Papers by Jie Lei

Revealing Single Frame Bias for Video-and-Language Learning (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Data augmentation aims to alleviate the overfitting issue in low-resource or class-imbalanced situations.
Approach:	They propose a framework called Text AutoAugment to enhance training samples . they use a Bayesian optimization algorithm to search for the best policy .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on six benchmark datasets.

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Jie Lei, Tamara Berg, Mohit Bansal

Optimizing Question Semantic Space for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for video-and-language learning use multiple frames as inputs.
Approach:	They propose to use single-frame models for video-and-language learning to investigate temporality in video- and language tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed model does not take into account temporal information on video-and-language tasks.

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Linhao Ye, Lang Yu, Zhikai Lei, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Liang He

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing retrieval-augmented generation methods are insufficient for multi-hop question answering . however, they tend to generate hallucinations due to semantic mismatching .
Approach:	They propose to optimize question semantic space for dynamic retrieval-augmented multi-hop question answering by optimizing the semantic embeddings.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing RAG methods in both in- and out-of-domain settings.

MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)

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Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li

MART: Memory-Augmented Recurrent Transformer for Coherent Video Paragraph Captioning (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Existing datasets for event understanding have limited coverage due to complexity of tasks.
Approach:	They propose a dataset that augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations . they propose 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation .
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction, and event relation extraction.

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Jie Lei, Liwei Wang, Yelong Shen, Dong Yu, Tamara Berg, Mohit Bansal

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for generating paragraph descriptions for videos require a coherent paragraph and a higher level of coherence.
Approach:	They propose a new method that generates a summarized memory state from video segments and sentence history to help better predict the next sentence.
Outcome:	The proposed method generates more coherent and less repetitive paragraph captions while maintaining relevance to the input video events.

AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang

LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment.
Approach:	They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references.
Outcome:	The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references.

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Yushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Jiazheng Xu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li

Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks on longcontext large language models fail to reflect their deep understanding capabilities across diverse tasks.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of long-context large language models to handle long-text problems.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves 50.1% accuracy when directly answering the questions . human experts achieve only 53.7% accuracy under a 15-minute time constraint .

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.

MWP-BERT: Numeracy-Augmented Pre-training for Math Word Problem Solving (2022.findings-naacl)

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Zhenwen Liang, Jipeng Zhang, Lei Wang, Wei Qin, Yunshi Lan, Jie Shao, Xiangliang Zhang

Unifying Discrete and Continuous Representations for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing work on math word problem solvers replace real numbers with symbolic placeholders to focus on logic reasoning.
Approach:	They propose to inject numerical properties into symbolic placeholders with contextualized representation learning schema to solve number representation dilemma.
Outcome:	The proposed model can solve MWP problems on English and Chinese benchmarks.

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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

Text Generation

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.

SumCSE: Summary as a transformation for Contrastive Learning (2024.findings-naacl)

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Raghuveer Thirukovalluru, Xiaolan Wang, Jun Chen, Shuyang Li, Jie Lei, Rong Jin, Bhuwan Dhingra

Compensate Quantization Errors: Make Weights Hierarchical to Compensate Each Other (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Sentence embedding models are typically trained using contrastive learning (CL) using human annotations directly or by repurposing other annotated datasets.
Approach:	They propose to use generative language models to generate CL data using annotated data.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the previous best unsupervised method by 1.8 points and SimCSE, a strong supervised baseline by 0.3 points on the semantic text similarity (STS) benchmark.

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Yifei Gao, Jie Ou, Lei Wang, Yuting Xiao, Xiangzhiyuan Xiangzhiyuan, Ruiting Dai, Jun Cheng

ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs (2020.aacl-main)

Challenge:	Emergent Large Language Models (LLMs) use extraordinary performance and powerful deduction capacity to discern from traditional language models.
Approach:	They propose a method that uses weights to compensate quantization error and learnable singular value incremental (LSI) LSI is a technique that helps weights compensate each other conditioned on activation.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in diverse quantization settings, no matter in weight-only, weight-activation or extremely low bit scenarios.

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Jifan Yu, Chenyu Wang, Gan Luo, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang, Zhiyuan Liu

Challenge:	Existing methods for concept expansion in MOOCs are inefficient because of the diversity of MOOC courses and rapid updates.
Approach:	They propose an end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) model for concept expansion in MOOCs that employs a two-level mechanism of seed selection and concept expansion.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on nine real MOOC datasets and maintains competitive performance under different settings.

