Papers by Kai Li

133 papers
FastMCTS: A Simple Sampling Strategy for Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating multi-step reasoning data rely on rejection sampling, which generates trajectories independently and suffers from inefficiency and imbalanced sampling across problems of varying difficulty levels.
Approach: They propose a data synthesis strategy inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search . it offers step-level evaluation signals and promotes balanced sampling .
Outcome: Experiments show that FastMCTS generates 30% more correct reasoning paths than rejection sampling.
Chronos: Learning Temporal Dynamics of Reasoning Chains for Test-Time Scaling (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for testing time scales treat reasoning traces or tokens equally, ignoring substantial variations in trajectory quality and localized logical failures.
Approach: They propose a chronological reasoning scorer that models each trajectory as a time series.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves relative improvements of 34.21% over Pass@128 and 22.70% over Maj@135 on HMMT25, highlighting its effectiveness.
Enhancing Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Modeling with End-to-End Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: End-to-end speech-to speech (S2S) dialogue systems face key challenges in incorporating external knowledge into their models.
Approach: They propose a framework that directly retrieves relevant textual knowledge from speech queries.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the performance of end-to-end speech-tospeech dialogue systems while achieving higher retrieval efficiency.
AGD: Adversarial Game Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing defenses, including post-training alignment and prompt engineering, struggle with adaptability to out-of-distribution (OOD) attacks.
Approach: They propose an adversarial game-based defense method that dynamically adjusts LLMs’ internal representations to achieve a balanced trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness.
Outcome: The proposed method improves LLMs’ safety over all baselines.
ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Causal chain reasoning models suffer from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift.
Approach: They propose a framework that uses exogenous variables to represent causal pairs and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions using structural causal recurrent neural networks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on Chinese and English CCR datasets.
Layer-wise Importance Matters: Less Memory for Better Performance in Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have gained popularity for adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose a method to optimize the importance of full layers with layer-wise importance scoring by leveraging the estimated importance scores.
Outcome: The proposed method is compatible with PEFT methods that operate on a per-layer basis and achieves better performance.
An Empirical Study of Iterative Refinements for Non-autoregressive Translation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive performance in varied generation tasks, surpassing the autoregressive Transformer.
Approach: They propose a strategy to conduct efficient refinements without performance declines by using two simple metrics to identify potential problems existing in current refinement processes.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the autoregressive Transformer by around one BLEU on average.
ReviewRL: Towards Automated Scientific Review with RL (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing automated review systems struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth.
Approach: They propose a framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on ICLR 2025 papers.
NOTABLE: Transferable Backdoor Attacks Against Prompt-based NLP Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing backdoor attacks against prompt-based learning involve injecting back doors into embedding layers or word embedders.
Approach: They propose a backdoor attack against prompt-based learning that injects backdoors into embedding layers or word embeddable vectors.
Outcome: The proposed backdoor attack outperforms two state-of-the-art models on six NLP tasks and three prompting strategies.
Task-oriented Domain-specific Meta-Embedding for Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods neglect domain-specific knowledge and use the same word embedding for each word in all domain-specified datasets.
Approach: They propose a method to incorporate domain-specific and task-oriented information into meta-embeddings by combining pre-trained word embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed method performs well on four text classification datasets and shows that it is compatible with existing methods.
LiveCANNBench: Benchmark SWE AI Coding for Ascend CANN (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in agents have enabled multi-file, multi-language, and dependency-aware AI coding.
Approach: They propose an SWE-level benchmark for AI coding in the Huawei Ascend CANN software stack.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world CANN repositories and consists of over 400 task instances spanning multiple file, multi-language, and execution-aware coding challenges.
Unified Demonstration Retriever for In-Context Learning (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: In-context learning is a new learning paradigm where a language model conditions on a few input-output pairs (demonstrations) and a test input, and directly outputs the prediction.
Approach: They propose a single model to retrieve demonstrations for a wide range of tasks by combining training signals from various tasks into a unified list-wise ranking formulation by language model’s feedback.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on 30+ tasks across 13 task families and multiple data domains.
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing text-to-SQL models are limited in their generalizability, despite their performance being over-estimated.
Approach: They propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering.
VOLTA: Improving Generative Diversity by Variational Mutual Information Maximizing Autoencoder (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: generative diversity is a critical yet underexplored issue in natural language generation . previous approaches to enhance diversity of Transformer models have been limited by their latent variables .
Approach: They propose a framework that bridges Transformer with VAE to enhance generative diversity.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves generative diversity while maintaining generative quality.
When Long Helps Short: How Context Length in Supervised Fine-tuning Affects Behavior of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose to use long-context SFT to improve short-contemporary performance . they also decouple and analyze two key components, Multi-Head Attention and Feed-Forward Network .
Outcome: The proposed model improves short-context performance, contrary to pretraining.
CSS: A Large-scale Cross-schema Chinese Text-to-SQL Medical Dataset (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases . a single-domain task evaluates the performance on identical databases based on the same domain .
Approach: They propose a cross-domain text-to-SQL task that parses user questions into SQL on unseen databases.
Outcome: The proposed system can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases.
A Unified Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Model Towards Interpolation and Extrapolation (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for temporal knowledge graphs de-emphasize temporal correlations between facts sequences and ignore inferring clues from missing facts.
Approach: They propose a Temporal PAth-based reasoning model that is robust to ambiguous temporal data.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms SOTA methods on the link prediction task.
Message Passing on Semantic-Anchor-Graphs for Fine-grained Emotion Representation Learning and Classification (2024.emnlp-main)

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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.
LLMs Can Achieve High-quality Simultaneous Machine Translation as Efficiently as Offline (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models perform well in offline machine translation when the complete source sentence is provided . however, in many real scenarios, the source tokens arrive in a streaming manner and simultaneous machine translation is required .
Approach: They propose a new paradigm that includes constructing supervised fine-tuning data for simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) to achieve SiMT, source and target tokens are rearranged into interleaved sequences, separated by special tokens according to varying latency requirements.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various SiMT benchmarks and evaluation metrics while maintaining efficient auto-regressive decoding.
CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) tasks are primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings unexplored.
Approach: They propose a task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions in dynamic city spaces.
Outcome: The proposed agent achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy compared to baselines . the proposed agent outperforms existing agents in open-ended city spaces .
Jailbreak-Zero: A Path to Pareto Optimal Red Teaming for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to red teaming are based on example-based evaluation, where a static list of specific prompts is used to define and measure "unsafe content"
Approach: They propose a new automated red teaming framework that shifts from example-based to policy-based evaluation that focuses on risk coverage, semantic diversity, and fidelity.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves superior, human-readable attacks against open-source and proprietary models even for unseen safety policies.
RATE-Nav: Region-Aware Termination Enhancement for Zero-shot Object Navigation with Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Object navigation is a fundamental task in embodied artificial intelligence.
Approach: They propose a region-aware Termination-Enhanced method that incorporates visual language models and exploration rates to enable efficient termination.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a success rate of 67.8% and an SPL of 31.3% on the HM3D dataset.
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs.
Approach: They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 .
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer.
Approach: They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios.
Evaluation and LLM-Guided Learning of ICD Coding Rationales (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on the explainability of ICD coding rely on attention-based rationales and qualitative assessments conducted by physicians.
Approach: They propose to evaluate the explainability of rationales in ICD coding using a multi-granular rationale-annotated dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the explainability of rationales in ICD coding by using human-annotated rationale-announced rationale models.
DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering in Disaster Management (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for question answering (QA) are lacking in a high-stakes environment.
Approach: They propose a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions . they propose 'keypoint-based evaluation protocol' emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity .
Outcome: Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose models such as MMLU-Pro.
Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process.
Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies show language agents lack human-level planning abilities . limitations and mechanisms to address them remain insufficiently understood .
Approach: They apply a feature attribution study to identify key factors hindering agent planning . they identify the limited role of constraints and diminishing influence of questions .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 15.6% on a real-world planning benchmark.
UnitCoder: Scalable Code Synthesis from Pre-training Corpora (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code understanding and generation, yet code generation remains a challenge.
Approach: They propose a model that supervises pre-training data quality through automatically generated unit tests while ensuring correctness via an iterative fix and refine flow.
Outcome: The proposed model improves performance on a large dataset with high quality pre-training data.
1+1>2: A Synergistic Sparse and Low-Rank Compression Method for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Low-rank approximation compresses the model by retaining its essential structure with minimal information loss.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages the strengths of pruning and low-rank approximation for LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed methods surpass the existing methods on LLaMA and Qwen2.5 models.
SelfBudgeter: Adaptive Token Allocation for Efficient LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent large reasoning models have shown exceptional performance on various tasks, but they consume excessive tokens even for simple queries, leading to resource waste and prolonged user latency.
Approach: They propose a self-adaptive reasoning strategy that automatically allocates budgets according to problem complexity and introduces GRPO for reinforcement learning to reduce output length.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves an average response length compression of 61% on math reasoning tasks while maintaining accuracy.
Explore More Guidance: A Task-aware Instruction Network for Sign Language Translation Enhanced with Data Augmentation (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on the recognition step, while paying less attention to sign language translation.
Approach: They propose a task-aware instruction network, namely TIN-SLT, for sign language translation, by introducing the isntruction module and the learning-based feature fuse strategy into a Transformer network.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms existing solutions on two benchmark datasets, PHOENIX-2014-T and ASLG-PC12, and outperformed previous best solutions by 1.65 and 1.42 in terms of BLEU-4.
ZoomRAG: Hierarchical Random-walk Zooming across Multi-scale Information Graphs for Fast and Accurate RAG (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Instance-Guided Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Text Matching (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Few-shot text matching is a more practical technique to determine whether two texts are semantically identical.
Approach: They propose a pluggable prompt learning method for few-shot text matching . they use the semantics of instances to regulate the effects of the gate on the prompt tokens .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on MRPC and QQP.
Review-Instruct: A Review-Driven Multi-Turn Conversations Generation Method for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating multi-turn dialogue data struggle to ensure both diversity and quality in instructions.
Approach: They propose a framework that synthesizes multi-turn conversations through an iterative "Ask-Respond-Review" process involving three agent roles: a Candidate, multiple Reviewers, and a Chairman.
Outcome: The proposed framework synthesizes multi-turn conversations through an iterative "Ask-Respond-Review" process involving three agent roles: a Candidate, multiple Reviewers, and a Chairman.
