequence predictors to sophisticated autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and sustaining multi-turn conversa-tions. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that instantiates a "Sentient Agent" that simulates human-like emotional changes and inner thoughts to provide a more realistic evaluation of the model in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures the agent's higher-order social cognition in multi-turn conversations. |
Improving Neural Machine Translation with Soft Template Prediction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) depend on source text to generate translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use extracted templates from tree structures as soft target templates to guide the translation procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on four benchmarks and demonstrates the effectiveness of soft target templates. |
Dynamic Memory Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that models can benefit from query-aware methods for few-shot text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic memory-based network for few-short text classification that uses static memory to adapt to unseen classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the miniRCV1 and ODIC datasets by 24% . Detailed analysis is performed to show how the proposed network achieves the new performance. |
PRiSM: Benchmarking Phone Realization in Speech Models (2026.acl-long)
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Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Yoonjae Kim, Kwanghee Choi, Eunjung Yeo, Ryan Soh-Eun Shim, Hanyu Zhou, Brendon Boldt, Karen Rosero, Kalvin Chang, Darsh Agrawal, Keer Xu, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Jian Zhu, Shinji Watanabe, David R. Mortensen
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of phone recognition systems only measure surface-level transcription accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose to standardize transcription-based evaluation and assess downstream utility in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings with transcription and representation probes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms LALMs in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings. |
MdEval: Massively Multilingual Code Debugging (2026.findings-acl)
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Shukai Liu, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Jiajun Shi, He Zhu, Liran Wang, Jin Ke, Wei Zhang, Hualei Zhu, Shuyue Guo, Tao Sun, Jiaheng Liu, Yunlong Duan, Yu Hao, Liqun Yang, Guanglin Niu, Ge Zhang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are limited in terms of language diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual debugging benchmark that includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and introduces the debug instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair task, bug localization task, and bug identification task. |
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. |
HSGraphAgent: Knowledge-Graph-Guided Large Language Models for Harmonized System Code Classification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Harmonized System (HS) code classification is a hierarchically structured and regulation-constrained task, often complicated by short and noisy product descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-graph-guided LLM framework that formulates HS classification as a stepwise, regulation-aware reasoning process over an explicit HS knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constrains inference to legally valid paths while producing explicit and traceable reasoning trajectories. |
Improving Semantic Matching through Dependency-Enhanced Pre-trained Model with Adaptive Fusion (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on dependency prior structure integration into pre-trained models is still unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-based fusion attention paradigm which explicitly introduces dependency prior structure into pre-trained models and adaptively fuses it with semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on 10 public datasets, demonstrating the benefits of adaptively fusing dependency structure in semantic matching task. |
Empirical Study of Zero-Shot NER with ChatGPT (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been a key component of natural language processing (NLP) . |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the NER task into simpler subproblems by labels and propose a syntactic augmentation strategy to stimulate model's intermediate thinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve remarkable improvements for zero-shot NER across seven benchmarks, including Chinese and English datasets. |
FewNLU: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Methods for Few-Shot Natural Language Understanding (2022.acl-long)
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Yanan Zheng, Jing Zhou, Yujie Qian, Ming Ding, Chonghua Liao, Li Jian, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Jie Tang, Sebastian Ruder, Zhilin Yang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols for few-shot natural language understanding (NLU) tasks are inconsistent and hinder fair comparison and measuring progress. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that improves previous evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., test performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
Constructing Your Model’s Value Distinction: Towards LLM Alignment with Anchor Words Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a study of large language models (LLMs) shows that they can generate outputs that are honest, positive, harmless, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that amplifies logits difference between positive and negative tokens . they propose to use the logits gap to generate positive and positive tokens after alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves effective alignment, but requires fewer computational resources compared to training-time alignment methods. |
Information Aggregation for Multi-Head Attention with Routing-by-Agreement (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on extracting informative or distinct partial-representations from different subspaces, while few studies have paid attention to the aggregation of the extracted partial-Representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a routing-by-agreement algorithm to improve multi-head attention by iteratively updating the proportion of how much a part should be assigned to a whole based on agreement between parts and wholes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves the information aggregation for multi-head attention over the standard linear transformation on linguistic probing and machine translation tasks. |
MobileVLM: A Vision-Language Model for Better Intra- and Inter-UI Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Qinzhuo Wu, Weikai Xu, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujian Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Recent mobile AI agents based on VLMs lack basic mobile capabilities due to their pre-trained nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile AI agent based on VLMs that includes additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing VLMs on the Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M . |
pFedGPT: Hierarchically Optimizing LoRA Aggregation Weights for Personalized Federated GPT Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with data heterogeneity and adapt shared global knowledge to individual client needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization (HBO) for fine-grained, personalized LoRA aggregation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on personalized FL benchmarks while introducing only minimal (approx. 4%) additional optimization overhead. |
End-to-End Optimization of LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Search Systems via Heterogeneous-Group-Based Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods depend on large critic networks to evaluate joint actions, leading to instability and high memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize large language models for agent-specific roles . they propose combining agent-based frameworks with retrieval-augmented generation . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that multi-agent group policy optimization outperforms baselines in task performance and computational efficiency. |
Multi-Head Attention with Disagreement Regularization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encourage diversity among multi-head attention are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a disagreement regularization term to encourage diversity among attention heads . they validated their approach on EnglishGerman and ChineseEnglish translation tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation performance across language pairs on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks. |
DT-Solver: Automated Theorem Proving with Dynamic-Tree Sampling Guided by Proof-level Value Function (2023.acl-long)
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Haiming Wang, Ye Yuan, Zhengying Liu, Jianhao Shen, Yichun Yin, Jing Xiong, Enze Xie, Han Shi, Yujun Li, Lin Li, Jian Yin, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural theorem-proving resort to large language models and tree searches. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic-Tree Driven Theorem Solver to accommodate general theoremes by guiding the search procedure with state confidence and proof-level values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular theorem-proving datasets with a 6.65% improvement on average in terms of success rate. |
Can LLM Safety Be Ensured by Constraining Parameter Regions? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are often assumed to contain parameter subsets whose modification directly influences safety behaviors. |
| Approach: | They evaluate four methods to identify parameter subsets with "safety regions" they find low overlap, but overlap drops when refinement is done using utility datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show low overlap and drop significantly when refined using utility datasets. |
Exploring All-In-One Knowledge Distillation Framework for Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods only obtain one lightweight student each time . this could be resource-intensive and resulting in multiple students not being optimally utilized . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework which generates multiple satisfactory students at once. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates multiple satisfactory students at once. |
From Fake to Real: Mitigating Out-of-Distribution Bias in In-Context Learning via Feedback Supervision from Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is one of the most common methods for complex Natural Language Understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses model confidence and perturbation perplexity to enhance the quality of pseudo-labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces OOD biases by avoiding direct use of source data. |
LVP-M3: Language-aware Visual Prompt for Multilingual Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances struggle to train a separate model for each language pair, which is costly and unaffordable when the number of languages increases in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose to train different MMT models to support translations between different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to handle the above issues by providing a shared semantic space for multiple languages. |
Disco-RAG: Discourse-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Dongqi Liu, Hang Ding, Qiming Feng, Xurong Xie, Zhucun Xue, Chengjie Wang, Jian Li, Jiangning Zhang, Yabiao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing RAG strategies treat retrieved passages in a flat and unstructured way, which prevents the model from capturing structural cues and constrains its ability to synthesize knowledge from dispersed evidence across documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly injects discourse signals into the generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on question answering and long-document summarization benchmarks show the efficacy of the proposed framework. |
CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on “factual statements” that rephrase source materials, but ignore “cognitive statements” . evaluating and detecting "faithfulness hallucinations" remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess faithfulness of cognitive statements and introduce a dataset to scale easily across models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses faithfulness of cognitive statements and scales easily across models. |
Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding (2023.acl-long)
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Ziheng Li, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Qiang Lou, Haizhen Huang, Jian Jiao, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-alignment pre-training framework that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-lingual sentence embedding on three cross-linguistic benchmarks. |
STeCa: Step-level Trajectory Calibration for LLM Agent Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on behavior cloning from expert demonstrations or preference learning through exploratory trajectory sampling, but these methods often struggle to address long-horizon tasks where suboptimal actions accumulate step by step, causing agents to deviate from correct task trajectories. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for LLM-based agent learning that identifies suboptimal actions through a step-level reward comparison during exploration and constructs calibrated trajectories using LLM reflection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in long-horizon tasks where suboptimal actions accumulate step by step, causing agents to deviate from correct task trajectories. |
Retrieval, Reasoning, Re-ranking: A Context-Enriched Framework for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing embedding-based methods rely on triples in the KG, which is vulnerable to specious relation patterns and long-tail entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-enriched framework for KGC that uses a large language model to generate potential answers for each query triple. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on FB15k237 and WN18RR datasets. |
Novel Slot Detection With an Incremental Setting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current dialogue systems face diverse user requests and rapid change domains, making quickly adapt to scenarios with previous unseen slot types becomes a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an incremental novel slot detection task which separates the dialogue system to deal with novel types as two major phrases: 1) model discovers unknown slots; 2) training model to possess the capability to handle new classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes catastrophic forgetting during the process of INSD and is highly effective. |
World Models with Hints of Large Language Models for Goal Achieving (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods address this by adding intrinsic rewards, but they fail to provide meaningful guidance in long-horizon decision-making tasks with large state and action spaces lacking purposeful exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal model-based RL approach that integrates the proposed hinting subgoals into the model rollouts to encourage goal discovery and reaching in challenging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in challenging, sparse-reward environments such as HomeGrid, Crafter, and Minecraft by 41.8%, 21.1%, and 9.9%. |
CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation is needed to address the problem of knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation that uses dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns to bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally. |
Emotion Inference in Multi-Turn Conversations with Addressee-Aware Module and Ensemble Strategy (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies on three different benchmark conversation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model over several strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose an addressee-aware module to automatically learn whether the participant keeps the historical emotional state or is affected by others in the next upcoming turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict the participant's emotion in the next upcoming turn without knowing the participant’s response yet. |
Towards Generalized Open Information Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) models are evaluated on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. |
| Approach: | They propose to generalize OpenIE over unseen target domains with different data distributions from source training domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats the previous methods in both in- and out-of-domain settings by 6.0% in F1 score absolutely. |
GRACE: Gradient-guided Controllable Retrieval for Augmenting Attribute-based Text Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for controlling the generation of pre-trained language models infuse domain bias into the generation process, making it difficult to generate out-of-domain texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses retrieval to generate fluent sentences with high attribute relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate fluent sentences with high attribute relevance while keeping domain bias out of the model. |
Alleviating Over-smoothing for Unsupervised Sentence Representation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn better unsupervised sentence representations have been successful . over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentences reduces the capacity of powerful PLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve the over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentence representations by combining negatives from PLMs intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on different strong baselines on Semantic Textual Similarity and Transfer datasets. |
Low-Resource Response Generation with Template Prior (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing open domain response generation models are limited to paired data, but are less explored in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a neural response generation model with unpaired data and paired data as prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in both automatic and human evaluation when only a few pairs are available. |
How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Zhongbin Guo, Zuming Zhang, Chengzhi Li, Yonghong Deng, Xinyue Zhang, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on spatial intelligence from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence have not explored whether visual intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a linguistic perspective to investigate spatial intelligence from a theoretical perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy. |
Unlocking the Power of Large Language Models for Entity Alignment (2024.acl-long)
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Xuhui Jiang, Yinghan Shen, Zhichao Shi, Chengjin Xu, Wei Li, Zixuan Li, Jian Guo, Huawei Shen, Yuanzhuo Wang
| Challenge: | Entity Alignment (EA) is a crucial step in unifying data from heterogeneous sources and plays a critical role in data-driven AI applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates large language models to improve EA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates large language models (LLMs) to improve EA accuracy while preserving efficiency. |
Joint Pre-Encoding Representation and Structure Embedding for Efficient and Low-Resource Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models require longer training and inference times as well as increased memory usage. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode textual descriptions into semantic representations before training and integrate structural embedding with pre-encoded semantic description to improve model's prediction performance on 1-N relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases inference speed by 30x and reduces training memory by approximately 60% on the WN18RR and UMLS datasets. |
Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate toxic content in pretrained language models are resource-intensive and require additional components. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enables the PLM itself to achieve "self-detoxification" they identify the toxification direction from the normal generation process to the one prompted with the negative prefix and then steer the generation to the reverse direction by manipulating the information movement within the attention layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods without any fine-tuning or extra components. |
LoRaDA: Low-Rank Direct Attention Adaptation for Efficient LLM Fine-tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques allow for adjustments to only a minor fraction of the parameters of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank direct attention adapted method for efficient LLM fine-tuning . they propose LMAM, which can bring negative attention to self-attention modules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the full fine-tuning method by 2.1% on GLUE benchmark. |
ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen, Shuqi Kong, Jiaan Wang, Kexin Huang, Tianle Gu, Yixu Wang, Jian Wang, Liang Dandan, Zhixu Li, Yan Teng, Yanghua Xiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance. |
| Approach: | They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs. |
Context Tracking Network: Graph-based Context Modeling for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to fully utilize contextual information which plays an important role in interpreting sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based Context Tracking Network to model the discourse context for IDRR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can integrate sentence-level and token-level contextual semantics better than existing models. |
M3TQA: Massively Multilingual Multitask Table Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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Daixin Shu, Jian Yang, Zhenhe Wu, Xianjie Wu, Xianfu Cheng, Guan Xiangyuan, Yanghai Wang, Pengfei Wu, Tingyang Yang, Hualei Zhu, Wei Zhang, Ge Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual table benchmarks suffer from geolinguistic imbalance - overrepresenting certain languages and lacking sufficient scale for rigorous cross-lingual analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for massively multilingual table question answering that includes tables expanded to 97 languages from Chinese and English sources. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs show that synthetically generated training data significantly boosts performance, especially for low-resource languages. |
m3P: Towards Multimodal Multilingual Translation with Multimodal Prompt (2024.lrec-main)
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Jian Yang, Hongcheng Guo, Yuwei Yin, Jiaqi Bai, Bing Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xinnian Liang, LinZheng Chai, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal neural machine translation models focus on bilingual translation, but experimental results show that they outperform the text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to leverage the multimodal prompt to guide the Multimodal Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (m3P) this framework aligns the representations of different languages with the same meaning and generates the conditional vision-language memory for translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Li, Rui Xu, Jian Yang, Junnan Liu, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Likang Xiao, Ming LI, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that modulates the contribution of each source model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model merging framework outperforms strong baselines on multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
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Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code (2024.acl-long)
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Tao Sun, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Yuwei Yin, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation of algorithm steps using conventions of programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous prompting methods by a large margin . the proposed model is based on a dataset of natural-language questions and code solutions . |
CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing language models rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to emulate character behaviors but neglect the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving these behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RPLA adopting a cognize-then-respond reasoning paradigm that leverages dual cognition for more contextually grounded and psychologically coherent responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed RPLA outperforms baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks. |
EmoPrompt-ECPE: Emotion Knowledge-aware Prompt-tuning for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) do not distinguish between the emotion-caused pairs that belong to different types of emotions, limiting their applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose an Emotion-cause pair extraction method which integrates the implicit knowledge of cause clauses into a prompt template and extends the emotion labels to categories with an external emotion word base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts all potential emotion clauses and corresponding cause clauses from unannotated documents. |
Structural Contrastive Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train multilingual language models using pretraining tasks like mask language modeling have yielded promising results on a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to align the structural words in a parallel sentence, enhancing models’ ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves model's ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations by increasing the frequency of negative pairings. |
Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are inherently dual-use and can be leveraged for both beneficial and harmful purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves tighter alignment on WMDP Bio and RWKU benchmarks. |
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. |
Mind’s Mirror: Distilling Self-Evaluation Capability and Comprehensive Thinking from Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, but their scale and computational demands pose challenges to their practical application. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for distilling the self-evaluation capability from LLMs into SLMs and advocate for more comprehensive thinking by incorporating multiple distinct CoTs and self-estimation outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of distilled SLMs on three NLP benchmarks. |
Learning Low-Resource End-To-End Goal-Oriented Dialog for Fast and Reliable System Deployment (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing end-to-end dialog systems perform less effectively when data is scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Dialog System which combines meta-learning and human-machine collaboration to improve dialog learning by a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms non-meta-learning baselines on a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset for low-resource goal-oriented dialog learning. |
FARSS: Fisher-Optimized Adaptive Low-Rank and Singular-Vector Selection for Knowledge-Preserving Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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Renxing Chen, Ziwei Xiang, Peisong Wang, Hongjian Fang, Meng Li, Fanhu Zeng, Yanan Zhu, Peipei Yang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Jian Cheng
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation methods for large language models have limitations in preserving world knowledge and limiting updates to preserve world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fisher-optimized adaptive low Rank and Singular-VectorSelection framework for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning that allows efficient and task-sensitive updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
KFCNet: Knowledge Filtering and Contrastive Learning for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have led to substantial gains over a broad range of NLP tasks, but have limitations for high-quality tasks such as commonsense generation and ad keyword generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Filtering and Contrastive learning Network which references external knowledge and achieves better generation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art on the CommonGen benchmark by a large margin. |
Where and What: Reasoning Dynamic and Implicit Preferences in Situated Conversational Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Situated conversational recommendation (SCR) uses visual scenes grounded in specific environments and natural language dialogue to deliver contextually appropriate recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates scene transition estimation and Bayesian inverse inference to provide contextually appropriate recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superiority over baselines on two representative benchmarks on dynamic scene transitions and implicit user intents. |
Debate-of-Thoughts: Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in LLMs Through Internal Deliberation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmented generation are based on a simplistic binary choice of relying on external contexts or memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms conflict resolution into an active deliberation process by incorporating contradictions as opportunities for deeper reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DoT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while generating transparent debate transcripts that explain its decisions. |
Identifying and Mitigating Social Bias Knowledge in Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for debiasing may generate incorrect or nonsensical predictions but leave aside individual commonsense facts, resulting in modified knowledge that elicits unreasonable or undesired predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that identifies encoding locations of biases within language models and then applies the Fairness-Stamp (FAST) they also propose 'BiaScope' to evaluate the retention of commonsense knowledge and generalization across paraphrased social biase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art baselines with superior debiasing performance while not compromising the overall model capability for knowledge retention and prediction. |
Explicit and Implicit Data Augmentation for Social Event Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Social event detection relies on labeled data, but annotation is costly and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play dual augmentation framework that combines explicit text-based and implicit feature-space augmentation to enhance data diversity and model robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best baseline model by 17.67% on the Twitter2012 dataset and 15.57% on the twitter2018 dataset in terms of the average F1 score. |
Benchmarking for Domain-Specific LLMs: A Case Study on Academia and Beyond (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Comp-Comp is an iterative benchmarking framework grounded in the principles of comprehensiveness and compactness. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework that incorporates the principle of comprehensiveness and compactness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is domain-agnostic and adaptable to a wide range of specialized fields. |
Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current studies on text image translation face bottlenecks due to lack of a publicly available dataset and poor optical character recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a text image translation model with a multimodal codebook and an OCR dataset for Chinese-English translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can associate the image with relevant texts, providing useful supplementary information for translation. |
Estimating Soft Labels for Out-of-Domain Intent Detection (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect out-of-dominance (OOD) intents are limited by the lack of OOD samples. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive soft pseudo labeling method that can estimate soft labels for pseudo OOD samples when training OOD detectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competing methods on three benchmark datasets and consistently outperformed previous methods. |
Doc-V*: Coarse-to-Fine Interactive Visual Reasoning for Multi-Page Document VQA (2026.acl-long)
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Yuanlei Zheng, Pei Fu, Hang Li, Ziyang Wang, Yuyi Zhang, Wenyu Ruan, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Wei Chen, Xiang Bai
| Challenge: | Existing OCR-free approaches to document visual question answering are brittle and passive. |
| Approach: | They propose an OCR-free agentic framework that casts multi-page DocVQA as sequential evidence aggregation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and proprietary models in five benchmarks and improves out-of-domain performance by 47.9% over baseline. |
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. |
Ambiguity Awareness Optimization: Towards Semantic Disambiguation for Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets. |
Seeing Isn’t Believing: Mitigating Belief Inertia via Active Intervention in Embodied Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to tackle complex embodied tasks through environmental interaction, but they still make suboptimal decisions and perform ineffective actions. |
| Approach: | They propose an active belief intervention mechanism that generates explicit belief states . they characterize belief inertia as a key failure mode of LLM-based agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant gains in task success rates across embodied benchmarks. |
A Multi-modal Debiasing Model with Dynamical Constraint for Robust Visual Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that many well-developed Visual Question Answering systems suffer from bias problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to mitigate bias problem by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets. |
Why Safeguarded Ships Run Aground? Aligned Large Language Models’ Safety Mechanisms Tend to Be Anchored in The Template Region (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Infilling a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model output is a common practice for existing LLMs, but it is vulnerable to inference-time jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to fill a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model output and to detach safety mechanisms from the template region to mitigate the risk of inference-time jailbreak attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is widespread across aligned LLMs and shows that it mitigates inference-time jailbreak vulnerabilities. |
Enhancing Event Causality Identification with Event Causal Label and Event Pair Interaction Graph (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event causality identification (ECI) do not consider event causal label information and interaction information between event pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enrich the representation of event pairs by introducing the event causal label information and the interaction information between event pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
S2SQL: Injecting Syntax to Question-Schema Interaction Graph Encoder for Text-to-SQL Parsers (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based encoders for text-to-SQL do not model the syntax of natural language questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject Syntax to question-Schema graph encoder for text-to-SQL parsers and employ the decoupling constraint to induce diverse relational edge embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all existing methods when pre-training models are used, resulting in a performance ranks first on the Spider leaderboard. |
DABERT: Dual Attention Enhanced BERT for Semantic Matching (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for semantic sentence matching lack the ability to capture subtle differences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Transformer-based pre-trained language model to capture fine-grained differences in sentence pairs by introducing a dual attention module and a fusion module to learn the aggregation of difference and affinity features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to capture fine-grained differences in sentence pairs. |
T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Sishi Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiangyu Li, Jiaxin Peng, Xiaoyan Gu, Jian Yang, Wenhan Chang, Zhenhe Wu, Jiang Zhong, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of table reasoning in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual table-to-report task and a table-based benchmark to assess the quality of table reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a bilingual benchmark with 457 industrial tables and evaluation criteria to measure the quality of report generation. |
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 . |
Intra-Correlation Encoding for Chinese Sentence Intention Matching (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve sentence intention matching for Chinese text are limited due to the particularity of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines character-granularity and word-granulularity features to perform sentence intention matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture sentence feature information from multiple perspectives and correlation information between different levels of sentences. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
UCS-SQL: Uniting Content and Structure for Enhanced Semantic Bridging In Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhenhe Wu, Zhongqiu Li, JieZhangChinaTele JieZhangChinaTele, Zhongjiang He, Jian Yang, Yu Zhao, Ruiyu Fang, Bing Wang, Hongyan Xie, Shuangyong Song, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods overlook the challenge of effectively transforming structure information from NL to SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework that unites content and structure pipes to bridge the gap between NL and SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between natural language questions and SQL by combining content and structure pipes. |
Towards Real-world Scenario: Imbalanced New Intent Discovery (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on detecting known and previously undefined categories of user intent . skewed and long-tailed distributions often encountered in open-world scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose to use imbalanced new intent discovery task to identify familiar and novel intent categories within long-tailed distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing benchmark on three datasets to simulate the real-world long-tail distributions. |
Answering Cross-Dimensional Geometric Visual Questions by Multi-constraint Spatial Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for solving complex visual questions are limited in their ability to represent in a cross-dimensional space. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can answer complex visual questions using cross-dimensional reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can answer complex visual questions in 2D to 3D space with great application value. |
Failing Forward: Improving Generative Error Correction for ASR with Synthetic Data and Retrieval Augmentation (2025.findings-acl)
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Sreyan Ghosh, Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli, Michael Levit, Peidong Wang, Jian Xue, Dinesh Manocha, Jinyu Li
| Challenge: | Generative Error Correction (GEC) is a powerful post-processing method to boost the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to augment GEC models with retrieved entities to improve accuracy in out-of-domain and out-od scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on multiple datasets and settings. |
Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty suffers from the cold start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale empirical analysis to examine human-AI Difficulty Alignment . they find that models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model size is not reliably helpful for human-AI alignment . high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, the authors say . |
mABC: Multi-Agent Blockchain-inspired Collaboration for Root Cause Analysis in Micro-Services Architecture (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Wei Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Jian Yang, Zhoujin Tian, Yi Zhang, Yan Chaoran, Zhoujun Li, Tongliang Li, Xu Shi, Liangfan Zheng, Bo Zhang
| Challenge: | Root cause analysis (RCA) in Micro-services architectures with escalating complexity is challenging due to fault propagation and circular dependencies among nodes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where multiple agents follow Agent Workflow and collaborate in blockchain-inspired voting to ensure the reliability of root cause analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of steps and standardizes task processing through Agent Workflow. |
Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study defines a conversation target from the system side to proactively steer conversations toward predefined targets or accomplish specific system-side goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset curation framework that automatically curations a large-scale personalized dialogue dataset using a role-playing approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is of high quality and could contribute to exploring personalized target-oriented dialogue. |
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. |
JudgeAgent: Beyond Static Benchmarks for Knowledge-Driven and Dynamic LLM Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhichao Shi, Xuhui Jiang, Chengjin Xu, Cangli Yao, Shengjie Ma, Yinghan Shen, Zixuan Li, Jian Guo, Yuanzhuo Wang
| Challenge: | Current evaluation methods for large language models rely on static benchmarks . limited knowledge coverage and fixed difficulties hinder the targeted optimizations resulting in superficial evaluations of LLMs - a problem that has been addressed by JudgeAgent . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-driven and dynamic evaluation framework for large language models . judgeAgent leverages LLM agents equipped with context graphs to traverse knowledge structures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve comprehensive evaluations and facilitate effective model iterations. |
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. |
ToolRerank: Adaptive and Hierarchy-Aware Reranking for Tool Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have proposed tool learning, which augments LLMs with external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive and hierarchy-aware reranking method to refine retrieval results by truncating the retrieval result related to seen and unseen tools at different positions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves retrieval results, leading to better execution results generated by the LLM. |
Dialogue Planning via Brownian Bridge Stochastic Process for Goal-directed Proactive Dialogue (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Goal-directed dialogue systems aim to proactively reach a pre-determined target through multi-turn conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a coherent dialogue planning approach that uses a stochastic process to model the temporal dynamics of dialogue paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates more coherent utterances and achieves the goal with a higher success rate. |
Self-supervised Preference Optimization: Enhance Your Language Model with Preference Degree Awareness (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised preference optimization framework that replaces the reward model with a preference loss and alignment loss to improve LLMs' ability to understand human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be integrated with existing preference optimization methods and significantly boost their performance. |
Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Luoyang Sun, Guangyan Li, Cheng Deng, Haifeng Zhang, Jian Zhao, Yongqiang Tang, Wensheng Zhang, Jun Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment bottlenecks due to computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that exploits activation and weight sparsity . they use a three-tier routing strategy that uses magnitude-based pruning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Llama and Mistral models show that DAWS outperforms activation-weight sparsity pruning methods. |
Detecting Customer Complaint Escalation with Recurrent Neural Networks and Manually-Engineered Features (N19-2)
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Wei Yang, Luchen Tan, Chunwei Lu, Anqi Cui, Han Li, Xi Chen, Kun Xiong, Muzi Wang, Ming Li, Jian Pei, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | e-commerce companies often have the option of escalating complaints by filing grievances with a government authority . this is detrimental to an ecommerce company, but this problem is challenging to solve by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides better recall and triage for specialized agents. |
Memory or Reasoning? Explore How LLMs Compute Mixed Arithmetic Expressions (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step math reasoning problems, but their internal implementation is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a "C**ausal **E**ffect **D**riven **F**ine-tuning method" to improve LLMs' reasoning ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model's reasoning ability by enhancing key components that are used to execute mixed arithmetic calculations. |
UCoder: Unsupervised Code Generation by Internal Probing of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiajun Wu, Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Yuchi Ma, Ensheng Shi, Yuqing Ma, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation tasks, but their effectiveness relies on supervised training with extensive labeled data and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method that leverages Internal Probing of Large language models for Code generation without any external corpus, even unlabeled code snippets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve competitive performance compared to supervised approaches while reducing the dependency on labeled data and computational resources. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Jian Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Pengfei Xu, Xiaohui Zhou, Yujia Zhang, Zexin Lu, Yasha Wang, Alan Zhao, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Recent model merging-based methods struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model’s training status. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B). |
MM-ChatAlign: A Novel Multimodal Reasoning Framework based on Large Language Models for Entity Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing MMEA methods rely on knowledge representation learning (KRL) to measure the similarity of entity embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes the visual reasoning abilities of MLLMs for multimodal entity alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the visual reasoning abilities of MLLMs for multimodal entity alignment. |
Descriptive Prompt Paraphrasing for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current researches mainly work on either of two types of targets in a decentralized manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to perform sentiment polarity on a target jointly considering its corresponding multiple modalities including text, image, and others. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on four datasets spanning the above two target types and is prompt-based language modelling. |
Beyond the Panorama: Training-Free Hierarchical Perception-Reasoning for Fine-Grained Vision in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face challenges in fine-grained visual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free hierarchical perception-reasoning framework that enhances fine-grained visual understanding by simulating human perception mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances fine-grained visual understanding by simulating human perception mechanisms. |
Golden Touchstone: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaojun Wu, Junxi Liu, Huan-Yi Su, Zhouchi Lin, Yiyan Qi, Chengjin Xu, Jiajun Su, Jiajie Zhong, Fuwei Wang, Saizhuo Wang, Fengrui Hua, Jia Li, Jian Guo
| Challenge: | Existing financial benchmarks suffer from limited language and task coverage, low-quality datasets, and inadequate adaptability for LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual benchmark for financial LLMs that assesses models’ language understanding and generation capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bilingual benchmark assesses models’ language understanding and generation capabilities. |