Reconciliation of Pre-trained Models and Prototypical Neural Networks in Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Youcheng Huang, Wenqiang Lei, Jie Fu, Jiancheng Lv

RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)

Challenge:	Existing methods do not consider that pre-trained models contain a prominently large amount of information regarding word frequencies, thus biasing prototypical neural networks against learning word entities.
Approach:	They propose a one-line-code normalization method to reconcile such a mismatch with empirical and theoretical grounds and propose 'references' for the model enhancement.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on nine benchmark datasets and is comparable to the state of the art.

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Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji

Constructing Emotional Consensus and Utilizing Unpaired Data for Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy.
Approach:	They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework .
Outcome:	The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios.

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Lei Shen, Jinchao Zhang, Jiao Ou, Xiaofang Zhao, Jie Zhou

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Existing models for dialogue empathy focus on the emotion flow in one direction, from context to response.
Approach:	They propose a dual-generative model to construct emotional consensus and use unpaired data to produce pseudo paired empathetic samples.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baseline models in producing coherent and empathetic responses.

CLEVE: Contrastive Pre-training for Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)

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Ziqi Wang, Xiaozhi Wang, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Lei Hou, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Juanzi Li, Jie Zhou

CIF-Bench: A Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark for Evaluating the Generalizability of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing EE methods do not model event characteristics from large unsupervised data.
Approach:	They propose a contrastive pre-training framework for event extraction to better learn event knowledge from large unsupervised data and their semantic structures.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves on ACE 2005 and MAVEN datasets on event extraction tasks.

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Yizhi Li, Ge Zhang, Xingwei Qu, Jiali Li, Zhaoqun Li, Noah Wang, Hao Li, Ruibin Yuan, Yinghao Ma, Kai Zhang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yiming Liang, Lei Zhang, Lei Ma, Jiajun Zhang, Zuowen Li, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Jie Fu

DeCEMBERT: Learning from Noisy Instructional Videos via Dense Captions and Entropy Minimization (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	a recent study shows that large language models have limited generalization in low-resource languages like Chinese.
Approach:	They propose to evaluate the zero-shot generalizability of large language models to the Chinese language . they release only half of the dataset publicly, with the remainder kept private .
Outcome:	The Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark evaluates the generalizability of LLMs to the Chinese language.

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Zineng Tang, Jie Lei, Mohit Bansal

MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to train models on unlabeled web videos are noisy and temporally misaligned . authors propose a method that adds captions and constrained attention loss to improve performance .
Approach:	They propose a method that adds captions from video frames as auxiliary text input to provide visual cues for learning better video and language associations.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on video-and-language tasks . it adds captions and constrained attention loss to improve model performance .

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Jifan Yu, Gan Luo, Tong Xiao, Qingyang Zhong, Yuquan Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Junyi Luo, Chenyu Wang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang

What is More Likely to Happen Next? Video-and-Language Future Event Prediction (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research.
Approach:	They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource.
Outcome:	The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs.

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Jie Lei, Licheng Yu, Tamara Berg, Mohit Bansal

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Existing models cannot make multimodal commonsense predictions of future events based on video and dialogue .
Approach:	They propose a task to predict which event is more likely to happen in a video clip . they use a dataset with 28,726 future event prediction examples from 10,234 videos .
Outcome:	The proposed model provides a good starting point but leaves room for future work.

MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)

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Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou

Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions.
Approach:	They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude.

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Zhiyu Xu, Lean Wang, Yuanxin Liu, Lei Li, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun

On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing research lacks systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection.
Approach:	They investigate the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM.
Outcome:	The proposed method enables transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead.

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Yusheng Su, Xiaozhi Wang, Yujia Qin, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Kaiyue Wen, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Pre-trained language models (PLMs) can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but require much more training time than fine-timing.
Approach:	They empirically investigate the transferability of soft prompts across different downstream tasks and PLMs to determine what decides prompt transferability.
Outcome:	The proposed method can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but requires much more training time than fine-timing.

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Chaoqun He, Renjie Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Shengding Hu, Zhen Thai, Junhao Shen, Jinyi Hu, Xu Han, Yujie Huang, Yuxiang Zhang, Jie Liu, Lei Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Open-Set Living Need Prediction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models have exceeded general human capabilities in various tasks.
Approach:	They present an Olympiad-level bilingual multimodal scientific benchmark featuring 8,476 problems from Olympiad level mathematics and physics competitions.
Outcome:	The best performing model, GPT-4V, attains an average score of 17.97% on OlympiadBench, with a mere 10.74% in physics, highlighting the benchmark rigor and the intricacy of physical reasoning.

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Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yizhou Sun, Chen Gao, Jiahuan Lei, Xinleishi Xinleishi, Hengliang Luo, Yong Li

Read Anywhere Pointed: Layout-aware GUI Screen Reading with Tree-of-Lens Grounding (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to living need prediction treat it as a closed-set classification problem, severely limiting their ability to capture diversity and complexity of living needs.
Approach:	They propose a system leveraging large language models for unrestricted need prediction that leverages Maslow's hierarchy of needs to align predictions with human living needs.
Outcome:	The proposed system outperforms closed-set approaches on need-based life service recall by an average of 19.37% on real-world datasets.

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Yue Fan, Lei Ding, Ching-Chen Kuo, Shan Jiang, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, Jie Yang, Yi Zhang, Xin Wang

Challenge:	Existing models for GUI understanding ignore a key GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points.
Approach:	They propose a Tree-of-Lens agent that constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree based on user input points and a GUI screenshot.
Outcome:	The proposed agent can interpret the Screen Point-and-Read task on mobile, web, and operating systems.

Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach (2022.findings-acl)

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Xin Lv, Yankai Lin, Yixin Cao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou

TVQA+: Spatio-Temporal Grounding for Video Question Answering (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Pre-trained language models capture factual knowledge from massive texts . but they are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance .
Approach:	They propose to use open-world assumption to evaluate PLM-based knowledge graph completion models . they propose to convert each triple and its support information into natural prompt sentences .
Outcome:	The proposed model is more accurate under the open-world assumption (OWA) this setting manual checks the correctness of knowledge that is not in KGs.

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Jie Lei, Licheng Yu, Tamara Berg, Mohit Bansal

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing video QA datasets only contain QA pairs without labels for key clips or regions needed to answer the question.
Approach:	They propose a framework that grounds evidence in both spatial and temporal domains to answer questions about videos using bounding boxes.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can produce interpretable spatio-temporal attention visualizations.

GroupRank: A Groupwise Paradigm for Effective and Efficient Passage Reranking with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan, Junjie Wang, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu

Graph-to-Tree Learning for Solving Math Word Problems (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Existing rankers excel in lexical-matching scenarios, while they struggle with complex queries requiring deep reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a new paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness to unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking.
Outcome:	The proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED while delivering a 6.4 inference speedup.

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Jipeng Zhang, Lei Wang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Yi Bin, Yan Wang, Jie Shao, Ee-Peng Lim

Numerical Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing tree-based neural models do not capture the relationships and order information among the quantities well.
Approach:	They propose a novel deep learning architecture that combines the merits of the graph-based encoder and tree-based decoder to generate better solution expressions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on two available datasets significantly.

TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering (D18-1)

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Jie Lei, Licheng Yu, Mohit Bansal, Tamara Berg

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Recent studies have focused on image-based question-answering (QA) tasks, but little has been done on video-based QA.
Approach:	They present a large-scale video QA dataset based on 6 popular TV shows . they provide analysis of the new dataset and trainable neural network framework .
Outcome:	The proposed dataset includes 152,545 QA pairs from 21,793 clips spanning over 460 hours of video.

Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Lean Wang, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Deli Chen, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun

A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	In-context learning (ICL) is a promising capability for large language models (LLMs) but its underlying mechanism remains unexplored.
Approach:	They propose a demonstration compression technique to expedite inference and an analysis framework for diagnosing ICL errors in GPT2-XL.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves ICL performance and expedites inference.

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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo

GTM: A Generative Triple-wise Model for Conversational Question Generation (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified.
Approach:	They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric.
Outcome:	The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area.

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Lei Shen, Fandong Meng, Jinchao Zhang, Yang Feng, Jie Zhou

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Experimental results show that opendomain conversational question generation improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over competitive baselines.
Approach:	They propose a triple-wise model with hierarchical variations for open-domain conversational question generation using a post-question-answer triple and one-to-many semantic mappings.
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over baselines.

Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents (2025.naacl-long)

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Zheyuan Zhang, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Linlu Gong, Jinchang Zhou, Zhanxin Hao, Jianxiao Jiang, Jie Cao, Huiqin Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li

From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Initial studies have focused on task-specific, independent LLM-empowered agents, but the potential of LLMs within a multi-agent collaborative framework for classroom simulation with real user participation remains unexplored.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent classroom simulation teaching framework that recognizes representative class roles and introduces a novel class control mechanism for automatic classroom teaching.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can simulate dynamic learning environment for users with active teacher-student and student-studente interactions.

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Lei Li, Yankai Lin, Xuancheng Ren, Guangxiang Zhao, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun

LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) are fine-tuned and released for research and deployments.
Approach:	They propose a PLM reuse paradigm that merges teacher-PLM knowledge into a student model.
Outcome:	The proposed paradigm can reduce the computational cost and environmental side-effects of retraining the PLM from scratch.

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Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Hongchang Lyu, Jiankai Tang, Zhidian Huang, Zhengxiao Du, Xiao Liu, Aohan Zeng, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases.
Approach:	They propose a bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding that extends context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms to improve models' long context capabilities.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms open-source models but struggles on longer contexts.

LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Yuze He, Ji Qi, Lei Hou, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong, Juanzi Li

ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies to build long context language models focus on context extension and continual training on long text.
Approach:	They propose a recipe for instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length . they adopt packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-uning .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by 30% while maintaining proficiency in handling short, generic tasks.

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Jie Yang, Honglin Guo, Li Ji, Jiazheng Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhikai Lei, Shuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shichun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu

UNICORN: A Unified Causal Video-Oriented Language-Modeling Framework for Temporal Video-Language Tasks (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow.
Outcome:	The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow.

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Yuanhao Xiong, Yixin Nie, Haotian Liu, Boxin Wang, Jun Chen, Rong Jin, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Lorenzo Torresani, Jie Lei

CritiqueLLM: Towards an Informative Critique Generation Model for Evaluation of Large Language Model Generation (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large multimodal models have encouraged the development of large multi-modal models . however, it is unclear how to extend these models to the more complex video domain .
Approach:	They propose a visual instruction tuning framework to address temporal video-language tasks . they collect a dataset and fine-tune the framework on instruction-following data .
Outcome:	The proposed model can perform better on established temporal video-language tasks without training objectives and intensive pre-training.

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Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Andrew Feng, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jiale Cheng, Shengyuan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang

Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs with External Knowledge and Interactive Game (P19-1)

Challenge:	Existing models for NLP evaluations lack the ability to generate informative critiques in pointwise grading and pairwise comparison especially without references.
Approach:	They propose a method which can acquire pointwise grading critiques with pseudo references and revise these critiques via multi-path prompting to obtain informative evaluation data in different tasks and settings.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms all open-source models and even GPT-4 in system-level correlations of pointwise grading.

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Jifan Yu, Chenyu Wang, Gan Luo, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang

Knowledge Representation

Challenge:	Existing methods to expand course concepts in MOOCs suffer from semantic drifts and lack of knowledge guidance.
Approach:	They propose to use a boundary search method to search for new concepts via external knowledge base and then use heterogeneous features to verify the results.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves on the datasets from Coursera and XuetangX.

More Than Sum of Its Parts: Deciphering Intent Shifts in Multimodal Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)

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Runze Sun, Yu Zheng, Zexuan Xiong, Zhongjin Qu, Lei Chen, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing systems struggle with multimodal content where the emergent meaning transcends the aggregation of individual modalities.
Approach:	They propose a framework to characterize semantic intent shifts where modalities interact to construct implicit hate from benign cues or neutralize toxicity through semantic inversion.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on H-VLI and on established benchmarks.

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Keke Lian, Wang Bin, Lei Zhang, Libo Chen, Junjie Wang, Ziming Zhao, Yujiu Yang, Miaoqian Lin, Haotong Duan, Haoran Zhao, Shuang Liao, Mingda Guo, Quan Jiazheng, Yilu Zhong, Chenhao He, Chen Zichuan, Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Hui LI, Dong Zhang

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows .
Approach:	They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code.
Outcome:	The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation.

Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)

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Lei Li, Yankai Lin, Shuhuai Ren, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun

CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods conduct knowledge distillation statically, e.g., student model aligns output distribution to teacher model on pre-defined training dataset.
Approach:	They propose a dynamic knowledge distillation that empowers the student to adjust the learning procedure according to its competency . they find it is promising and provide discussions on potential future directions towards more efficient methods .
Outcome:	The proposed method can boost student model performance while accelerating training . the proposed method reduces memory usage and accelerates model inference .

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Lei Li, Yankai Lin, Deli Chen, Shuhuai Ren, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun