Papers by Kai Yang
Consistent Representation Learning for Continual Relation Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train relation extraction models overfit memory samples and perform poorly on imbalanced datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses contrastive learning and knowledge distillation to train a model on data with new relations while avoiding forgetting old ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and yields strong robustness on the imbalanced datasets. |
Rethinking Data Selection at Scale: Random Selection is Almost All You Need (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection techniques are designed for small data pools, a study finds . filtering data by token length is an efficient method for improving results . |
| Approach: | They use self-scoring methods that do not rely on external help to perform fine-tuning . they also find that filtering data by token length offers a stable and efficient method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform random selection on large datasets on large data pools. |
Sarcasm-R1: Enhancing Sarcasm Detection through Focused Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sarcasm detection are limited by supervised learning or prompt engineering . a new approach decomposes sarcasm detection into three dimensions: language, context, and emotion . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decomposes sarcasm detection into three dimensions: language, context, and emotion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in most cases. |
ReviewRL: Towards Automated Scientific Review with RL (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sihang Zeng, Kai Tian, Kaiyan Zhang, Yuru Wang, Junqi Gao, Runze Liu, Sa Yang, Jingxuan Li, Xinwei Long, Jiaheng Ma, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| 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. |
What Is Overlap Knowledge in Event Argument Extraction? APE: A Cross-datasets Transfer Learning Model for EAE (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches ignore the overlap knowledge across datasets, preventing models from achieving better performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to divide the EAE knowledge into overlap knowledge across datasets and specific knowledge of the target dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model with a large margin when only ten records are available in the target dataset. |
AdaZeta: Adaptive Zeroth-Order Tensor-Train Adaption for Memory-Efficient Large Language Models Fine-Tuning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in memory-efficient zeroth-order methods have limited their widespread adoption due to performance drops and a high risk of divergence. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient zeroth-order framework to improve performance and convergence of the MeZO methods by using only forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and convergence of the proposed methods on Roberta-Large and Llama-2-7B models. |
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. |
WW-CSL: A New Dataset for Word-Based Wearable Chinese Sign Language Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Sign language is an effective non-verbal communication mode for the hearingimpaired people. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-form scheme to represent dynamic CSL gestures using a word-based dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the local sequential sensor data derived from the wearable-based CSL gestures with the global, fine-grained skeleton representations captured from video-based gestures simultaneously. |
Unsupervised Dual Paraphrasing for Two-stage Semantic Parsing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing frameworks rely on nontrivial human labor to generate canonical utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses an unsupervised paraphrase model to parse canonical utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective and compatible with supervised training. |
LogicEval: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating Automated Repair Techniques for Logical Vulnerabilities in Real-World Software (2026.acl-long)
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Syed Md Mukit Rashid, Abdullah Al Ishtiaq, Kai Tu, Yilu Dong, Tianwei Wu, Ali Ranjbar, Tianchang Yang, Najrin Sultana, Shagufta Mehnaz, Syed Rafiul Hussain
| Challenge: | Existing automated program-repair techniques focus on repairing memory corruptions, but they struggle with logical vulnerabilities because of their limited semantic understanding of the code and its expected behavior. |
| Approach: | They evaluated a dataset of 122 logical vulnerabilities and a framework to evaluate patches for logical weaknesses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates both traditional and LLM-based approaches for addressing real-world logical vulnerabilities. |
Wanda++: Pruning Large Language Models via Regional Gradients (2025.findings-acl)
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Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Bhavana Ganesh, Aram Galstyan, Goeric Huybrechts, Markus Müller, Jonas M. Kübler, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Sravan Babu Bodapati, Nathan Susanj, Zheng Zhang, Jack FitzGerald, Abhishek Kumar
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods suffer from accuracy degradation without full-model sparsity-aware fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning framework that uses decoder-block-level regional gradients to improve pruning accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms the state-of-the-art pruning frameworks by utilizing decoder-block-level regional gradients. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| 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 . |
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. |
Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Low-Resource Stance Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Stance Detection Tasks require background knowledge especially when there is no explicit target mentioned in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a masked language prompt joint contrastive learning approach to stimulate the knowledge inherit from pre-trained models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective in stance detection on three benchmarks. |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| 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. |
Scented-EAE: Stage-Customized Entity Type Embedding for Event Argument Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for incorporating entities into EAE rely on prompts or NER . weak semantic associations due to missing role-entity correspondence cues . one-sided semantic understanding relying solely on argument role semantics a problem . |
| Approach: | They propose an EAE model with stage-customized entity type embedding to explore the role of entity types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on mainstream benchmarks and robustness in low-resource settings. |
QuZO: Quantized Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiajun Zhou, Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ziyue Liu, Yequan Zhao, Ershad Banijamali, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Ngai Wong, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are quantized to lower precision to reduce memory cost and latency in inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a quantized zeroth-order framework for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) using low-precision forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to first-order methods in FP8 and superior accuracy in INT8 and INT4 training. |
Is LLM an Overconfident Judge? Unveiling the Capabilities of LLMs in Detecting Offensive Language with Annotation Disagreement (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models' ability to handle disagreement cases. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the performance of large language models in detecting offensive language at varying levels of agreement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves detection accuracy and model alignment with human judgment by using disagreement samples in training. |
Towards Zero-shot Learning for End-to-end Cross-modal Translation Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end zero-shot speech translation model is based on a zero-shot approach, but it is less competitive because of the limited amount of data available for multiple modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end zero-shot speech translation model that connects two pre-trained uni-modality modules via word rotator’s distance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than or as well as those of the CTC-based models and can be trained in an end-to-end style to avoid error propagation. |
Firewall Routing: Blocking Leads to Better Hybrid Inference for LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have significantly enhanced performance across various NLP tasks . high computational costs and latency associated with deploying such models pose bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic hybrid inference framework that efficiently selects between a strong and a weak LLM based on the complexity of the query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing routing strategies by up to 5.29% in APGR . large models often introduce higher latency, making them less suitable for real-time or resource-constrained applications. |
Taxonomy-Guided Zero-Shot Recommendations with LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deploy large language models (LLMs) into RecSys have limited prompt length, unstructured item information, and un-constrained generation of recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy-guided recommendation framework that empowers LLMs with category information in a systematic approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves recommendation quality compared to zero-shot approaches. |
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. |
Time-RA: Towards Time Series Reasoning for Anomaly Diagnosis with LLM Feedback (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiyuan Yang, Zichuan Liu, Lei Song, Kai Ying, Stephen Wang, Joshua Thomas Bamford, Svitlana Vyetrenko, Jiang Bian, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has traditionally focused on binary classification and lacks the fine-grained categorization and explanatory reasoning required for transparent decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a time-series reasoning task that reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm. |
Corrupted but Not Broken: Understanding and Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Corrupted Data in Visual Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunhao Gou, Hansi Yang, Zhili Liu, Kai Chen, Yihan Zeng, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Qun Liu, Bo Han, James Kwok, Yu Zhang
| 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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Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Ruiqi Yan, Yuzhe Liang, Xiquan Li, Ruiyang Xu, Zhikang Niu, Yanqiao Zhu, Yifan Yang, Zhanxun Liu, Kai Yu, Yuxuan Hu, Jinyu Li, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu, Xie Chen
| 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. |
AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have made it possible to translate images with text in one language into equivalent images displaying that text translated into another language. |
| Approach: | They propose an all-encompassing framework for the task–In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) that incorporates contextual cues from both textual and visual elements during translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be constructed using open-source models and requires no training, making it highly accessible and expandable. |
Self-Improvement in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using data and data, self-improvement for Large Language Models has improved model capabilities without significantly increasing costs. |
| Approach: | This survey provides a comprehensive overview of self-improvement for Large Language Models . it includes commonly used evaluations and downstream applications . |
| Outcome: | The authors provide a comprehensive overview of self-improvement in Multimodal LLMs. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| 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 . |
CAR: Empowering Agents with Dynamic Tool Synthesis and Global Trajectory Rectification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM agents are brittle in open-ended environments due to two limitations: 1) a closed action space; 2) myopic error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that augments the action space and revises global strategies by adding a reflective replanning mechanism to the system. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAR outperforms baselines in a diagnostic benchmark with pruned toolsets to simulate tool scarcity. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| 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. |
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianjun Pan, Junyi Wang, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Kaiyin Xu, Yougen Zhou, Yihan Li, JingYuan Zhao, Qin Chen, Ningning Zhou, Kai Chen, Liang He
| Challenge: | Existing models focus on a single therapy, but complex cases require flexible strategies among various therapies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark . it is designed to address three key challenges: 1) can we train a highly realistic AI counselor? 2) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?" |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is annotated with extensive professional skills and includes over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. |
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. |
Adversarial Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Language Learners (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted performance of Pre-trained language models on few-shot Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks by employing task-specific prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cloze-driven prompt framework for prompt tuning that implicitly stimulates knowledge from pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art for prompt-based fine-tuning on few-shot NLU tasks. |
Full Parameter Fine-tuning for Large Language Models with Limited Resources (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require massive GPU resources for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient optimization that fuses the gradient computation and parameter update in one step to reduce memory usage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory usage to 10.8% compared to the standard approach. |
Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers? (2025.coling-main)
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Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Jingyuan Huang, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhenting Wang, Wenyue Hua, Haiyan Zhao, Kai Mei, Yanda Meng, Kaize Ding, Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks, but mechanisms by which they encode tasks of varying complexity remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to explore the possibility that LLMs process concepts in different layers . they propose to categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process complex concepts in shallow layers, the authors show . the proposed model could be used to prob complex tasks in shallow ones . |
Multimodal Dialogue Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Qingfeng Sun, Yujing Wang, Can Xu, Kai Zheng, Yaming Yang, Huang Hu, Fei Xu, Jessica Zhang, Xiubo Geng, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on multimodal dialogue models but neglect generation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dialogue response generation task which requires multimodal dialogs containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses. |
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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Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| 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. |
GAMEBoT: Transparent Assessment of LLM Reasoning in Games (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to create benchmarks that move beyond superficial pattern recognition to delve into the profound reasoning skills required for problemsolving face challenges such as insufficient interpretability, performance saturation or data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a gaming arena designed for rigorous assessment of LLM reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes complex reasoning into predefined modular subproblems and generates ground truth for these subproblem types. |
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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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Kai Yang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, James Ma, Irene Li, Qingning Yao, Shanelle Roman, Zilin Zhang, Dragomir Radev
| 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. |
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. |
Everyone is unique: Towards Behaviorally Heterogeneous Negotiation Dialogue Systems for Debt Collection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that assume users to be static, rational agents with fixed preferences fail to capture rich behavioral heterogeneity in real-world debt collection scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a public persona-enriched debt collection benchmark that highlights behavioral heterogeneity in negotiation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing models in realistic scenarios using 16 state-of-the-art LLMs. |
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. |
DaMo: Data Mixing Optimizer in Fine-tuning Multimodal LLMs for Mobile Phone Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Kai Shi, Jun Yang, Ni Yang, Binqiang Pan, Qingsong Xie, null Zhangchao, Zhenyu Yang, Tianhuang Su, Haonan Lu
| Challenge: | Mobile Phone Agents (MPAs) have attracted huge attention due to their practicability in a multitude of scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a data mixture optimization solution that extrapolates optimal data mixtures from a trainable network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on open-source benchmarks and on open source benchmarks. |
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. |
PrismRAG: Boosting RAG Factuality with Distractor Resilience and Strategized Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Mohammad Kachuee, Teja Gollapudi, Minseok Kim, Yin Huang, Kai Sun, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Nirav Shah, Yue Liu, Aaron Colak, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve factuality of large language models (LLMs) rely on human-engineered instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages and instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without extensive human engineered instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art solutions across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks and is being deployed in production. |
KERAG: Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Advanced Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely on semantic parsing to retrieve knowledge strictly necessary for answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-filtering-summarization pipeline that enhances QA coverage by retrieving a broader subgraph likely to contain relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art solutions by about 7% in quality and exceeds GPT-4o (Tool) by 10-21%. |
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%. |
From Generalist to Specialist: A Survey of Large Language Models for Chemistry (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pretraining of LLMs on extensive web-based texts are insufficient for advanced scientific discovery, especially in chemistry. |
| Approach: | They outline methodologies for incorporating domain-specific chemistry knowledge and multi-modal information into LLMs and conceptualize chemistry LLM agents using chemistry tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on domain-specific chemistry knowledge and multi-modal information and are capable of accelerating scientific research. |
FedMKT: Federated Mutual Knowledge Transfer for Large and Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research in large language models (LLMs) has focused on enabling clients to fine-tune their locally deployed homogeneous LLMs collaboratively or on transferring knowledge from server-based LLM to small language models at downstream clients. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient federated mutual knowledge transfer framework for large and small language models that allows for token alignment and selective knowledge transfer between client-side LLMs and a server-side SLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the performance of both LLMs and SLMs with clients' unique domain insights while preserving the server's LLM and client's unique domain insight. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| 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. |
Piecing It All Together: Verifying Multi-Hop Multimodal Claims (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing claim verification datasets often do not require systems to perform complex reasoning or effectively interpret multimodal evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that requires models to reason over multiple pieces of evidence . they construct a large-scale dataset comprising 15k multi-hop claims paired with multimodal evidence - generated and refined using large language models with additional input from human feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on human performance benchmarks and human reasoning hops. |
FedProxy: Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Proxy SLMs and Heterogeneity-Aware Fusion (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a performance bottleneck . Existing approaches like Offsite-Tuning (OT) secure the LLMs IP . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces weak adapters with a unified, powerful Proxy Small Language Model (SLM) they propose 'resource-friendly' compression and 'robust optimization' to handle data heterogeneity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FedProxy outperforms OT and centralized fine-tuning methods. |
LegalAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Legal Domain (2025.acl-long)
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Haitao Li, Junjie Chen, Jingli Yang, Qingyao Ai, Wei Jia, Youfeng Liu, Kai Lin, Yueyue Wu, Guozhi Yuan, Yiran Hu, Wuyue Wang, Yiqun Liu, Minlie Huang
| 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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Memory-Driven Role-Playing: Evaluation and Enhancement of Persona Knowledge Utilization in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to recall and accurately apply designated persona knowledge without explicit cues . memory-driven role-playing paradigms are attracting significant interest . |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-driven role-playing paradigm that frames persona knowledge as the LLM's internal memory store and a prompting architecture that guides structured memory retrieval and response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm provides a comprehensive diagnostic for four-stage role-playing abilities across 12 LLMs. |
Markovian Linguistic-Temporal Bridge: Unlocking the Potential of LLMs for Time Series Forecasting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) are based on token-level linguistic-temporal alignment, leading to stacking of logically disjointed tokens as input. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that distills latent evolutionary patterns of language into a Markovian state transition graph, which is transferred as a structural prior to the time series domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves global structural isomorphism between the linguistic and temporal domains. |
SoftDedup: an Efficient Data Reweighting Method for Speeding Up Language Model Pre-training (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves training efficiency on deduplicated datasets and improves downstream accuracy by 1.77%. |
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. |
Competency-Aware Neural Machine Translation: Can Machine Translation Know its Own Translation Quality? (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are often criticized for failures that happen without competency awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extends conventional NMT with a self-estimator to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs on translation tasks intact and on quality estimation tasks better than existing methods. |
DenseSSM: State Space Models with Dense Hidden Connection for Efficient Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face excessive computational and memory requirements due to the commonly used Transformer architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the flow of hidden information between layers in large language models by selectively integrating shallow-layer hidden states into deeper layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maintains parallelizability and inference efficiency of SSMs while significantly boosting performance on public benchmarks. |
Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that share entity embeddings of knowledge graphs (KGs) would incur a severe privacy leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a new attack method that aims to recover the original embedding information based on the known entity embeddables of FedE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to infer whether a specific relation exists in a private client. |
CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Kai Lv, Shuo Zhang, Tianle Gu, Shuhao Xing, Jiawei Hong, Keyu Chen, Xiaoran Liu, Yuqing Yang, Honglin Guo, Tengxiao Liu, Yu Sun, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of tasks . however, the resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models . they use 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and optimizers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. |
MaZO: Masked Zeroth-Order Optimization for Multi-Task Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhen Zhang, Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Nathan Susanj, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Siegfried Kunzmann, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning requires significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a ZO-based framework that eliminates the need for backpropagation and provides a memory-efficient alternative to backprograming. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses first-order methods in performance and accuracy. |
Markov Chain of Thought for Efficient Mathematical Reasoning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have sought to enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov Chain of Thought (MCoT) that compresses previous reasoning steps into a simplified question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves efficiency and maintains comparable accuracy. |
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. |
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. |
AlignSum: Data Pyramid Hierarchical Fine-tuning for Aligning with Human Summarization Preference (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text summarization tasks employ Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to fit diverse datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a human summarization preference alignment framework to align PLMs with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework narrows the gap between automatic and human evaluations by integrating three components. |
Relational Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to determine the sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in online reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose a relational graph attention network to encode a tree structure for sentiment prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of the graph attention network (GAT) on the SemEval 2014 and Twitter datasets. |
TOI-CNN: a Solution of Information Extraction on Chinese Insurance Policy (N19-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Element Tagging on insurance policies can be used to streamline manual review of hundreds of contracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-of-interest convolutional neural network (TOI-CNN) to replace traditional pooling layer for processing nested phrasal or clausal elements in insurance policies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can automatically convert a massive amount of insurance policies into structural archives for management and comparison. |
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. |
How Numerical Precision Affects Arithmetical Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Guhao Feng, Kai Yang, Yuntian Gu, Xinyue Ai, Shengjie Luo, Jiacheng Sun, Di He, Zhenguo Li, Liwei Wang
| 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. |
OmniAlign-V: Towards Enhanced Alignment of MLLMs with Human Preference (2025.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Zhao, Shengyuan Ding, Zicheng Zhang, Haian Huang, Maosongcao Maosongcao, Jiaqi Wang, Weiyun Wang, Xinyu Fang, Wenhai Wang, Guangtao Zhai, Hua Yang, Haodong Duan, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing open-source multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) focus on enhancing foundational capabilities, leaving a significant gap in human preference alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 200K high-quality training samples featuring diverse images, complex questions, and varied response formats to improve MLLMs’ alignment with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset of 200K high-quality training samples improves human preference alignment while maintaining or enhancing performance on standard VQA benchmarks. |