Papers by Jin Cao

47 papers
Agent-RewardBench: Towards a Unified Benchmark for Reward Modeling across Perception, Planning, and Safety in Real-World Multimodal Agents (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are developing but lack external feedback . there is no clear on how to select reward models for agents .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate agent reward modeling ability in MLLMs . they use multiple dimensions and real-world agent scenarios evaluation .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates agent performance in multimodal large language models . it covers perception, planning, and safety with 7 scenarios and is highly difficult and high-quality .
Beyond Under-Alignment: Atomic Preference Enhanced Factuality Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing work evaluates the factuality of large language models on in-domain (ID) datasets and the factuality on out-of-domain datasets.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances model’s awareness of factuality at the granularity of individual facts and propose 'Atomic Preference Enhanced Factuality Tuning' this framework enhances the model’ s awareness and accuracy of factual information at the level of individual factual facts.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves model performance by an average of on ID and OOD datasets, which is highly effective.
Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing open-source models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities.
Approach: They evaluate 12 multimodal tasks using 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models.
Outcome: The proposed method is effective in multimodal reasoning tasks, the authors show . they show that it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process.
Tug-of-War between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge conflicts in RALMs can ensnare them in a tug-of-war between knowledge and evidence, limiting their practical applicability.
Approach: They propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model’s confidence.
Outcome: The proposed method can resolve knowledge conflicts in large language models with the help of conflict-disentangle contrast decoding (CD2) .
CogKTR: A Knowledge-Enhanced Text Representation Toolkit for Natural Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-demos)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge-enhanced methods are limited to knowledge-intensive tasks.
Approach: They propose a knowledge-enhanced text representation toolkit for natural language understanding . it combines knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection and knowledge application .
Outcome: The proposed toolkit supports knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection, and knowledge application.
A Troublemaker with Contagious Jailbreak Makes Chaos in Honest Towns (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research focuses on single-agent attacks and shared memory attacks, but real-world scenarios often involve independent memory.
Approach: They propose a large-scale, multi-agent, multitopology attack evaluation framework that exploits the memory of an agent to make it more vulnerable to jailbreak attacks.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on the troublemaker makes chaos in Honest Town task with 23.51%, 18.95%, and 52.93% improvements in line, star topologies, and 100-agent settings.
Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Dialog State Tracking do not generalize well to new domains and unseen slots.
Approach: They propose an ontology-free framework that queries for unseen constraints and slots in multi-domain task-oriented dialogs using a conditional language model pre-trained on substantive English sentences.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves goal accuracy in zero-shot domain adaptation settings by up to 9% over the previous state-of-the-art on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset.
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts.
Approach: They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters.
Outcome: The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters.
Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
Approach: They propose a chain-of-thought-like method to elicit models' potential abilities to generate rationales and answers that are based on attribution tracing and causal tracers to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM.
Outcome: The proposed method eliminates Toxic CoT problems and improves the model’s overall commonsense reasoning performance by 5.5%.
Depth Aware Hierarchical Replay Continual Learning for Knowledge Based Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Continual learning models adapt well to the latest data but lose ability to remember past data due to changes in the data source.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical replay framework that allows models to keep a small memory of previous learned data that uses replay.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms previous continual learning methods in mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
Sharing Encoder Representations across Languages, Domains and Tasks in Large-Scale Spoken Language Understanding (2023.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Larger encoders can improve accuracy for spoken language understanding (SLU) but are difficult to use given the inference latency constraints of online systems.
Approach: They propose to use a larger 170M parameter BERT encoder that shares representations across languages, domains and tasks for SLU.
Outcome: The proposed encoders achieve state-of-the-art performance on numerous NLP tasks.
TongGu: Mastering Classical Chinese Understanding with Knowledge-Grounded Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in Natural Language Processing (NLP), but struggle with Classical Chinese Understanding (CCU) Existing models, including general-purpose and preliminary LLMs, lack the ability to address CCU in data-demanding and knowledge-intensive tasks.
Approach: They propose to use a classical Chinese corpora-based instruction-tuning dataset to unlock the full CCU potential of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed model unlocks the full CCU potential of LLMs by preserving its foundational knowledge while maintaining redundancy-aware tuning (RAT) and CCU-RAG.
MULFE: A Multi-Level Benchmark for Free Text Model Editing (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in comprehending human language and vast parametric knowledge obtained from large corpora.
Approach: They propose a multi-level benchmark for free text model editing to bridge the gap . they categorize probe queries into three levels of generalization .
Outcome: The proposed method improves the generalization performance of large langugae models.
Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that pre-trained masked language models can be factual knowledge bases.
Approach: They conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs . they find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts a .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on illustrative cases and external contexts . the results question the previous findings that MLMs can be reliable factual knowledge bases .
Whispers that Shake Foundations: Analyzing and Mitigating False Premise Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions . authors propose a method to mitigate false premises hallucinosity .
Approach: They propose a method to constrain false premise attention heads during the model inference process.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance by constraining false premise attention heads . it yields a notable increase of nearly 20% of model performance .
LINKED: Eliciting, Filtering and Integrating Knowledge in Large Language Model for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, such as commonsense reasoning.
Approach: They propose a method to elicit, filter and integrate knowledge in large language models (LINKED) they propose 'reward model' to filter out noisy knowledge and 'take marginal consistent reasoning module'
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms SOTA baselines on two commonsense reasoning tasks.
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied.
Approach: They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains .
Outcome: The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability.
Privacy Risks of Intermediate Representations: Attribute Inference in Distributed LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Distributed LLMs avoid raw inputs by transmitting intermediate hidden states, a practice widely assumed to preserve privacy.
Approach: They propose a distributed inference framework that transmits intermediate hidden states to avoid sending raw inputs by exposing sensitive user attributes.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves Top-1 accuracy of 0.997 on CMS, 0.980 on Skytrax, and 0.986 on ECHR.
LogicPro: Improving Complex Logical Reasoning via Program-Guided Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: LogicPro is a data synthesis method that uses LeetCode-style algorithm problems and their corresponding Program solutions to generate complex logic data.
Approach: They propose a new method which leverages LeetCode-style algorithm Problems and their corresponding Program solutions to synthesize complex logic data in text format.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models for BBH27, LogicBench, DROP, AR-LSAT, and GSM8K, and a wide range of reasoning datasets.
Attention Fusion: a light yet efficient late fusion mechanism for task adaptation in NLU (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: a recent study has shown that fine-tuning pre-trained models is parameter-inefficient and expensive.
Approach: They propose a task-attuned token module which integrates pre-trained network representations into a pre-trainer.
Outcome: The proposed model trains only 0.0009% of the parameters and is efficient during computation and scalable during deployment.
The Reasoning-Memorization Interplay in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but struggle to generalize to unseen questions due to over-reliance on memorized training examples.
Approach: They propose to identify a set of linear features in the model’s residual stream that govern the balance between genuine reasoning and memory recall.
Outcome: The proposed model can be manipulated to activate the most relevant problem-solving capabilities during answer generation.
Learn over Past, Evolve for Future: Forecasting Temporal Trends for Fake News Detection (2023.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing work on fake news detection does not consider the temporal shift issue caused by the rapidly-evolving nature of news data.
Approach: They propose a framework to forecast temporal patterns of news data and guide detector to fast adapt to future distributions.
Outcome: The proposed framework forecasts temporal distribution patterns and guides detector to fast adapt to future distribution.
HisDoc-OCR: Restoring Visual Grounding in MLLMs for Chinese Historical Document OCR (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Despite multimodal large language models' strong performance on modern document OCR, their application to historical Chinese texts suffers from severe hallucinations, character fabrication, uncontrolled repetition, and semantic drift.
Approach: They propose a multimodal large language model which restores visual grounding through three synergistic strategies: Layout Injection, First-Occurrence Boost, Self-Distilled Attention Focusing and HisDoc-OCR.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms general-purpose and OCR-specific models on Chinese historical documents.
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints.
Approach: They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration.
Unlocking the Future: Exploring Look-Ahead Planning Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that large language models may possess preliminary planning capabilities.
Approach: They examine the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations.
Outcome: The proposed model can decode the decision from the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token.
Large-Scale Corpus Construction and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Ancient Chinese Poetry: New Method and Data Insights (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Ancient Chinese poetry presents unique challenges for Large Language Models due to data scarcity and limited ability of general LLMs when dealing with ACP.
Approach: They propose a specialized Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework to improve LLMs' performance . they use 1.1 million ancient poems and 990K related texts to address hallucination issues .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance of LLMs in ancient Chinese poetry domain from 49.2% to 89.0%.
DiffChat: Learning to Chat with Text-to-Image Synthesis Models for Interactive Image Creation (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a novel method to align Large Language Models to "chat" with prompt-as-input Text-to-Image Synthesis models is proposed . a user-specified instruction can be used to create a high quality image .
Approach: They propose a method to align Large Language Models to "chat" with prompt-as-input Text-to-Image Synthesis models for interactive image creation.
Outcome: The proposed method can exhibit superior performance than baseline models and strong competitors based on automatic and human evaluations.
Don’t Be Misled by Style: A Style-Adaptive Reranker for Capturing Effective Knowledge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing rerankers are mainly trained on well-edited texts, but stylistic features can be misled by reranked models.
Approach: They propose a style-augmented multi-task framework that prioritizes effective knowledge over stylistic perturbations by using an LLM to derive passage-level supervision on whether a passage helps or harms answer correctness.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that SARK improves generation performance across multiple LLMs under mixed-style conditions.
Meeseeks: A Feedback-Driven, Iterative Self-Correction Benchmark evaluating LLMs’ Instruction Following Capability (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models lack the ability to adhere to instructions, resulting in suboptimal performance.
Approach: They propose an automated iterative instruction-following benchmark with integrated feedback mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark identifies erroneous components in model responses and provides feedback accurately.