LIME: Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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King Zhu, Qianbo Zang, Shian Jia, Siwei Wu, Feiteng Fang, Yizhi Li, Shuyue Guo, Tianyu Zheng, Jiawei Guo, Bo Li, Haoning Wu, Xingwei Qu, Jian Yang, Ruibo Liu, Xiang Yue, Jiaheng Liu, Chenghua Lin, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing MLLM benchmarks and unified evaluation frameworks cannot accurately and efficiently reflect the ability of MLMLs. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automated benchmark curated using a pipeline that filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that require image-based understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77% while it can more effectively distinguish different models’ abilities. |
Natural Language Processing Meets Quantum Physics: A Survey and Categorization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on quantum-inspired algorithms for NLP and quantum-based algorithms for cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize quantum-inspired algorithms according to quantum theory, linguistic targets that are modeled, and the downstream application. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorized according to the use of quantum theory, the linguistic targets that are modeled, and the downstream application. |
Improving Cross-Domain Chinese Word Segmentation with Word Embeddings (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Chinese word segmentation (CWS) are character-based and word-based . character-driven approaches use conditional random field models to label sequences, with complex hand-crafted discrete features. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised word-based approach to improve cross-domain Chinese word segmentation given a baseline segmenter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on five datasets covering domains in novels, medicine, and patent. |
JPU: Bridging Jailbreak Defense and Unlearning via On-Policy Path Rectification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to diverse jailbreak attacks despite extensive safety alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to rectify dynamic jailbreak paths towards safety anchors by dynamically mining on-policy adversarial samples to expose vulnerabilities and identify jailbreak path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves jailbreak resistance against dynamic attacks while maintaining its utility. |
Answering Complex Geographic Questions by Adaptive Reasoning with Visual Context and External Commonsense Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image is proposed . the task requires identifying the objects in the image and understanding the background context . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image . they analyze the image and describe its fine-grained content by text and keywords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to answer geographic reasoning questions based on an image . it can be applied to a large-scale dataset with 41,329 samples . |
Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Standard RALMs often neglect their intrinsic knowledge due to the interference from retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to improve robustness of RALMs by generating sequential reading notes for each retrieved document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms standard RALMs on four open-domain QA benchmarks. |
E2CL: Exploration-based Error Correction Learning for Embodied Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language models are exhibiting increasing capability in knowledge utilization and reasoning, but they often suffer from misalignment between their intrinsic knowledge and environmental knowledge, leading to infeasible actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages exploration-induced errors and environmental feedback to enhance environment alignment for embodied agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and exhibits superior self-correction capabilities. |
From 1,000,000 Users to Every User: Scaling Up Personalized Preference for User-level Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to align large language models assume uniform human preferences, overlooking the diversity inherent in human populations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scalable personalized alignment of large language models . they establish a preference space characterizing psychological and behavioral dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods with an average of 17.06% accuracy gain across four benchmarks and a strong adaptation capability to novel preferences. |
DataArc-SynData-Toolkit: A Unified Closed-Loop Framework for Multi-Path, Multimodal, and Multilingual Data Synthesis (2026.acl-demo)
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Zhichao Shi, Cehao Yang, Hao Zhou, Xiaojun Wu, Huajie Li, Xuhui Jiang, Chengjin Xu, Yuanzhuo Wang, Jian Guo
| Challenge: | Existing synthetic data tools are limited by convoluted workflows, fragmented data standards, and limited scalability across modalities. |
| Approach: | They develop an open-source framework that aims to reduce the technical barrier to synthetic data generation and subsequent model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an optimal balance between generation efficiency and data quality. |
CDB: A Unified Framework for Hope Speech Detection Through Counterfactual, Desire and Belief (2025.findings-naacl)
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Tulio Ferreira Leite Da Silva, Gonzalo Freijedo Aduna, Farah Benamara, Alda Mari, Zongmin Li, Li Yue, Jian Su
| Challenge: | Using algorithms to model user-generated desires on social media, we propose a new approach to understanding and detection of hope speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-driven decomposition of the notional category hope and its automatic detection in a unified setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures future-oriented hopes through desires and beliefs and the counterfactuality of past unfulfilled wishes and regrets. |
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. |
Relation Extraction with Temporal Reasoning Based on Memory Augmented Distant Supervision (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Distant supervision is an important paradigm for automatically extracting relations . but the examples collected can be noisy and pose significant challenge for labeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to predict whether two entities participate in a relation at a given time spot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in WIKI-TIME and NYT-10 datasets compared with the best existing models . the proposed model is based on a dataset with a valid period of a certain relation of two entities in the knowledge base . |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
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. |
FlipDA: Effective and Robust Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text data augmentation are limited to simple tasks and weak baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method FlipDA that uses a generative model and a classifier to generate label-flipped data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves many tasks while not negatively affecting the others. |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |