Papers by Jie Li
Dual Prompt Tuning based Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on hierarchy-aware text feature by exploiting explicit parent-child relationships, resulting in label confusion within each layer. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-prompt tuning method which emphasizes discrimination among peer labels by performing contrastive learning on each hierarchical layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and is available on github. |
Topology Imbalance and Relation Inauthenticity Aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks for Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect fake news focus on mining lexical and syntactic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology imbalance and Relation inauthenticity aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks to identify fake news on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets. |
AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of autonomous agents capable of executing complex, multi-turn tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for agentic reinforcement learning that integrates turn-level tree search with tree search to address key challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses key challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. |
Boosting Multi-modal Keyphrase Prediction with Dynamic Chain-of-Thought in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qihang Ma, Shengyu Li, Jie Tang, Dingkang Yang, null Chenshaodong, Yingyi Zhang, Chao Feng, Ran Jiao
| Challenge: | Multi-modal keyphrase prediction (MMKP) aims to produce concise, informative phrases that capture the essence of cross-modal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models to generate conclusive phrases using multiple modalities of input information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods on absence and unseen scenarios and overestimate model capability due to overlap in training tests. |
Text AutoAugment: Learning Compositional Augmentation Policy for Text Classification (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Semantics of the Unwritten: The Effect of End of Paragraph and Sequence Tokens on Text Generation with GPT2 (2021.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments on an English essay dataset using Chinese-GPT2 . they find that the model can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Mitigating Geospatial Knowledge Hallucination in Large Language Models: Benchmarking and Dynamic Factuality Aligning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have extensive world knowledge, but often generate inaccurate geospatial knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluation of large language models to mitigate hallucinations . they use Kahneman-Tversky Optimization to align LLMs with their reality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework uncovers hallucinations in 20 advanced LLMs. |
Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for analyzing social media data lack a systematic integration of medical knowledge, causing a critical treatment gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to integrate medical knowledge into social media data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to distinguish depression from transient mood changes. |
ReFreeKV: Towards Threshold-Free KV Cache Compression (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Towards the KV cache efficiency, we propose a new objective that lifts the threshold constraints for robust KV compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adjusts KV cache budgets while preserving full-cache performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reduce memory consumption while preserving full-cache performance. |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Entity-level Prototypical Network Enhanced by Dispersedly Distributed Prototypes (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing prototypical networks for named entity recognition suffer from label dependency and tightly distributed prototypes, thus causing misclassifications. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity-level Prototypical Network enhanced by dispersedly distributed prototypes to build entity-level prototypes and distribute them dispersionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the previous models on two evaluation tasks and the Few-NERD settings in terms of overall performance. |
HERB: Measuring Hierarchical Regional Bias in Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-aacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods do not examine social groups categorised by geographical information, leaving the region-related biases in pre-trained LMs unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical regional bias evaluation method to quantify regional bias in pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates regional bias with regard to comprehensive topics and measures potential regional bias that can be propagated to downstream tasks. |
ProvBench: A Benchmark of Legal Provision Recommendation for Contract Auto-Reviewing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiuxuan Shen, Zhongyuan Jiang, Junsan Zhang, Junxiao Han, Yao Wan, Chengjie Guo, Bingcheng Liu, Jie Wu, Renxiang Li, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Contract review is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly . a benchmark is proposed to detect potential legal conflicts . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for legal provision recommendation and conflict detection for contract auto-reviewing which aims to recommend the legal provisions related to contract clauses and detect possible legal conflicts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task recommends legal provisions related to contract clauses and detects legal conflicts. |
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
An LLM-Embedding Semantic Adaptation Network for Post-level Semantic Drift Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evaluating semantic drift is essential for understanding discourse evolution and opinion formation in online discussions. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-embedding Semantic Adaptation Network to evaluate semantic drift . they use an LRU module, an LEM-Embedding graph convolutional network module and an adaptive fusion module to integrate features from event related posts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the semantic drift evaluation task compared to baseline models. |
Contrastive Preference Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing discrepancies between token-level objective and overall sequence-level quality of a model are causing exposure bias and other issues in NMT. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive preference model that integrates an indicator function to fine-tune a pre-trained model in Neural Machine Translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the traditional Plackett-Luce model on three language pairs and also outperFORMs token-level and sequence-level baseline models. |
MemSearcher: Iterative Memory Integration for Search Agent via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Debing Zhang, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based search agents often concatenate the full interaction history into the context, producing long and noisy inputs and increasing compute cost and memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent framework that maintains a compact memory during multi-turn interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong history-concatenation (ReAct-style) baselines on a range of public datasets while maintaining nearly constant token counts across multi-turn interactions. |
Generative Text-to-Image Retrieval via Hierarchical Identifiers and Semantic Internalization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image retrieval methods suffer from limited semantic discriminability, alignment bias, and closed-set restrictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for semantic internalization for Generative Multimodal Alignment . they construct multi-granularity hierarchical identifiers to ensure unique, semantically consistent image representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks on Flickr30K and MS-COCO datasets . it achieves average Recall@1, Recall @5, and Recall_10 improvements of 10.65%, 8.50%, and 7.00% . |
Know Your Place: Diagnosing Implicit Social Adaptation Failures in Chinese Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest that failures of large language models in social contexts are not due to limited linguistic competence, but to inappropriate recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conduct controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conducts controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
Benchmarking Large Language Models on CFLUE - A Chinese Financial Language Understanding Evaluation Dataset (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) there is an urgent need for new benchmarks to keep pace with the development of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the capability of large language models (LLMs) they use a dataset to provide both knowledge assessment and application assessment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides datasets tailored for knowledge assessment and application assessment. |
Knowledge Inheritance for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Jing Yi, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Yusheng Su, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale pre-trained language models are mainly trained from scratch individually, ignoring that many well-taught PLMs are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training framework called knowledge inheritance and propose auxiliary supervision to efficiently learn larger PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to train large-scale language models with huge parameters and a large dataset can be adapted to domain adaptation and knowledge transfer. |
MAVEN: A Massive General Domain Event Detection Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Ziqi Wang, Xu Han, Wangyi Jiang, Rong Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Peng Li, Yankai Lin, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing datasets exhibit data scarcity and limited coverage of general-domain events. |
| Approach: | They present a MAssive eVENt detection dataset which contains 4,480 Wikipedia documents and 168 event types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing methods cannot achieve promising results on the small datasets. |
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li
| 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. |
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yongyu Mu, Yuzhang Wu, Yuchun Fan, Chenglong Wang, Hengyu Li, Jiali Zeng, Qiaozhi He, Murun Yang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on compressing the Key-Value cache or grouping attention heads, while overlooking redundancy between layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs that uses feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces redundancy by sharing weights across layers while maintaining high response quality while reducing redundant calculations within 53% 84% of the total layers. |
Modeling Graph Structure in Transformer for Better AMR-to-Text Generation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies on AMR-to-text generation formalize the task as a sequence-tosequence learning problem . previous approaches only consider the relations between directly connected concepts while ignoring the rich structure in AMR graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware self-attention approach to model the relations between indirectly connected concepts in the seq2seq model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on English AMR benchmarks . it significantly outperformed the state of the art on the benchmarks, with 29.66 and 31.82 BLEU scores . |
Large Language Models for Automated Open-domain Scientific Hypotheses Discovery (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on hypothetical induction is limited by the observation annotations in the dataset and the ground truth hypotheses are mostly commonsense knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a first dataset for social science academic hypotheses discovery using raw web corpus as observations and propose valid, useful scientific hypothese . they propose 'a multi-module framework' that includes feedback mechanisms to boost performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset generates valid, novel, and helpful scientific hypotheses, even new to humanity, using open-domain data and a web corpus as observations. |
Towards Fine-grained Text Sentiment Transfer (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained text sentiment transfer only reverse the sentiment polarity of text, but they lack a robust and parallel learning algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-grained text sentiment transfer task that revises a sequence to satisfy a given sentiment intensity while preserving the original semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in automatic evaluation and human evaluation. |
AdapShot: Adaptive Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Semantic-Aware KV Cache Reuse (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for In-Context Learning (ICL) rely on a predetermined number of shots, leading to insufficient context or noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a probe-based evaluation mechanism that utilizes output entropy to determine the optimal number of shots and leverages KV cache reuse for efficient inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average performance gain of 10% and a 4.64 speedup compared to state-of-the-art DBSA. |
Message Passing on Semantic-Anchor-Graphs for Fine-grained Emotion Representation Learning and Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Emotion classification is an important task with applications in education, virtual reality, and robotics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token embeddings to generate a "semantic-anchor graph" using semantic anchors, sentences can be projected onto them to form a graph . |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed system can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
Unregulated Chinese-to-English Data Expansion Does NOT Work for Neural Event Detection (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that cross-language data expansion results in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They leverage cross-language data expansion and retraining to enhance neural Event Detection on English ACE corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ED performance by 1.6% over the straight data combination. |
MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Binxu Li, Tiankai Yan, Yuanting Pan, Jie Luo, Ruiyang Ji, Jiayuan Ding, Zhe Xu, Shilong Liu, Haoyu Dong, Zihao Lin, Yixin Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit limited generality and often fall short when compared to specialized models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal medical agent that picks the most suitable medical tools based on user inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs better than open-source models and the closed-source model, GPT-4o. |
Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Conversational Concept Flows (2023.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that explicitly modeling concept flows with a large commonsense knowledge graph improves response quality, but there is a gap between the knowledge graph and the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model human conversational concept flows with a commonsense knowledge graph . they extract abundant concepts and relations from natural conversations and build a conversation-aware knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than baselines on a large-scale reddit conversation dataset. |
AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jun Zhan, Junqi Dai, Jiasheng Ye, Yunhua Zhou, Dong Zhang, Zhigeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Ruibin Yuan, Ge Zhang, Linyang Li, Hang Yan, Jie Fu, Tao Gui, Tianxiang Sun, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing language models that use discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities are limited to text generation and do not include multimodal output. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained stably without any alterations to existing models or training paradigms. |
KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on partial aspects of knowledge abstraction, concretization, and completion (KACC). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified knowledge graph benchmark to improve existing benchmarks . they collect new datasets that contain larger concept graphs and cross-view links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves existing benchmarks in terms of dataset scale, task coverage, and difficulty. |
Data Efficient RLVR via Off-Policy Influence Guidance (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Erle Zhu, Dazhi Jiang, Yuan Wang, Xujun Li, Jiale Cheng, Yuxian Gu, Yilin Niu, Aohan Zeng, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang, Hongning Wang
| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods for RLVR are heuristic-based, lacking theoretical guarantees and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose an off-policy influence estimation method that approximates data influence using offline trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational cost of policy rollouts and improves storage and computation efficiency. |
Exploring Mathematical Extrapolation of Large Language Models with Synthetic Data (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent capabilities in language understanding, text generation and many other tasks, but struggle in complex multi-step reasoning problems such as mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune an open-llama-3B model to perform well on multi-step reasoning tasks via synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reach a zero-shot pass@1 at 0.44 on the in-domain dataset and demonstrates certain generalization capabilities on the out-of-domain data. |
Lifting Optimized Binaries to Canonical Compiler IR via Structure-Aware Retrieval and Iterative Verification (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for decompiling binary code are brittle due to compiler optimizations that distort control-flow and data-flow structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that lifts optimized binaries to canonical compiler intermediate representation (IR) BRIDGE uses control-flow-aware retrieval-augmented generation with feedback-driven verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms seven baselines on humanEval-Decompile and MBPP, lifting x86-64 and ARM64 binaries to LLVM IR. |
ToM: Leveraging Tree-oriented MapReduce for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show ToM outperforms existing divide-and-conquer frameworks . RAG relies on similarity-based rankings to retrieve and reason over chunks based on logical coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-oriented MapReduce framework for long-context reasoning . it leverages the hierarchical structure of long documents by constructing a DocTree . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ToM outperforms existing divide-and-conquer frameworks and RAGs . the proposed framework improves logical coherence and long-context reasoning on 70B+ LLMs compared to existing approaches . |
CTRLEval: An Unsupervised Reference-Free Metric for Evaluating Controlled Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reference-free metrics have obvious limitations for evaluating controlled text generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised reference-free metric which evaluates controlled text generation from different aspects by formulating each aspect into multiple text infilling tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric has higher correlations with human judgments while obtaining better generalization of evaluating generated texts from different models and with different qualities. |
Exploring Conditional Variational Mechanism to Pinyin Input Method for Addressing One-to-Many Mappings in Low-Resource Scenarios (2024.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage conditional variational mechanism to simplify pinyin IME . they employ a strategy that facilitates interaction between pinyan and Chinese character information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of pinyin input method engine (IME) under low-resource conditions. |
Incremental Transformer with Deliberation Decoder for Document Grounded Conversations (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems do not exploit document knowledge effectively enough. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based architecture for document grounded conversations that incorporates document knowledge into a two-pass decoder to improve context coherence and knowledge correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on context coherence and knowledge relevance on a real-world document grounded dataset. |
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance. |
Multi-Granularity Semantic Revision for Large Language Model Distillation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaoyu Liu, Yun Zhang, Wei Li, Simiao Li, Xudong Huang, Hanting Chen, Yehui Tang, Jie Hu, Zhiwei Xiong, Yunhe Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models rely on student-generated outputs, which introduce generation errors and misguide the distillation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity semantic revision method for LLM distillation that corrects errors using teacher-generated tokens and re-generates the sequence to minimize errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces errors and misguides distillation on student models and improves consistency between teacher and student outputs. |
Quantifying and Improving the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Against Spurious Features in Grounding Data (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shiping Yang, Jie Wu, Wenbiao Ding, Ning Wu, Shining Liang, Ming Gong, Hongzhi Li, Hengyuan Zhang, Angel X. Chang, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on robustness to explicit noise (e.g., document semantics) but overlook implicit noise (spurious features). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to quantify the robustness of RAGs against spurious features by integrating a data synthesis pipeline and a taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies the robustness of RALMs against spurious features. |
Cognitive Scaffold: From Fluid Context to Crystallized Memory for Long-Horizon DeepResearch Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Scaling LLM-based agents to long-horizon deep research is constrained by context-noise trade-off . solving a single query may require hundreds of interactions with noisy environments . |
| Approach: | They propose a factorized memory architecture that decouples the cognitive state into a Fluid Working Context for immediate reasoning and a persistent Knowledge Graph for long-term retention. |
| Outcome: | The Cognitive Scaffold outperforms baselines on Xbench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp-ZH, and GAIA . it achieves 74.7% Avg@3 and 87.0% Pass@3 on xbench, browseComp, and 88.3% Pass@3. |
GEAR: Graph-based Evidence Aggregating and Reasoning for Fact Verification (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract information from evidence are unable to grasp relational and logical information among the evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based evidence aggregating and reasoning framework to integrate evidence from multiple pieces of evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements on a large-scale benchmark dataset. |
PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from language shortcuts that allow models to rely on text, lack of question diversity, and narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal punchline comprehension benchmark to assess models' ability to comprehend punchlines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses in-context learning and chain-of-thought in punchline comprehension. |
AVG-LLaVA: An Efficient Large Multimodal Model with Adaptive Visual Granularity (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing large multimodal models typically divide high-resolution images into multiple local images and a global image, leading to a large number of visual tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose an LMM that can adaptively select the appropriate visual granularity based on the input image and instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly reduces visual tokens and speeds up inference on 11 benchmarks. |
Derailer-Rerailer: Adaptive Verification for Efficient and Reliable Language Model Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods struggle with complex tasks and reasoning stability, limiting their practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adaptively balances reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency by employing a lightweight Derailer mechanism to assess reasoning stability and selectively triggers an advanced Rerailer verification process only when necessary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant accuracy improvements (8-11%) while maintaining 2-3 times better efficiency than existing verification methods. |
GUI-explorer: Autonomous Exploration and Mining of Transition-aware Knowledge for GUI Agent (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | GUI automation is a key challenge in dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free GUI agent that integrates two mechanisms to explore trajectories in GUIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI-explorer shows significant improvements over existing agents. |
ZoomRAG: Hierarchical Random-walk Zooming across Multi-scale Information Graphs for Fast and Accurate RAG (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xianming Hu, Jingyang Chen, Bin Tang, Yihe Liu, Yihong Huang, Hongbo Zhao, Nuoyi Chen, Jie Zhang, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful tool for NLP applications . but it is challenging to encode large knowledge bases as compact offline structures . |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical graph inference method that uses random walks to retrieve information from a corpus of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces offline indexing costs and accelerates retrieval. |
Neural Gibbs Sampling for Joint Event Argument Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event argument extraction cannot adequately model the correlation between event arguments and their roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian model to jointly extract event arguments using Gibbs sampling . they train two neural networks to model prior distribution and conditional distribution over event arguments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve comparable results to existing methods on two widely-used datasets. |
LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Jiazheng Xu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications. |
TTVS: Boosting Self-Exploring Reinforcement Learning via Test-time Variational Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing test-time methods are limited in specialized or novel domains where supervision is prohibitively expensive or unavailable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments training stream from unlabeled test queries. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show TTVS outperforms state-of-the-art RL-based techniques on unlabeled test-time data. |
Unifying Discrete and Continuous Representations for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
MoA: Heterogeneous Mixture of Adapters for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Bo Yuan, Rolan Yan, Hongyang He, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Dongping Zhang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) are limited by computational costs and performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) they propose combining expert load imbalance and representation collapse to improve LLM performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms homogeneous MoE-LoRA architectures in performance and parameter efficiency. |
SumCSE: Summary as a transformation for Contrastive Learning (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selection (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empathy is a key trait of everyday human conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a serial encoding and Emotion-Knowledge interaction method for empathetic dialogue generation which is more sensitive to emotion dynamics in conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline evaluations on the utterance-level annotated EMPATHETICDIALOGUES. |
ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Repulsive Attention: Rethinking Multi-head Attention as Bayesian Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bang An, Jie Lyu, Zhenyi Wang, Chunyuan Li, Changwei Hu, Fei Tan, Ruiyi Zhang, Yifan Hu, Changyou Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-head attention is an effective module in deep neural networks, but there are no explicit mechanisms guaranteeing this property. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric approach that explicitly improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and consequently strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
CDT: A Comprehensive Capability Framework for Large Language Models Across Cognition, Domain, and Task (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated abilities, lacking a holistic framework for assessing LLM capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cognition-Domain-Task framework which measures a model’s capabilities across three dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on dataset evaluation and data selection, while achieving higher scores on general and specific benchmarks. |
Disentangle-based Continual Graph Representation Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing graph embedding methods overlook streaming nature of incoming data in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a disentangle-based continual graph representation learning framework inspired by the human’s ability to learn procedural knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art continual graph representation learning framework and alleviate catastrophic forgetting problem. |
ReFT: Reasoning with Reinforced Fine-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the generalization of large language models are using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) this approach does not show sufficient generalization ability because it only relies on the given CoT data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chain-of-Thought annotations to train Large Language Models using supervised fine-tuning to improve generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SFT on GSM8K, MathQA, and SVAMP datasets and shows a superior generalization ability. |
Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mis- and disinformation online are a major source of harms of different kinds . out-of-context information is where different pieces of information are falsely associated . past studies have attempted to defend against OOC mis- and deinformation through external evidence, but they disregard the role of different pieces with different stances. |
| Approach: | They propose a stance extraction network that can extract stances of different pieces of evidence in a single framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a public large-scale dataset with a performance gain of 3.2% in accuracy. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qianjun Pan, Junyi Wang, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Kaiyin Xu, Yougen Zhou, Yihan Li, JingYuan Zhao, Qin Chen, Ningning Zhou, Kai Chen, Liang He
| Challenge: | Existing models focus on a single therapy, but complex cases require flexible strategies among various therapies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark . it is designed to address three key challenges: 1) can we train a highly realistic AI counselor? 2) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?" |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is annotated with extensive professional skills and includes over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. |
Contextual Rephrase Detection for Reducing Friction in Dialogue Systems (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI based dialogue systems like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, are getting more and more prevalent in real-world applications to help users across the globe. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextual rephrase detection model ContReph to automatically identify rephrasings from multi-turn dialogues using contextual information and user-agent interaction signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the pairwise rephrase detection models by leveraging the context and user-agent interaction signals. |
Internalizing Multi-Agent Reasoning for Accurate and Efficient LLM-based Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping recommender systems by leveraging extensive world knowledge and semantic reasoning to interpret user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-agent Trajectory-Aligned Recommender to integrate reasoning capabilities into a model by a multi-agend teacher system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses its teacher by 8.7% to 39.5% while eliminating iterative latency. |
CLEVE: Contrastive Pre-training for Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Enhancing Argument Structure Extraction with Efficient Leverage of Contextual Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Argument structure extraction (ASE) aims to identify the discourse structure of arguments within documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient Context-aware ASE model that fully exploits contextual information by augmenting modeling capacity and augmenting training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract argumentative discourse structure from documents and reduce reliance on specific words or less informative sentences. |
Benchmarking Diverse-Modal Entity Linking with Generative Models (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Sijia Wang, Alexander Hanbo Li, Henghui Zhu, Sheng Zhang, Pramuditha Perera, Chung-Wei Hang, Jie Ma, William Yang Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang, Patrick Ng
| Challenge: | Existing models for diverse-mode entity linking (EL) work well on per modality configurations, but it is more challenging to design a unified model for diverse modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative diverse-modal model that integrates text, image and table . they propose combining a multimodal encoder-decoder paradigm with a fine-tuning GDMM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by 8.51 F1 on average for diverse-modal EL. |
AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing review quality are unscalable across domains and fail to adapt to evolving content patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework that automates the discovery of interpretable features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a large-scale online platform with a billion-level user base. |
Controllable Style Arithmetic with Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for linguistic style control lack fine-grained control, require extensive computation, or introduce significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-space approach that extracts style-specific representations by analyzing parameter differences between models trained on contrasting styles and incorporates them into a model with precise control over style intensity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves three key capabilities while achieving optimal computational efficiency. |
Probing the Safety Robustness of LLMs in Latent Space (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tianle Gu, Kexin Huang, Zongqi Wang, Yixu Wang, Jie Li, Xin Wang, Yang Yao, Yujiu Yang, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Despite substantial progress in safety alignment techniques, aligned large language models can still produce unsafe responses under minor internal perturbations. |
| Approach: | They introduce Activation Steering Attack (ASA) and leverage the Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) as a diagnostic signal to probe the local sensitivity of safety behaviors in latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is model-agnostic and supervision-free, enabling a general and reproducible diagnostic metric for analyzing safety robustness. |
Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Ancient people translated classical Chinese into Japanese using a system of annotations placed around characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce an LLM-based annotation pipeline and construct a dataset from digitized open-source translation data to improve sequence tagging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high scores on direct machine translation, but could serve as a supplement to LLMs to improve the quality of character’s annotation. |
Think How to Think: Mitigating Overthinking with Autonomous Difficulty Cognition in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but often suffer from overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage fine-tuning strategy that progressively inspires LRMs’ difficulty cognition and redundancy cognition of LRM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly reduces inference costs by over 70% on easy tasks and 40% on complex ones without compromising performance. |
LLM-Guided Semantic Bootstrapping for Interpretable Text Classification with Tsetlin Machines (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) provide strong semantic representations but are costly and opaque. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transfers pretrained language models into symbolic form and integrates them into symbolic models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves interpretability and accuracy across multiple text classification tasks while remaining fully symbolic and efficient. |
CIF-Bench: A Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark for Evaluating the Generalizability of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
Beyond Rejection Sampling: Trajectory Fusion for Scaling Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned using rejection sampling retain only correct reasoning trajectories . however, this paradigm treats supervision as a binary filter that systematically excludes teacher-generated errors, leaving a gap in how reasoning failures are modeled during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning strategy that reframes rejection sampling as a structured supervision construction process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms RFT on multiple math benchmarks while retaining only correct reasoning trajectories. |
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yubo Gao, Haotian Wu, Hong Chen, Junquan Huang, Yibo Yan, Jungang Li, Zihao Dongfang, Sicheng Tao, PS Tan, Jie Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing efficiency methods for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generate excessively long rationales without commensurate accuracy gains. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that operationalizes this principle through coarse-to-fine budgeting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GSM8K and MATH500 show that HAB surpasses standard CoT in accuracy and reduces token usage, achieving stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than baselines. |
Towards Unifying Multi-Lingual and Cross-Lingual Summarization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on multilingual summarization and cross-lingual summmarization has been limited due to their different definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify MLS and CLS into a more general setting, i.e. many-to-many summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in the zero-shot directions. |
HOSMEL: A Hot-Swappable Modularized Entity Linking Toolkit for Chinese (2022.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the use of entity linking (EL) in downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a modularized entity linking toolkit for easy task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit achieves significantly better accuracy and less time and spaceconsumption than existing methods. |
FFAEval: Evaluating Dialogue System via Free-For-All Ranking (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems show poor correlation with human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a free-for-all human evaluation framework that shares dialogue history with annotators for multi-turn scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a strong correlation with human assessment on English and Chinese dialogue systems. |
P²Net: Parallel Pointer-based Network for Key Information Extraction with Complex Layouts (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kaiwen Wei, Jie Yao, Jiang Zhong, Yangyang Kang, Jingyuan Zhang, Changlong Sun, Xin Zhang, Fengmao Lv, Li Jin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for key information extraction are based on a limited set of entity categories and fixed layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, human-annotated dataset for key information extraction . it is based on a human-annotated layout and 1,162 entity categories . they propose 'parallel pointer-based network' that leverages implicit relationships . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on widely-used datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining fast inference speeds. |
U-CORE: A Unified Deep Cluster-wise Contrastive Framework for Open Relation Extraction (2023.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Relation Extraction (RE) are limited due to the overlap between predefined and undefined relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for both Zero-shot and Unsupervised Relation Extraction tasks by leveraging techniques from Contrastive Learning and Clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three well-known datasets showing an average improvement of 7.35% ARI on Zero-shot ORE tasks and 15.24% ARI for Unsupervised ORE. |
GDLLM: A Global Distance-aware Modeling Approach Based on Large Language Models for Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to analyzing large language models are limited by their pre-trained knowledge of Small Language Models(SLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a global distance-aware modeling approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs) they first present a distance-based graph structure utilizing Graph Attention Network(GAT) |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves minority relation class learning ability on two publicly available datasets, TB-Dense and MATRES. |
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jifan Yu, Gan Luo, Tong Xiao, Qingyang Zhong, Yuquan Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Junyi Luo, Chenyu Wang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang
| 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. |
A General Framework to Enhance Fine-tuning-based LLM Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Ren, Zhenwei Dai, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Jingying Zeng, Zhen Li, Rahul Goutam, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Qi He, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to remove specific data from LLMs without requiring full retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing target data and suppressing related generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the unlearning and utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing the target data and suppressing related generations. |
Dynamic Model-Bank Test-Time Adaptation for Automatic Speech Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing ASR TTA methods struggle with instability under continual and long-term distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a continuous adaptive model-bank framework that adapts to domain shifts in ASR test-time scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse, continuously shifting ASR benchmarks show that DMSUTA outperforms existing continual TTA baselines. |
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Few-shot domain adaptation and NOTA detection are two real-world challenges for few-shot relation classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models . they build upon the FewRel dataset by adding a new test set in a different domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can evaluate few-shot domain adaptation and few- shot none-of-the-above detection on a new domain and NOTA relation choice. |
XAL: EXplainable Active Learning Makes Classifiers Better Low-resource Learners (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for active learning rely on model uncertainty or disagreement to pick unlabeled data, leading to over-confidence in superficial patterns and lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a bi-directional encoder and a uni-directional decoder to generate and score an explanation for low-resource text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 9 strong baselines on six datasets and can generate explanations for its predictions. |
Task-Aware LLM Routing with Multi-Level Task-Profile-Guided Data Synthesis for Cold-Start Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing routers generalize poorly in cold-start scenarios where in-domain training data is unavailable. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-type–aware router approach that models query-conditioned cost and performance via latent task-like variables with prior regularization derived from the synthesized task taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and cost under cold-start and in-domain settings and enables efficient routing. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou
| 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. |
Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MFinMeeting: A Multilingual, Multi-Sector, and Multi-Task Financial Meeting Understanding Evaluation Dataset (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing financial benchmarks rely on news articles, earnings reports, or announcements, making it challenging to capture the real-world dynamics of financial meetings. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual, multi-sector, and multi-task dataset called MFinMeeting that supports English, Chinese, and Japanese . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark supports English, Chinese, and Japanese, enhancing comprehension of financial discussions in diverse linguistic contexts. |
MiCEval: Unveiling Multimodal Chain of Thought’s Quality via Image Description and Reasoning Steps (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiongtao Zhou, Jie He, Lanyu Chen, Jingyu Li, Haojing Chen, Victor Gutierrez Basulto, Jeff Z. Pan, Hanjie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the quality of reasoning steps in multimodal chain-of-thought are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the correctness of reasoning chains by evaluating the quality of both the description and each reasoning step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves interpretability and human judgments on four state-of-the-art MLLMs. |
The Essence of Contextual Understanding in Theory of Mind: A Study on Question Answering with Story Characters (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chulun Zhou, Qiujing Wang, Mo Yu, Xiaoqian Yue, Rui Lu, Jiangnan Li, Yifan Zhou, Shunchi Zhang, Jie Zhou, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | Theory-of-Mind (ToM) is a psychological capability that allows humans to understand and interpret the mental states of others. |
| Approach: | They propose a CharToM-QA benchmark to assess the importance of comprehensive contextual understanding about personal backgrounds in ToM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 1,035 ToM questions based on classic novels and shows that educated participants perform better when they have read the novels than non-educated participants. |
MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters and build expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance. |
MetaASSIST: Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Meta Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue datasets contain lots of noise in their state annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train robust dialogue state tracking models by combining pseudo and vanilla labels by a common weighting parameter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 80.10% on multiWOZ 2.4. |
Unsupervised Knowledge Selection for Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge selection tasks require the preidentified knowledge to generate informative dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to supervise knowledge selection when the gold knowledge label is unknown by obtaining an oracle knowledge label via distant supervision and leverage knowledge distillation to alleviate the noisy labeling problem of distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong supervised baselines on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets and generates more informative responses. |
C-LLM: Learn to Check Chinese Spelling Errors Character by Character (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Spell Checking method that learns to check errors Character by Character. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 2.1% enhancement in general scenarios and a significant improvement in vertical domain scenarios compared to existing methods. |
ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. |
FewNLU: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Methods for Few-Shot Natural Language Understanding (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting During Domain Adaptation of Seq2seq Language Generation (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on lifelong learning requires incremental memory space to learn a model . existing work on experience replay or elastic weighted consolidation requires incremental space . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a recall optimization mechanism to memorize parameters of previous tasks via regularization and a domain drift estimation algorithm to compensate the drift between different domains in the embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA models on paraphrase and dialog response generation tasks. |
RU22Fact: Optimizing Evidence for Multilingual Explainable Fact-Checking on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify factuality of claims do not provide sufficient evidence for explainable fact-checking systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and a novel multilingual explainable fact-checking dataset on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and generate explanations in 16 languages. |
Huatuo-26M, a Large-scale Chinese Medical QA Dataset (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Xidong Wang, Jianquan Li, Shunian Chen, Yuxuan Zhu, Xiangbo Wu, Zhiyi Zhang, Xiaolong Xu, Junying Chen, Jie Fu, Xiang Wan, Anningzhe Gao, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are a powerful tool for medical research, but the data is a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the largest ever medical Question Answering dataset with 26 Million QA pairs as a fine-tuning data for training large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it can be used to train large language models and improves zero-shot performance on other datasets. |
Conversations Are Not Flat: Modeling the Dynamic Information Flow across Dialogue Utterances (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent intelligent open-domain chatbots have made substantial progress thanks to the rapid development of large-scale pre-training approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic flow mechanism to model the context flow and a model to capture the information dynamics across dialogue utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the DialoGPT on the dialogue generation task. |
Unsupervised Dependency Graph Network (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work has identified properties of pretrained self-attention models that mirror those of dependency parse structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encourages attention heads to model different dependency relations from raw corpora and a masked language modeling task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can induce dependency structures from raw corpora and the masked language modeling task without gold POS tags and any external information. |
Learning Flexible Large Multimodal Models with Arbitrary Modality Combinations (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have potential for cross-modal understanding . but extending MLLM to handle diverse modalities introduces two challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage compression mechanism to reduce the number of modality tokens per modality and condense it into a single, compact token sequence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Flex-M3 outperforms its counterpart trained on only full-modality data. |
The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a growing number of researchers are studying the hallucination issue in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection benchmark and a method to detect hallucines in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects hallucinations and mitigates them using different training stages. |
WeTS: A Benchmark for Translation Suggestion (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on overall performance of machine translation but ignore TS performance, authors say . if TS is applied into post-editing, it will reduce the time and cost of post-production. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a golden corpus annotated by experts to generate a translation suggestion model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the golden corpus annotated by translators on four translation directions. |
Reasoning Aware Self-Consistency: Leveraging Reasoning Paths for Efficient LLM Sampling (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate reasoning paths before answers, but lack a systematic approach to determine optimal number of samples or select the most faithful rationale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates the quality of reasoning and consistency of answers for each generated sample and uses criteria-based stopping and weighted majority voting to guide early stopping decisions and rationale selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while maintaining accuracy. |
On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Deming Ye, Chaojun Xiao, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection methods are not suitable for enhancing pre-trained language models with external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play knowledge injection method where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of knowledge injection on knowledge-driven tasks while keeping model parameters frozen. |
Advancing SMoE for Continuous Domain Adaptation of MLLMs: Adaptive Router and Domain-Specific Loss (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT) in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), with a primary focus on Task-incremental CIT, where MLLM are required to continuously acquire new tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse Mixture of Expert (SMoE) based method for domain-incremental CIT in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) . they equip the SMoA module with a domain-specific autoregressive loss (DSAL) they establish a new benchmark to evaluate the efficacy of their method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all baselines and is based on a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) module . |
Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhonghang Yuan, Zhefan Wang, Fang Hu, Zihong Chen, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jie Ying, Huanjun Kong, Songyang Zhang, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, but their applications on knowledge-intensive domains have not been explored due to the scarcity of high-quality verifiable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extends reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to knowledge-intensive domains through automated verififiability data synthesis while enabling verification of the LLM's reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework enhances the reasoning of large language models in knowledge-intensive domains without significantly compromising the model’s general capabilities. |
The Stochastic Parrot on LLM’s Shoulder: A Summative Assessment of Physical Concept Understanding (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed remarkable advancements in large language models (LLMs) many researchers argue that LLMs may not * Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that summarises the memorization issue by using grid inputs that abstractly describe physical phenomena. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task alleviates the memorization issue by using grid-format inputs that abstractly describe physical phenomena. |
Detecting Training Data of Large Language Models via Expectation Maximization (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Membership inference attacks aim to determine whether a specific example was used to train a given language model. |
| Approach: | They propose a membership inference approach that iteratively refines prefix effectiveness and membership scores using an expectation-maximization strategy without requiring labeled non-member examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines under systematically varied distributional overlap and difficulty. |
Do MLLMs Understand Pointing? Benchmarking and Enhancing Referential Reasoning in Egocentric Vision (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Egocentric AI agents rely on pointing to resolve referential ambiguities in natural language commands. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering benchmark to evaluate and enhance pointing reasoning in egocentric views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates and enhances pointing reasoning in egocentric views. |
VehicleWorld: A Highly Integrated Multi-Device Environment for Intelligent Vehicle Interaction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Shuo Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yiran Guo, Yuan Li, Yining Zheng, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Traditional Function Calling (FC) approaches operate statelessly, requiring multiple exploratory calls to build environmental awareness before execution, leading to inefficiency and limited error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a state-based function call approach that maintains explicit system state awareness and implements direct state transitions to achieve target conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms traditional function calling approaches, achieving superior execution accuracy and reduced latency. |
Addressing Inquiries about History: An Efficient and Practical Framework for Evaluating Open-domain Chatbot Consistency (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate consistency capacity of open-domain chatbots are costly and low-efficient. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient framework for evaluating consistency of open-domain chatbots . they use human judges to interact with chatbot, which is costly and low-efficient . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can assess the consistency capacity of chatbots and achieve a high ranking correlation with the human evaluation. |
Open-Set Living Need Prediction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yizhou Sun, Chen Gao, Jiahuan Lei, Xinleishi Xinleishi, Hengliang Luo, Yong Li
| 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. |
Few-Shot Data-to-Text Generation via Unified Representation and Multi-Source Learning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Alexander Hanbo Li, Mingyue Shang, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, Jie Ma, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Bonan Min, William Yang Wang, Kathleen McKeown, Vittorio Castelli, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data-to-text generation focus on specific types of structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides a unified representation that can handle various forms of structured data such as tables, knowledge graph triples, and meaning representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot and few-shot scenarios and can adapt to new structured data. |
RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a serious threat to the safety of reusing deep neural networks (DNNs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient online defense mechanism based on robustness-aware perturbations to distinguish poisoned and clean samples to defend against backdoor attacks on natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better defending performance and lower computational costs than existing defense methods. |
Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation as Constrained HMM (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models have some drawbacks due to slow inference speed and label bias due to local normalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a left-to-right Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to control label bias in non-autoregressive translation (NAT) They propose a bi-directional HMM, which can regularize each other's biases via shared parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can achieve comparable performance to autoregressive Transformers using various decoding methods. |
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuanfu Wang, Pengyu Wang, Chenyang Xi, Bo Tang, Junyi Zhu, Wenqiang Wei, Chen Chen, Chao Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Yijun Niu, Keming Mao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang
| Challenge: | Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%. |
MIO: A Foundation Model on Multimodal Tokens (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zekun Moore Wang, King Zhu, Chunpu Xu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiaheng Liu, Yibo Zhang, Jessie Wang, Ning Shi, Siyu Li, Yizhi Li, Haoran Que, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ge Zhang, Ke Xu, Jie Fu, Wenhao Huang
| Challenge: | Existing models lack multimodal understanding capabilities, resulting in closed-source model that does not support multimodal interleaved sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a foundation model built on multimodal tokens capable of understanding and generating speech, text, images, and videos in an end-to-end, autoregressive manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to understand speech, text, images, and videos in an end-to-end, autoregressive manner. |
NumNet: Machine Reading Comprehension with Numerical Reasoning (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing numerical MRC models are weak in numerical reasoning, such as addition, subtraction, sorting and counting. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical MRC model that integrates numerical reasoning into existing MRC models and achieves an EM-score of 64.56% on the DROP dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all existing machine reading comprehension models by considering the numerical relations among numbers on the DROP dataset. |
DataSciBench: An LLM Agent Benchmark for Data Science (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dan Zhang, Sining Zhoubian, Min Cai, Fengzu Li, Lekang Yang, Wei Wang, Tianjiao Dong, Ziniu Hu, Jie Tang, Yisong Yue
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single task, simple evaluation metrics, and readily available ground truth (GT) DataSciBench is built on curated, natural, and challenging prompts with complex evaluation criteria and uncertain GT. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models in data science that integrates LLM-based self-consistency and human verification to ensure accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models in all metrics and offers rigorous insights into LLM strengths and weaknesses. |
Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a novel graph for narrative comprehension captures coherence between passages in narratives . end-to-end paradigms are effective for comprehension tasks, but may not be sufficient for all comprehension scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph dubbed NarCo which explicitly depicts task-agnostic coherence dependencies that are ready to be consumed by downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph is practically instantiated by LLMs without human annotations. |
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing factuality detection methods are not effective for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a probing model that trains on offline consistency checking results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification and improves on factuality detection and question answering benchmarks. |
Towards Faithful Industrial RAG: A Reinforced Co-adaptation Framework for Advertising QA (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA in industrial environments are inherently relational and often updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: Graph-aware Retrieval and evidence-constrained reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, safety, and URL validity. |
Key Fact as Pivot: A Two-Stage Model for Low Resource Table-to-Text Generation (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation use encoder-decoder framework, but lack of large parallel data is a problem for many domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to separate table-to-text generation into two stages: key fact prediction and surface realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 27.34 BLEU score with only 1,000 parallel data, while the baseline model only achieves 9.71 BLUE score. |
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao, Di Yin, Fang Li, Jie Wang, Chen Zeng Xi, Suncong Zheng, Xiaolong Liang, Xing Sun
| Challenge: | Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs. |
Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) models can be used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a more practical and universal attack that does not require the presence of a target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses both text and image safety checkers while preserving high semantic alignment with the target prompt. |
A Contextual Hierarchical Attention Network with Adaptive Objective for Dialogue State Tracking (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialogue state tracking ignore the slot imbalance problem and treat all slots indiscriminately, which limits the learning of hard slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to employ a contextual hierarchical attention network to enhance the DST by learning contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 52.68% and 58.55% joint accuracy on multiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets and significantly improves performance (+1.24% and +5.98%) |
AgentMove: A Large Language Model based Agentic Framework for Zero-shot Next Location Prediction (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to apply large language models to zero-shot next location prediction tasks are limited due to their limited computational power. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic agentic prediction framework to achieve generalized next location prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the leading baseline by 3.33% to 8.57% across 8 out of 12 metrics. |
Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Multi-Source Probing for Open-Domain Conversational Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models of open-domain dialogue comprehension have limited conversational understanding and response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source probing method to probe dialogue comprehension abilities of open-domain dialogue models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method aggregates features from multiple sources to accomplish diverse task goals and conducts downstream tasks in a generative manner consistent with dialogue model pre-training to leverage model capabilities. |
Teaching Your Models to Understand Code via Focal Preference Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Xin Zhang, Xiao Liu, Yangyu Huang, Jianwen Luo, Yizhen Zhang, Zuchao Li, Ruihang Chu, Yujiu Yang, Scarlett Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning focus on unit test feedback to construct preference pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Preference Learning improves on BigCodeBench and BigCodeBind tasks. |
Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern neural machine translation models suffer limitation in compositional generalization, resulting in weakened translation performance on unseen compounds. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce categorization to the contextualized representations to improve generalization by reducing sparsity and overfitting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces compositional generalization error rates by 24% on a dedicated MT dataset. |
Manual Evaluation Matters: Reviewing Test Protocols of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Yuzhuo Bai, Keyue Qiu, Zhiyu Xie, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (RE) has attracted much attention in the past few years . previous methods to evaluate models manually or directly on autolabeled data have produced inaccurate evaluations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use distant supervision to generate large-scale autolabeled data . they build manually-annotated test sets for two DS-RE datasets and evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces 53% wrong labels at the entity pair level in the popular NYT10 dataset. |
TreeRL: LLM Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for On-Policy LLM RL typically train a separate process reward model, which suffers from distribution mismatch and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that directly incorporates on-policy tree search for RL training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math and code reasoning benchmarks show that tree search achieves superior performance compared to traditional ChainRL. |
Learning to Recover from Multi-Modality Errors for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation models suffer from multi-modality problem . despite their autoregressivity, most NMT models suffer with slow decoding speed . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-autoregressive model which generates a translation as a sequence of segments while each segment is predicted token-by-token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve 4 times speedup while maintaining comparable performance. |
Context Tracking Network: Graph-based Context Modeling for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks are not stealthy to system deployers or users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel backdoor attack method based on negative data augmentation and modifying word embeddings that is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict characters' personalities have not been studied in the NLP field due to the lack of appropriate datasets mimicking the process of book reading. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to predict characters' personalities that uses an exhaustive vocabulary of personality traits as targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is efficient and accurate and relies on long-term context to achieve accurate predictions for both machines and humans. |
Medical Dialogue System: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du, Yuxuan Wang, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Tong Ruan, Jie Xu, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have significant potential to simplify diagnostic procedure and reduce the cost of collecting information from patients. |
| Approach: | They analyze 325 papers from well-known computer science, natural language processing conferences and journals to find out the major challenges of medical dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems have been surveyed in the medical community but have not been evaluated from a technical perspective. |
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models . |
Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph Modeling over Key Utterances for Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Compared to standard RC tasks, dialogue reading comprehension (DRC) has raised challenges because of the complex speaker information and noisy dialogue context. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method for dialogue reading comprehension that extracts answers from dialogues by using key-utterances-extracting methods and a Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance against previous works. |
CAP: Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaokun Wang, Jinyu Guo, Jingwen Pu, Hongli Pu, Meng Yang, Xunlei Chen, Jie Ou, Wenyi Li, Guangchun Luo, Wenhong Tian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for modifying parameters are unsystematic and rely on empirical experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable alignment prompting for unlearning framework that decouples unlearning into a learnable prompt optimization process via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves precise, controllable unlearning without updating model parameters. |
Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
CodeBind: Decoupled Representation Learning for Multimodal Alignment with Unified Compositional Codebook (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal representation alignment is crucial for large language models and robotics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes multimodal representation spaces through a modality-shared-specific codebook design. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal classification and retrieval tasks. |
HMEAE: Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing event extraction methods classify each argument role independently, ignoring conceptual correlations between different argument roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction model to provide inductive bias from the concept hierarchy of event argument roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on real-world datasets and shows that it leverages useful knowledge from the concept hierarchy. |
SciMMIR: Benchmarking Scientific Multi-modal Information Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Siwei Wu, Yizhi Li, Kang Zhu, Ge Zhang, Yiming Liang, Kaijing Ma, Chenghao Xiao, Haoran Zhang, Bohao Yang, Wenhu Chen, Wenhao Huang, Noura Al Moubayed, Jie Fu, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) is a rapidly evolving field . current benchmarks for image-text pairings overlook the scientific domain . |
| Approach: | They develop a scientific domain-specific MMIR benchmark to evaluate image-text pairings using open-access research paper corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 530K image-text pairs extracted from scientific documents with detailed captions. |
Better Modeling of Incomplete Annotations for Named Entity Recognition (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) assume that the training data is fully annotated with named entity information. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised setup for named entity recognition where annotated data is assumed to be available during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is able to recognize named entities with incomplete annotations. |
Multimodal Incremental Transformer with Visual Grounding for Visual Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on implicit exploration of multimodal coreference but neglect the importance of locating the objects explicitly in the visual content, which is associated with textual entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal incremental transformer with visual grounding which aims to explicitly locate related objects in the image guided by textual entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance on the VisDial v0.9 and v1.0 datasets. |
Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
ROSE: Robust Selective Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the lack of adversarial robustness in pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning approach that conducts selective updates when adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves adversarial robustness on downstream tasks . it eliminates spurious updates, leading to flatter and wider optima than the conventional method . |
Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional singleround retrieval struggles with complex multistep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points. |
All Changes May Have Invariant Principles: Improving Ever-Shifting Harmful Meme Detection via Design Concept Reproduction (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyou Jiang, Mingyang Li, Junjie Wang, Yuekai Huang, Jie Huang, Zhiyuan Chang, Zhaoyang Li, Qing Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for harmful meme detection only learn the combination of harmful elements and lack understanding of these implicit expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects harmful memes by replicating the design concept of malicious users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest accuracy with 81.1% and has slight accuracy decreases when generalized to type-shifting and temporal-evolving memes. |
From Past To Path: Masked History Learning for Next-Item Prediction in Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kaiwen Wei, Kejun he, Xiaomian Kang, Jie Zhang, null Ymyang, Li Jin, Zhenyang Li, Jiang Zhong, Richard He Bai, Junnan Zhu
| Challenge: | Generative recommendation models inherently bias towards local contexts, failing to capture deeper historical dependencies necessary for understanding complex user intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that shifts the objective from simple next-step prediction to deep comprehension of history by entropy-guided masking policy and a curriculum learning scheduler to enhance the framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art generative models on three public datasets and shows that it is more accurate than current models. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
YEDDA: A Lightweight Collaborative Text Span Annotation Tool (P18-4)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing annotation tools do not consider post-annotation quality analysis due to inter-annotator disagreement. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight but efficient open-source tool for text span annotation that can be used for collaborative user annotation and administrator evaluation and analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces the annotation time by half compared with existing tools and the time can be compressed by 16.47% through intelligent recommendation. |
LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Heng Ji, Minlie Huang, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning Makes Generalized and Calibrated Neural Text Retrievers (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning is a technique that updates few parameters in pre-trained models for language understanding and generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage prompt tuning for neural text retrieval to improve generalization and cross-domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can mitigate the two issues faced by fine-tuning retrieval methods and improve the out-of-domain zero-shot generalization of the retrieval models. |
CodRED: A Cross-Document Relation Extraction Dataset for Acquiring Knowledge in the Wild (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting relational facts between entity pairs within single sentences or documents. |
| Approach: | They present a problem of cross-document relation extraction (CRE) using human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first human-annotated cross-document RE dataset . it shows that it is challenging to existing RE methods including strong BERT-based models. |
ONSEP: A Novel Online Neural-Symbolic Framework for Event Prediction Based on Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | TKGF is a technique that requires experience during testing and relying on a single short-term history. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates dynamic causal rule mining and dual history augmented generation to enhance event prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvements across diverse datasets and significantly improves Hit@k. |
Consistency Regularization Training for Compositional Generalization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing neural models have difficulty generalizing to unseen combinations of seen components. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the capability of Transformer on compositional generalization by consistency regularization training without modifying model architectures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on semantic parsing and machine translation benchmarks. |
LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
SAGE: Synergistic Adaptive Gating of Experts for Hateful Video Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hateful video detection rely on multimodal feature fusion . existing methods rely only on blind feature mixing, which leads to feature dilution . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts from blind feature mixing to decision-level arbitration . it instantiates disentangled experts to rigorously preserve modality-specific semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on HateMM and MultiHateClip benchmarks. |
Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a limited number of text encoders are able to recognize fine-grained entities or events within encoded semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation dataset to examine embeddings' ability to recognize fine-grained entities or events within encoded semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows embeddings struggle with fine-grained matching . the proposed encoder outperforms the state-of-the-art 7B model in a small sample . |
TAKE: Topic-shift Aware Knowledge sElection for Dialogue Generation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work finds that realizing who holds the initiative can help select knowledge . however, there is a strong semantic transition between two rounds, probably leading to initiative misjudgment . |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-shift Aware Knowledge sElector(TAKE) model which locates relevant parts from dialogue history to improve knowledge selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the WoW. |
A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kedi Chen, Dezhao Ruan, Yuhao Dan, Yaoting Wang, Siyu Yan, Xuecheng Wu, Yinqi Zhang, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Liang He, Biqing Qi, Linyang Li, Qipeng Guo, Xiaoming Shi, Wei Zhang
| Challenge: | Inductive reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a survey of inductive reasoning for large language models . they categorize methods into three main areas: post-training enhancement, test-time exploration, and data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves inductive reasoning in large language models. |
T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Yang, Honglin Guo, Li Ji, Jiazheng Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhikai Lei, Shuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shichun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
| Outcome: | The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
A Survey on Cross-Lingual Summarization (2022.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Cross-lingual summarization is a task of generating a summary in one language for a given document in a different language. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic review of the literature on cross-lingual summarization . they summarize previous efforts and compare them with each other . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with previous approaches and summarizes them to provide a deeper analysis. |
Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, XingYu XingYu, Yuqiu Ji, Guohai Xu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Debing Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese resources are small in scale and limited to specific domains, making them insufficient for LLM post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-annotated reward model and a preference dataset to address this gap . they evaluate Chinese RMs on CheemsBench and construct an RM that captures human preferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed RM achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench and CheeMePreference. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
Advancing MoE Efficiency: A Collaboration-Constrained Routing (C2R) Strategy for Better Expert Parallelism Design (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using Mixture-of-Experts, researchers have found that efficient MoE is difficult to achieve due to two key reasons: imbalanced expert activation and massive communication overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaboration-constrained routing strategy that encourages more specialized expert groups and leverages expert specialization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an average performance improvement of 0.51% and 0.33% on LLaMA-MoE and Qwen-MaE respectively. |
Understanding Translationese in Cross-Lingual Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets involve translation, but translationese is distinguished from original text . previous studies have shown that translationeses in CLS are not a problem in training sets . |
| Approach: | They propose to use cross-lingual summarization to generate a concise summary in a target language from a document in . existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation, but the translated text is distinguished from the original written in that language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method systematically investigates how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. |
Stand on The Shoulders of Giants: Building JailExpert from Previous Attack Experience (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn incessantly emerging novel relations are overfitting the few memorized examples of old relations, causing confusion among existing relations. |
| Approach: | They introduce episodic memory activation and reconsolidation (EMAR) to continual relation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in catastrophic forgetting old relations. |
Defining and Evaluating Visual Language Models’ Basic Spatial Abilities: A Perspective from Psychometrics (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies assessing the spatial abilities of VLMs lack a solid theoretical foundation and lack measurable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychometric framework defining five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models (VLMs) it provides a comprehensive evaluation benchmark and methodological perspective for embodied AI development . |
ClidSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Dialogue Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pipeline models on ClidSum and mDialBART. |
Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association (2024.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing information retrieval datasets cannot capture abstract semantic associations well. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that retrieves relevant plots from the book for a query using a labeled dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to evaluate the performance of IR models on the novel task Plot Retrieval. |
GoG: Relation-aware Graph-over-Graph Network for Visual Dialog (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms the strong baseline in both generative and discriminative settings by a significant margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware graph-over-graph network (GoG) for visual dialog . their model outperforms the strong baseline in both generative and discriminative settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in both generative and discriminative settings by a significant margin. |
Bridging the Gap between Prior and Posterior Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue models lack prior and posterior knowledge selection . prior selection module may not learn to select knowledge properly because of lack of posterior information . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation-based training strategy to remove the exposure bias of knowledge selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets. |
Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs with External Knowledge and Interactive Game (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Low-Confidence Gold: Refining Low-Confidence Samples for Efficient Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Low-Confidence Gold (LCG) is a new filtering framework for Large Language Models that curates high-quality subsets while preserving data diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a new filtering framework that employs centroid-based clustering and confidence-guided selection for identifying valuable instruction pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on a subset of 6K samples while maintaining data diversity. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Dayuan Fu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates 6 agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that closed-source models outperform open-source model (48.4% vs 32.1%) integrating models with advanced scaffolds to form autonomous agents is a paradigm shift. |
TeachMaster: Generative Teaching via Code (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Yuheng Wang, Runde Yang, Lin Wu, Jie Zhang, Jingru Fan, Tianle Zhou, Ruoyu Fu, Huatao Li, Ruijie Shi, Siheng Chen, Weinan E, Chen Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating video content are limited by high costs and slow update cycles. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shifting educators from manual creators to high-level directors who focus on pedagogical intents while agents handle execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces production costs to 0.3% of traditional course videos and provides a robust solution for scalable education. |
ELLE: Efficient Lifelong Pre-training for Emerging Data (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are typically trained with static data, ignoring that streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. |
| Approach: | They propose to use function preserved model expansion to expand existing PLM's width and depth to improve efficiency of knowledge acquisition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves pre-training efficiency and performance over existing models on BERT and GPT. |
Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), many downstream NLP tasks can be well solved given appropriate prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate ChatGPT and Bing GPT3 into their applications to create a set of LLMs that can be used to generate NLP tasks with appropriate prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be zero-shot or few-shot learners to solve specified tasks and can even be zero or few shot learners. |
GraphReader: Building Graph-based Agent to Enhance Long-Context Abilities of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shilong Li, Yancheng He, Hangyu Guo, Xingyuan Bu, Ge Bai, Jie Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yangguang Li, Wanli Ouyang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing models for long contexts struggle to handle long inputs due to limited context window and memory usage. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based agent system that analyzes long texts into a graphical graph . GraphReader consistently outperforms GPT-4-128k across context lengths from 16k to 256k . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on four challenging benchmarks. |
Enhancing One-Shot Pruned Pre-trained Language Models through Sparse-Dense-Sparse Mechanism (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Guanchen Li, Xiandong Zhao, Lian Liu, Zeping Li, Yixing Xu, Dong Li, Lu Tian, Jie He, Ashish Sirasao, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are robust in contextual understanding but their considerable size incurs significant computational and storage costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse-Dense-Sparse pruning framework to prune PLMs . they prune less critical connections using conventional pruning methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms SparseGPT and Wanda under identical sparsity. |
Learning to Reason Deductively: Math Word Problem Solving as Complex Relation Extraction (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve math word problems do not provide explanations for generated expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a deductive approach that presents explainable deductive reasoning steps to iteratively construct target expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing strong baselines on four benchmark datasets. |
Asclepius: A Spectrum Evaluation Benchmark for Medical Multi-Modal Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Liu, Wenxuan Wang, Su Yihang, Jingyuan Huang, Yudi Zhang, Cheng-Yi Li, Wenting Chen, Xiaohan Xing, Kao-Jung Chang, Linlin Shen, Michael R. Lyu
| Challenge: | Medical Multi-Modal Large Language Models (Med-MLLMs) are a promising new form of artificial general intelligence due to their ability to tackle complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that comprehensively assesses medical multi-modal large language models in terms of distinct medical specialties and different diagnostic capacities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers 15 medical specialties and different diagnostic capacities, and excludes overlap with existing VQA dataset. |
Neural-DINF: A Neural Network based Framework for Measuring Document Influence (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure scholarly impact of documents without citations only consider word frequency change. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network framework that measures document influence without citations by using word frequency changes and word semantic shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on document influence evaluation without citations. |
Situated Embedding Models for Context-Aware Dense Retrieval (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing embedding models are not well-equipped to encode situated context effectively, i.e., situating a chunk’s meaning within its context. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent short chunks in a way that is conditioned on a broader context window to enhance retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models on a book-plot retrieval dataset. |
CARE-STaR: Constraint-aware Self-taught Reasoner (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiliang Li, Bo Tang, Yijun Niu, Beihong Jin, Qiwen Shi, Yuchen Feng, Zhiyu Li, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang, Feiyu Xiong
| Challenge: | Recent research on instruction following has demonstrated that LLMs can handle complex instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose to assign constraints to different levels of constraints in instructions . they use chain-of-thought and self-taught reasoner methods to identify constraints . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on three instruction-following benchmarks. |
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios. |
JPU: Bridging Jailbreak Defense and Unlearning via On-Policy Path Rectification (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kai Li, Xuanqing Yu, Ziyi Ni, Yi Zeng, Yao Xu, Zheqing Zhang, Xin Li, Jitao Sang, Xiaogang Duan, Xuelei Wang, Chengbao Liu, Jie Tan
| Challenge: | Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal–hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20%. |
Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Attention-based Span-specific and Contextual Semantic Representations (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods treat each span token equally important, ignoring significant features. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based joint extraction framework with attention-based semantic representations that utilizes span-specific and contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on ACE2005, CoNLL2004 and ADE. |
CORBA: Contagious Recursive Blocking Attacks on Multi-Agent Systems Based on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing security models rely on open-ended communication, but the collaborative process itself can be exploited and disrupted. |
| Approach: | They propose a new threat class, called Denial-of-Collaboration, which corrupts collaborative structure and transforms communication topology into self-sabotage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks bypass conventional safety alignments that are not designed to detect behavioral or systemic attacks. |
Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
Re3: Relevance & Recency Retrieval for Mitigating Temporal Hallucination (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing retrievers suffer from temporal-semantic misalignment and outdated-document interference . Existing frameworks suffer from both temporal validity and outdated factual versions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that mitigates temporal hallucinations by embedding heterogeneous temporal signals into the semantic space to ensure retrieval fidelity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Re3 outperforms baselines by 9.7% in generation accuracy . the framework outperformed strongest baselines on challenging dynamic tasks . |
Glider: Global and Local Instruction-Driven Expert Router (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for routing-based expert models favor generalization over performance on held-in tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a global and local instruction driven expert router that leverages recent LLMs' semantic reasoning capabilities to generate task-specific instructions from the input query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves held-in performance while maintaining strong generalization on held-out tasks. |
CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emits predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing methods on six classification tasks yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions. |
Trial and Error: Exploration-Based Trajectory Optimization of LLM Agents (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach that allows agents to learn from their exploration failures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three complex tasks by a large margin. |
FlipDA: Effective and Robust Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Domain Representative Keywords Selection: A Probabilistic Approach (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a probabilistic approach to select a subset of a target domain representative keywords is crucial for many downstream tasks in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic approach to select a subset of a target domain representative keywords from a candidate set, contrasting with a context domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach provides more importance to distinctive keywords than common keywords contrasting with the context domain. |
DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yuan Yao, Deming Ye, Peng Li, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lixin Huang, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation extraction dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features . document-level relation extraction is a task to identify relational facts between entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text. |