NPRF: A Neural Pseudo Relevance Feedback Framework for Ad-hoc Information Retrieval (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing neural IR models do not have a mechanism for treating expansion terms differently from the original query terms, making it difficult to combine them with existing PRF approaches.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models by embedding different neural models as building blocks.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR models.
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages.
Approach: They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction.
Outcome: The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning.
Corrupted but Not Broken: Understanding and Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Corrupted Data in Visual Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) aims to enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but its effectiveness is often compromised by corrupted datasets with issues such as hallucinated content and poor OCR quality.
Approach: They propose a corruption-robust training paradigm that surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data.
Outcome: The proposed training paradigm surpasses existing strategies for mitigating the effects of corrupted data.
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a new spoken dialogue system with single-stage training is demonstrating its low latency and high quality . SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens .
Approach: They propose a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms previous models on 4 GPUs with limited data.
SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing studies in text-to-SQL do not require generating complex SQL queries with multiple clauses or sub-queries.
Approach: They propose a syntax tree network to address the complex text-to-SQL generation task.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art model by 9.5% on a large text-to-SQL corpus.
SWE-Fixer: Training Open-Source LLMs for Effective and Efficient GitHub Issue Resolution (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models excel in code generation benchmarks, but these benchmarks focus on single-file scenarios with constrained context scope.
Approach: They propose an open-source framework to effectively resolve GitHub issues using a code file retrieval module and a model-based code editing module.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on two GitHub benchmarks.
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages .
Approach: They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models .
Outcome: The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English .
GradOT: Training-free Gradient-preserving Offsite-tuning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for offsite-tuning of large language models require high computational costs and lack theoretical analysis.
Approach: They propose an offsite-tuning approach that selectively applies compression techniques such as rank compression and channel pruning to preserve the gradients of fine-tuned adapters while ensuring privacy.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses existing OT methods in privacy protection and model performance.
How do LLMs’ Preferences Affect Event Argument Extraction? CAT: Addressing Preference Traps in Unsupervised EAE (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to supervised EAE suffer from preference traps due to misalignments between prior knowledge, instructions, or output constraints and LLMs’ preferences.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised EAE framework that handles LLMs' preference traps by targeting their prior knowledge and instructions.
Outcome: The proposed framework matches the best DeepSeek-R1 API model with a significantly lower time cost.
MARIO: MAth Reasoning with code Interpreter Output - A Reproducible Pipeline (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models lack mathematical reasoning, a hurdle on the path to true artificial general intelligence.
Approach: They propose a protocol for fine-tuning large language models with a Python code interpreter to enhance the text analysis of the LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed protocol improves the performance of a 7B-parameter LLM on the GSM8K and MATH datasets while allowing for an outlier-free value model-based inference method.
Timely Machine: Awareness of Time Makes Test-Time Scaling Agentic (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) tackle complex reasoning tasks, but test-time scaling is becoming expensive.
Approach: They propose to redefine test-time as wall-clock time, where models dynamically adjust strategies based on time budgets.
Outcome: The proposed model improves time budget awareness and boosts performance across Timely-Eval.
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation.
Approach: They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation.
Outcome: The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation.
Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes . human translators of songs need to have a mastery of cultural traditions and the poetic usage of both source and target languages .
Approach: They propose a model that can model lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment . they use an encoder-decoder framework that can translate lyrics and determine number of aligned notes .
Outcome: The proposed framework can translate lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step.
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.
Approach: They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data.
Outcome: Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base.
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths.
Approach: They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages.
MindBridge: Scalable and Cross-Model Knowledge Editing via Memory-Augmented Modality (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge editing methods overfit to specific models, causing edited knowledge to be discarded during each LLM update and requiring frequent re-editing.
Approach: They propose a solution that allows editors to edit knowledge in multiple LLMs at the same time.
Outcome: The proposed solution performs better even in editing tens of thousands of knowledge entries and can adapt to different LLMs.
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use a similarity metric to measure semantic similarity between test samples and referents, but their performance is limited due to the label scarcity.
Approach: They propose a novel approach to learn a similarity metric for measuring the semantic similarity between test samples and referents, where each referent represents an entity class.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models with a significant margin in most cases.
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Commercial-scale language models (LMs) have taken APR to unprecedented levels, but they are limited by parameters and humans interact with them through explicit prompts.
Approach: They propose a method that utilizes process supervision to improve program repair by allowing users to input feedback from compilers and test cases.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms large outcome-based generation methods and is inspired by strategies used in programming competitions.
EpiGEN: An Efficient Multi-Api Code GENeration Framework under Enterprise Scenario (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to large language models fail to meet expectations for code generation tasks . existing approaches are faced with drawbacks of high resource consumption and inadequate handling of multi-API tasks.
Approach: They propose an Efficient multi-Api code GENeration framework that uses private APIs to pre-train LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework shows good acceptability and readability on single-GPU tasks compared to fully fine-tuned LLMs with a larger number of parameters.
Semantic Parsing with Dual Learning (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to parse natural language queries are limited by lack of labeled data and constrained decoding.
Approach: They propose a semantic parsing framework with the dual learning algorithm that makes full use of data through a dual-learning game.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on ATIS dataset and gets competitive performance on overnight dataset.
CIF-Bench: A Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark for Evaluating the Generalizability of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing causal reasoning models only learn to induce empirical causal patterns that are predictive to the label, while human beings seek for deep and conceptual understanding of the causality to explain the observed causal facts.
Approach: They present a human-annotated CAusal REasoning dataset with conceptual explanations of the causality.
Outcome: The presented dataset shows that human-annotated explanations can be useful for promoting the accuracy and stability of causal reasoning models.
Dual-Channel Span for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to extract sentiment triplets are too noisy and enumerate all possible spans.
Approach: They propose a dual-channel span generation method to constrain the search space of span candidates.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces span enumeration by nearly half on two versions of public datasets.
Efficient Context and Schema Fusion Networks for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to track dialogue state are limited due to data sparsity and long dialogues.
Approach: They propose to use the previous dialogue state and current dialogue utterance as input for DST.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and improves existing ones.
CAMIEval: Enhancing NLG Evaluation through Multidimensional Comparative Instruction-Following Analysis (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Evaluating the quality of texts generated by language models has always been a challenging task in natural language processing (NLP).
Approach: They propose a multidimensional comparative evaluation method based on instruction-following that combines relevance, factuality, and adherence with a concrete Chain-of-Thoughts process to enhance the accuracy of evaluations.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in correlation with human evaluations on two NLG evaluation benchmarks.
NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents.
Approach: They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process.
Outcome: The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets .
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement.
Outcome: The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3.
From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) inspire the "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm . traditional methods of assessment and evaluation fail in dynamic and open-ended scenarios .
Approach: They propose a paradigm where LLMs are leveraged to perform scoring, ranking, or selection for machine learning evaluation scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed model-based judgment and evaluation paradigms are based on large language models and are compared to the current model-driven evaluation paradigm.
OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, but their ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback remains underexplored.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces by combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems.
Outcome: The proposed framework emulates human-like cognitive adaptation and operates via a general perception–memory–reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback.
BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Neural audio codecs have enabled high-fidelity reconstruction of speech, music and sound . however, speech-optimized codec systems suffer degradation on music or sound if they ignore spectral differences .
Approach: They propose a neural audio codec that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently.
Outcome: Experimental results show that BSCodec achieves better reconstruction quality on music and sound compared to existing codecs.
PruMUX: Augmenting Data Multiplexing with Model Compression (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work has investigated methods like model pruning, knowledge distillation, and data multiplexing to increase model throughput without sacrificing accuracy.
Approach: They propose to combine structured pruning and data multiplexing methods to increase model throughput without sacrificing accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 7.5-29.5X throughput improvement over a BERT-base model with accuracy threshold from 80% to 74%.
Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: utilizing human annotations can enhance critique ability, but model-generated critiques suffer from inherent flaws due to complexity of critique . a new framework that leverages multi-agent feedback improves critique ability .
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages multi-agent feedback to improve critique ability . they propose to use supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve this capability .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves critique ability in both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning stages.
Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing datasets for semantic parsing are too small in terms of number of programs for training modern data-intensive models.
Approach: They propose a large-scale complex and cross-domain semantic parsing task for a database . they use a dataset with 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries .
Outcome: The proposed task is different from previous tasks because it uses the same database and program . the best model achieves only 9.7% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting.
Structural Supervision for Word Alignment and Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge on syntactic structure neglects the rich structural information from target tokens and the structural similarity between the source and target sentences.
Approach: They propose to incorporate syntactic structure of both source and target tokens into the encoder-decoder framework, tightly correlating the internal logic of word alignment and machine translation for multi-task learning.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on four publicly available language pairs and consistently outperformed baselines in alignment accuracy and translation quality.
Community-Aware Assessment of Social Textual Engagement and Resonance: A Human-Centric Perspective on User-Generated Content Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Traditional Video Quality Assessment (VQA) focuses on aesthetic fidelity and technical distortions.
Approach: They propose a new task that evaluates whether a UGC item has positive community resonance based on multimodal attributes rather than visual quality alone.
Outcome: The proposed task outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CASTER-Bench . it provides interpretable and empathetic reasoning paths that align with real community feedback.
Decoupled Dialogue Modeling and Semantic Parsing for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent work on Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest . current approaches mostly employ end-to end models and face data sparsity problems .
Approach: They propose a decoupled multi-turn text-to-SQL framework where dialogue context is explicitly solved by an utterance rewrite model and a single-turn Text-toSQl parser are proposed.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on SParC and CoSQL datasets without annotated in-domain data.
Privacy Implications of Retrieval-Based Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a study of retrieval-based language models shows improved interpretability, factuality, and adaptability compared to parametric counterparts . kNN-LMs are more susceptible to leaking private information from their private datastore than parametric models .
Approach: They present the first study of privacy risks in retrieval-based language models . they aim to strike a balance between utility and privacy in domains where privacy is of concern .
Outcome: The proposed methods improve interpretability, factuality, and adaptability compared to parametric models . the study finds that kNN-LMs are more susceptible to leaking private data than parametric ones .
AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on cognitive abilities, such as knowledge retrieval, complex reasoning, and instruction following, largely overlooking empathy evaluation.
Approach: They propose to benchmark two core empathetic capabilities of omnimodal large models (OLMs) generating empatries by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs and judging empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark outperforms existing models with audio output capabilities but is unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness.
Adaptive Zooming via Relevance-Informed Positional Resource Allocation for Training-free LLM Context Extension (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing training-free methods for extrapolating beyond training context lengths are semantics-agnostic . Existing methods that focus on relative token distances can indiscriminately blur semantically relevant and irrelevant tokens .
Approach: They propose an adaptive positional zooming method that uses semantic relevance to extrapolate beyond training context lengths.
Outcome: Experiments show that RiPRA outperforms existing training-free extrapolation methods . relevant tokens get higher positional resolution, while irrelevant tokens are compressed .
MDTeamGPT: Mitigating Context Collapse and Enabling Self-Evolution in Medical Multi-Agent Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Long, multi-round, multirole interaction trajectories lead to severe information dilution and context window overload, triggering context collapse which destabilizes reasoning.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework that compresses and reorganizes multi-round consensus.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines across text-based and multimodal tasks while demonstrating superior diagnostic performance and stability in complex clinical scenarios.
Dual Slot Selector via Local Reliability Verification for Dialogue State Tracking (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to predict dialogue state from scratch are inefficient and lead to errors . empirical results show that our method achieves 56.93%, 60.73%, and 58.04% joint accuracy on multi-domain conversations .
Approach: They propose a dual-stage dialogue state tracking method that uses a slot selector and a Slot Value generator to predict the current dialogue state.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 56.93%, 60.73%, and 58.04% joint accuracy on multi-domain conversations.
Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge (C18-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to answer selection are limited in domains with limited labeled data.
Approach: They propose a Knowledge-aware Attentive Network framework for cross-domain answer selection that uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong competitors by a noticeable margin in cross-domain answer selection.
FiNE: Filtering and Improving Noisy Data Elaborately with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Currently, there are two mainstream methods for improving data integrity: data filtering and data augmentation.
Approach: They propose a method to improve data integrity by combining data filtering and data augmentation with LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses the open-source chat version on HalluQA by 8.45 on the open source version.
RLSeek: Evidence-Grounded Reasoning for RAG Hallucination Detection (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent work addresses this problem by training span-level hallucination detectors using reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning.
Approach: They propose a framework that explicitly enforces active evidence seeking during CoT reasoning by requiring quotation of relevant source segments at each verification step.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves hallucination span detection performance with limited reasoning overhead and improved robustness in out-of-domain settings.
T2S-GPT: Dynamic Vector Quantization for Autoregressive Sign Language Production from Text (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing vector quantization methods are fixed-length encodings, overlooking the uneven information density in sign language.
Approach: They propose a two-stage sign language production paradigm that encodes sign language sequences into discrete codes and autoregressively generates sign languages from text.
Outcome: The proposed model can dynamically adjust the encoding length based on the information density in sign language to achieve accurate and compact encoded enccoding.
Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How? (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Tabular data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data.
Approach: They analyze how LMs can be combined with other components for different tabular data preparation tasks.
Outcome: The proposed methods lack the ability to capture the relationships within tables and adapt to the tasks involved.
ProReason: Multi-Modal Proactive Reasoning with Decoupled Eyesight and Wisdom (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large vision-language models often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation.
Approach: They propose a visual reasoning framework that decouples vision-reasoning capabilities and multi-run proactive perception.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models on benchmarks for open-source and closed-source models with 13.2% performance gain.
TextHide: Tackling Data Privacy in Language Understanding Tasks (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Unsolved privacy challenges in distributed or federated learning are a challenge for many domains including Natural Language Processing.
Approach: They propose a federated learning framework that adds an encryption step to prevent an eavesdropping attacker from recovering private text data.
Outcome: The proposed model can effectively defend against attacks on shared gradients or representations and the averaged accuracy reduction is only 1.9%.
From Data-Centric to Sample-Centric: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Progressive Optimization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a method that incorporates partial solution prefixes from expert demonstrations to guide the policy.
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform strong baselines, yielding faster convergence and a higher performance ceiling.
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges.
Approach: They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task.
Outcome: The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing.
LegalAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Legal Domain (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing general-domain benchmarks do not capture complexity of real-world judicial cognition and decision-making.
Approach: They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM Agents in the legal domain.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark includes 17 corpora from real-world legal scenarios and provides 37 tools for interacting with external knowledge.
VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing vision-language models struggle with reasoning-focused tasks due to the lack of high-quality training data.
Approach: They propose a new approach that leverages search engines to create a multimodal multimodal dataset . they use a set of 30,000 seed images to extract HTML data from 700K unique URLs .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves the best known performance on MMMU-Pro (40.7), MathVerse (42.6), and DynaMath (55.7).
Powering Verifiable Learning via Automated Evolutionary Data Synthesis (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to building generalizable verifiable data are task-specific and lack a principled, universal evaluator of verifikatability.
Approach: They propose a task-agnostic, strategy-guided, executably-checkable data synthesis framework that synthesizes problems, diverse candidate solutions and verification artifacts from a single source.
Outcome: The proposed framework synthesizes problems, candidates, and verification artifacts from human-annotated and strategy-induced checks and iteratively discovers strategies.
Dynamic Multi-granularity Attribution Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for predicting sentiment polarity of aspects are susceptible to interference caused by irrelevant contexts and lack sentiment knowledge at a data-specific level.
Approach: They propose a novel Aspect-based sentiment analysis method that leverages attention scores to model the relationships between aspects and contexts.
Outcome: The proposed method is able to predict sentiments from a set of five benchmark datasets.
When Safety Alignment Fails to Generalize: Probing with Language Game Jailbreaks (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing safety alignment methods rely on fixed or narrow transformation schemes to generalize . existing methods based on fixed and narrow transformations are often inadequate .
Approach: They propose a framework for discovering and refining language game-based jailbreaks to probe alignment generalization.
Outcome: The proposed framework allows controlled exploration of alignment behavior across closely related linguistic variants.
Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (C18-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from noisy labeling problem, which can severely degrade its performance.
Approach: They propose a framework for distantly supervised relation extraction that leverages text corpus and knowledge graph and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
Multi-Passage Machine Reading Comprehension with Cross-Passage Answer Verification (P18-1)

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Challenge: Recent years have seen rapid growth in the MRC community . MRC is believed to be a crucial step in building a general intelligent agent .
Approach: They propose an end-to-end neural model that enables multiple passages to verify each other based on their content representations.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline on the English MS-MARCO dataset and the Chinese DuReader dataset, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
Forge: Quality-Aware Reinforcement Learning for NP-Hard Optimization in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on correctness, overlooking optimality . large language models excel at math, coding, logic and puzzles .
Approach: They propose a framework for training and evaluating Large Language Models on NP-hard optimization problems through quality-aware RLVR.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks on math, coding, logic and puzzles.
Relabel the Noise: Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations via Cooperative Multiagents (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for entity and relation extraction require light human annotation efforts.
Approach: They propose a method to re-label noisy instances with a cooperative group . they use a confidence consensus module to gather the wisdom of all agents .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two real-world datasets.
CodeBind: Decoupled Representation Learning for Multimodal Alignment with Unified Compositional Codebook (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Mind’s Mirror: Distilling Self-Evaluation Capability and Comprehensive Thinking from Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, but their scale and computational demands pose challenges to their practical application.
Approach: They propose a method for distilling the self-evaluation capability from LLMs into SLMs and advocate for more comprehensive thinking by incorporating multiple distinct CoTs and self-estimation outputs.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves the performance of distilled SLMs on three NLP benchmarks.
MM-MATH: Advancing Multimodal Math Evaluation with Process Evaluation and Fine-grained Classification (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for multimodal reasoning in large multimodal models are underperforming on multimodal tasks.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for multimodal reasoning in large multimodal models, MM-MATH . MM's process evaluation employs LMM-as-a-judge to automatically analyze solution steps . diagram misinterpretation is the most common error, they find .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves only 31% accuracy, compared to 82% for humans.
BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for deep search agents rely on blackbox web search APIs . dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder reproducibility and fair comparisons - authors .
Approach: They propose a benchmark that employs a fixed corpus for controlled retrieval for deep search agents.
Outcome: The new benchmark shows that agents that combine large language models with retrieval tools excel at complex, reasoning-intensive queries.
The Strength of the Weakest Supervision: Topic Classification Using Class Labels (N19-3)

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Challenge: a topic classifier can understand only class labels when training for tasks that require a large amount of labeled documents.
Approach: They propose an algorithm that can initialize a topic classifier using only class labels . they propose a method that combines word embedding and naive Bayes classification .
Outcome: The proposed approach saves significant initial labeling effort by providing a "warm start" the proposed approach can be fine-tuned with more labeled documents to reach a certain performance level.
Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs.
Approach: They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories.
Outcome: The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models.
Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of SFT via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Currently, LLMs learn in a data-driven schema while the instructions about complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct.
Approach: They employ a gradient-based method to dissect the process that the Supervised Fine-tuning Process (SFT) adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns.
Outcome: The proposed method dissects the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns.
ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Literature review is an indispensable step in the research process, but literature summary is challenging and time consuming.
Approach: They propose an LLM agent with human workflow guidance for comparative literature summary . they use a human workflow to extract key elements from relevant literature and generate summaries .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the CoT model in several dimensions.
Condor: Enhance LLM Alignment with Knowledge-Driven Data Synthesis and Refinement (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing high-quality human-annotated SFT data is a bottleneck for Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a two-stage synthetic data generation framework that incorporates World Knowledge Trees and Self-Reflection Refinement to produce high-quality SFT data at scale.
Outcome: The proposed model fine-tuned on 20K condor-generated samples achieves superior performance compared to instruct model trained with RLHF.
Beyond the Granularity: Multi-Perspective Dialogue Collaborative Selection for Dialogue State Tracking (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that task-oriented dialogue systems have attracted growing attention and achieved substantial progress.
Approach: They propose a method that dynamically selects relevant dialogue contents for each slot . they retrieve turn-level utterances and evaluate their relevance to the slot from three perspectives .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on MultiWOZ 2.1 and MultiWOz 2.2 and superior performance on multiple mainstream benchmark datasets.
ExCAR: Event Graph Knowledge Enhanced Explainable Causal Reasoning (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work infers the causation between events based on knowledge from annotated causal event pairs, but additional evidence information is unexploited.
Approach: They propose an Event graph knowledge enhanced explainable CAusal Reasoning framework that acquires additional evidence information from a large-scale causal event graph as logical rules for causal reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in human evaluation and in animal models.
Step-level Value Preference Optimization for Mathematical Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating preference-level annotations do not capture the fine-grained quality of model outputs in multi-step reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose an algorithm to automatically annotate step-level preferences for multi-step reasoning using Monte Carlo Tree Search.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance on in-domain and out-of domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks.
Com2 : A Causal-Guided Benchmark for Exploring Complex Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing works focus on complex tasks like math and code, while complex commonsense reasoning remains underexplored due to its uncertainty and lack of structure.
Approach: They propose to build a benchmark for large language models based on complex commonsense reasoning based upon causal event graphs and causal theory.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark combines a complex commonsense reasoning benchmark with a detective story to achieve a more challenging subset.
Redundancy Principles for MLLMs Benchmarks (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Rapid growth of Multi-modality Large Language Models has led to significant redundancy among benchmarks.
Approach: They propose a framework to improve MLLM benchmark design by identifying redundancy at three levels: dimension, instance, and cross-benchmark redundancies.
Outcome: The proposed framework streamlines evaluations and enhances reliability.
DPGA-TextSyn: Differentially Private Genetic Algorithm for Synthetic Text Generation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to fine-tune large language models pose privacy risks . researchers have synthesized data with strong generation capabilities closed-source LLMs to alleviate this problem .
Approach: They propose to combine general LLMs with genetic algorithm to produce relevant and diverse synthetic text under differential privacy constraints.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves the performance of the model in downstream tasks while ensuring privacy.
ReAL: How Can LLMs Simulate the Real Teacher? Retrieval-enhanced Agent for Adaptive Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Prior methods model learner-item interactions based only on ID sequences, leading to insufficient use of both learner and item information.
Approach: They propose a Retrieval-enhanced Agent for Adaptive Learning powered by large language models to simulate teacher decision-making with extensive prior knowledge and teaching experience.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on three real-world datasets in both internal and external perspectives.
Curriculum Learning based Hierarchical Scoring and Analysis Framework for Question Answering Task Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation methods rely on rule-based matching with shallow semantic understanding or adopt LLM-as-a-Judge approaches that incur high cost and latency while offering limited error interpretability.
Approach: They propose a curriculum learning based hierarchical framework for QA task evaluation that supports quick scoring and fine-grained error analysis.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on quick scoring and error analysis tasks while being 25 faster.
URO-Bench: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation for End-to-End Spoken Dialogue Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a lack of comprehensive evaluations for SDMs in speech-to-speech (S2S) scenarios is a major challenge for end-to end spoken dialogue models.
Approach: They propose to provide an extensive evaluation framework for end-to-end spoken dialogue models (SDMs) that includes both cognitive dimensions and paralinguistic cues .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is divided into two difficulty levels: basic track and pro track, each comprising 20 test sets, evaluating the spoken dialogue model’s abilities in U**nderstanding, **R**easoning, and **O**ral conversation.
Permitted Knowledge Boundary: Evaluating the Knowledge-Constrained Responsiveness of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent research has raised concerns about the controllability of large language models.
Approach: They propose to define a "boundary bias" to depict KCR in large language models . they propose to quantify the boundary bias of LLMs and assess the KCR .
Outcome: The proposed model is based on two new datasets to assess its performance.
Experience-Driven Multi-Agent Optimization for Black-Box Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for jailbreak have poor transferability and high sensitivity to preprocessing . EMJO provides an effective and scalable paradigm for systematic jailbreak optimization .
Approach: They propose a model that couples agents into a closed-loop "probe–evaluate–revise” process . they propose EMJO, which can be query-efficient and transferable, under black-box access.
Outcome: a new approach outperforms existing jailbreak baselines on diverse LLMs . it achieves up to 11% improvement in attack success rate while reducing query cost .
MetaPro Online: A Computational Metaphor Processing Online System (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Metaphors do not take literal meanings in contexts, which may cause difficulties for language learners and machines to understand them.
Approach: They propose a computational metaphor processing online system that queries metaphoricity labels, paraphrases and concept mappings for non-domain-specific text.
Outcome: The proposed system can query metaphoricity labels, paraphrases, and concept mappings for non-domain-specific text without coding background.
Self-Sum: Teaching an Agent to Decide Itself When and What to Summarize (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for summarizing long-horizon agents rely on fixed, rule-based summarization strategies.
Approach: They propose a framework that empowers agents to autonomously decide when and what to summarize by modeling it as an internal cognitive action unified with environmental actions.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms no-summarization and rule-based training methods on long-horizon benchmarks and shows strong generalization gains.
Simple and Effective Unsupervised Redundancy Elimination to Compress Dense Vectors for Passage Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Dense passage retrieval improves ranking accuracy in open-domain question answering but at the cost of large space and memory requirements.
Approach: They propose a simple unsupervised pipeline that includes principal component analysis (PCA), product quantization, and hybrid search to improve space efficiency.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline achieves good accuracy–space trade-offs, for example, 48 compression with less than 3% drop in top-100 retrieval accuracy on average or 96 compression without drop in space requirements.
Sound Signal Processing with Seq2Tree Network (L18-1)

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Challenge: Recent LSTM models have been used to model sequential data processing tasks because of their ability to preserve previous information weighted on distance.
Approach: They propose to use a tree-structured tree-based neural network architecture to solve the problem of unbalanced connections between data units inside and outside semantic groups.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art Bidirectional LSTM model on a signal and noise separation task.
Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE): The Synergy of Reasoning Chains and Expert Mixtures in Self-Alignment (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that reasoning abilities contribute significantly to model safety, while integrating Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can further enhance alignment.
Approach: They propose a framework that synergistically combines reasoning chains and expert mixtures to improve self-alignment.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves model safety, jailbreak resistance, and over-refusal capabilities, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model.
MIG: Automatic Data Selection for Instruction Tuning by Maximizing Information Gain in Semantic Space (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for instruction-tuning datasets prioritize instance quality and use heuristic rules to maintain diversity.
Approach: They propose a method that quantifies diversity based on the distribution of information within a label graph.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on 5% Tulu3 datasets and base models.
TEXTOIR: An Integrated and Visualized Platform for Text Open Intent Recognition (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . currently, many dialogue systems are limited to handle the uncertain open intents .
Approach: TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . it is composed of two main modules: open intent detection and open intent discovery . authors propose a framework to implement a complete process to identify known intents and discover open intents .
Outcome: TEXTOIR is the first integrated and visualized platform for text open intent recognition . it integrates state-of-the-art algorithms and benchmark intent datasets . however, there are still some issues, which bring difficulties for future research .
RotateQVS: Representing Temporal Information as Rotations in Quaternion Vector Space for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for temporal knowledge graphs can hardly model temporal relation patterns, lacking of interpretability.
Approach: They propose a temporal modeling method which represents temporal entities as Rotations in Quaternion Vector Space and relations as complex vectors in Hamilton’s quaterniont space.
Outcome: The proposed method can model key patterns of relations in TKG, such as symmetry, asymmetry, and inverse, and can capture time-evolved relations by theory.
RedundancyLens: Revealing and Exploiting Visual Token Processing Redundancy for Efficient Decoder-Only MLLMs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current decoder-only architectures achieve higher performance but lower efficiency . cross-attention-based architectures skip visual token computations .
Approach: They propose a training-free framework for analyzing trained MLLMs to investigate redundancy . they propose 'probe-activated Dynamic FFN and Hollow Attention' algorithms for visual token reductions and a layer ranking algorithm for inference acceleration.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves comparable performance to or better than state-of-the-art methods while remaining compatible with them.
Scaling Laws for Fact Memorization of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Fact knowledge memorization is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate factual and reliable responses.
Approach: They analyze scaling laws for LLM’s fact knowledge and LLMs’ behaviors of memorizing different types of facts.
Outcome: The proposed model can generalize on unseen facts and its scaling law is similar to general pre-training.
Beyond Dynamic Quantization: An Efficient Static Hierarchical Mix-precision Framework for Near-Lossless LLM Compression (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for dynamic quantization are hardware-unfriendly and often lead to large quantization errors in static scenarios.
Approach: They propose a Static Hierarchical Mix-precision Quantization method which quantifies both inter-layer and intra-layer sensitivity through unified derivations involving Hessian.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 75.58% on zero-shot reasoning tasks while yielding average speedup of 2.86.
Enhancing Pre-Trained Language Representations with Rich Knowledge for Machine Reading Comprehension (P19-1)

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Challenge: Recent results show pre-trained language models (LMs) can improve machine reading comprehension (MRC) Experimental results indicate that KT-NET offers significant and consistent improvements over BERT .
Approach: They propose a method that leverages external knowledge bases to improve machine reading comprehension (MRC) KT-NET employs an attention mechanism to select desired knowledge from KBs and fuses selected knowledge with BERT to enable context- and knowledge-aware predictions.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on ReCoRD and SQuAD1.1 benchmarks and ranks 1st on the ReCoDR and SQUAD1.1 leaderboards.
TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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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%.
Logic Jailbreak: Efficiently Unlocking LLM Safety Restrictions Through Formal Logical Expression (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Despite advances in aligning LLMs with human values, current safety mechanisms remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks.
Approach: They propose a black-box jailbreak method that uses logical expression translation to bypass LLM safety mechanisms.
Outcome: The proposed method exploits the distributional gap between alignment data and logic-expressed inputs while preserving the underlying semantic intent and readability while evading safety constraints.
How Numerical Precision Affects Arithmetical Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Despite the success of transformer-based large language models, understanding and enhancing their mathematical capabilities remains a significant challenge.
Approach: They propose to use numerical precision as a key factor that influences LLMs' effectiveness in arithmetical tasks to determine their effectiveness.
Outcome: The proposed models perform better in arithmetic tasks than transformer-based models with standard numerical precision.
ORAL: Prompting Your Large-Scale LoRAs via Conditional Recurrent Diffusion (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) are limited in scalability and controllability.
Approach: They propose a conditional recurrent diffusion framework that generates LoRA parameters directly . they integrate model architecture and textual task specifications to generate task-specific parameters .
Outcome: The proposed framework scales to billions-of-parameter LLMs and maintains controllability.
Knowledge Triplets Derivation from Scientific Publications via Dual-Graph Resonance (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing relation extraction methods aim to extract explicit triplet knowledge from documents, but they can hardly perceive unobserved factual relations.
Approach: They propose a novel Extraction-Contextualization-Derivation strategy to generate a document-specific dynamic graph from a shared static knowledge graph.
Outcome: The proposed method can generate richer explicit and implicit relations under the guidance of static and dynamic knowledge topologies.

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