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving document-level DECI with low-resourced languages under-explored.
Approach: They propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning for zero-shot cross-lingual ECI.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on monolingual and multilingual scenarios by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score.
SOP-Maze: Evaluating Large Language Models on Complicated Business Standard Operating Procedures (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as domain-specific agents, but evaluation of their capabilities in such contexts has not been fully explored.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow instructions and make decisions in real-world scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world business data and adapted into 23 complex SOP scenarios.
Reusing Transferable Weight Increments for Low-resource Style Generation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Text style transfer (TST) is crucial in natural language processing, aiming to endow text with a new style without altering its meaning.
Approach: They propose a framework to use style features in weight increments to transfer low-resource styles effectively.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves remarkable performance across different backbones, achieving particularly effective results in low-resource scenarios.
Instilling Type Knowledge in Language Models via Multi-Task QA (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Current methods to learn entity types rely on coarse, noisy labels . current methods rely only on text-to-text pre-training on type-centric questions .
Approach: They propose to instill fine-grained type knowledge in language models by pre-training on type-centric questions.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in zero-shot dialog state tracking benchmarks and can accurately infer entity types in Wikipedia articles.
RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval augmented language models often overlook effective alignment with human preferences.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate RMs in retrieval augmented language models . they incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark combines 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity of data sources.
DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing timeline summarizations lack flexibility to meet diverse granularity needs . a fine-grained timeline showing the technical details is preferred for news topics .
Approach: They propose a new paradigm to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements.
Outcome: The proposed timelines are informative and granularly consistent, but they struggle to generate consistent timelines.
Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multimodal web agents are cost-efficient and privacy-preserving, but suffer from weak planning and limited cross-website generalization.
Approach: They propose a method which autonomously explores environments to discover experiences and utilizes hindsight experience to synthesize strictly aligned, high-level training data.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-32B model on real-world benchmarks and demonstrates that mastering low-level atomic skills does not guarantee high-level planning competence.
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) .
Approach: They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries.
Outcome: The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer.
InstructoR: Instructing Unsupervised Conversational Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for conversational retrieval only fine-tune on limited supervised data, making it difficult for the retriever to fully grasp the entire conversation.
Approach: They propose a method to instruct unsupervised conversational dense retrieval with large language models (LLMs) they use supervised data to discover the user's query intent from the conversation context .
Outcome: The proposed method can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method.
Alignment Precedes Fusion: Open-Vocabulary Named Entity Recognition as Context-Type Semantic Matching (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Continual learning and zero-shot learning approaches have not been adopted to scale to novel-emerging types.
Approach: They propose a method to recognize entities in novel types by their textual names or descriptions.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three challenging OVNER benchmarks by 9.7%, 9.5%, and 1.8% F1-score of novel types.
MCS-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Chinese Classical Studies (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced visual and language understanding, but their potential in Chinese Classical Studies (CCS) remains underexplored due to the lack of specialized benchmarks.
Approach: They propose to develop a multimodal benchmark specifically designed for Chinese Classical Studies across multiple subdomains to bridge this gap.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark spans seven core subdomains with a total of 45 meticulously designed tasks.
A Good Neighbor, A Found Treasure: Mining Treasured Neighbors for Knowledge Graph Entity Typing (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to infer missing types for knowledge graphs only leverage one-hop neighbor information of the central entity, ignoring multi-hop neighbors that can provide valuable clues for inference.
Approach: They propose a method to infer missing types for knowledge graph entities by using neighbor information and co-occurrence relations between types.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets.
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent advances in deep learning have significantly impacted the legal domain.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework for judicial decision-making that simulates the court trial process . they propose 420 Chinese judgment documents to support their framework and build a large-scale legal knowledge base .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles.
A Survey of Large Models in Sports (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Increasing interest in sports has led to the rapid advancement of large models, particularly multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . linguistic intelligence is a key component of large-model-driven sports intelligence .
Approach: They propose to establish a foundation for advancing research and practical development of large-model-driven sports intelligence.
Outcome: The proposed model-driven sports intelligence will be able to process and generate sports-related language effectively and process multiple data modalities.
RL-PLUS: Countering Capability Boundary Collapse of LLMs in Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid-policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a hybrid-policy optimization approach that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks and superior performance on out-of distribution reasoning tasks.
RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align relevant video content with natural language queries.
Approach: They propose to conduct efficient text-video Retrieval with a salient-and-correlated AdaPter . they propose a low-rank modulation module to refine per-image features from frozen CLIP backbone .
Outcome: Experiments on four TVR datasets show that the proposed method performs better than other methods.
Evaluating Personalized Tool-Augmented LLMs from the Perspectives of Personalization and Proactivity (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Personalized tool utilization is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preference in interaction scenarios with various tools.
Approach: They propose a key-point-based LLM evaluation method that mitigates biases by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference.
Outcome: The proposed method mitigates biases in the LLM-as-a-judge system by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference.

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