Papers by Kun Zhang

131 papers
HSDreport: Heart Sound Diagnosis with Echocardiography Reports (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for heart sound diagnosis are limited to a few fixed categories and do not utilize echocardiography reports, the gold standard in the diagnosis of related diseases.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that mandates the direct utilization of heart sounds obtained from auscultation to predict echocardiography reports.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods and existing multimodal LLMs in detecting key abnormalities in heart sounds.
Mechanistic Interpretability Should Prioritize Feature Consistency in Sparse Autoencoders (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) but the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by the observed inconsistency of learned SAE features across different training runs.
Approach: They propose to use the Pairwise Dictionary Mean Correlation Coefficient to quantify SAE feature consistency as an evaluation axis alongside reconstruction and sparsity.
Outcome: The proposed measure is based on the pairwise dictionary mean correlation coefficient (PW-MCC) on LLM activations.
ReFSQL: A Retrieval-Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods that align natural language with SQL Language underestimate inherent structural characteristics of SQL and lead to structure errors.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-argument framework that aligns natural language with SQL Language and trains one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves accuracy and robustness of text-to-SQL generation on five datasets.
ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but their application in open-ended, knowledge-intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is limited.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval-augmented generation within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art KAR methods by up to 23.10% and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by upto 25.37%.
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy.
Approach: They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy.
Text Embedding as Treatment: A Meta Causal Approach for Robust Sentiment Classification (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for sentiment classification use binary treatment of words . Existing approaches limit generalizability to novel words and low-frequency words if there is a word in a sentence that is not treated .
Approach: They propose a meta-causal approach that uses a single training task to identify causal words for arbitrary words.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the spurious correlation between word treatment and sentiment classification by removing words with low treatment effects from a pre-trained language model.
Learning to Solve Domain-Specific Calculation Problems with Knowledge-Intensive Programs Generator (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Domain Large Language Models (LLMs) are developed for domain-specific tasks based on general LLMs, but it still requires professional knowledge to facilitate the expertise for some domain- specific tasks.
Approach: They propose a pipeline to solve domain-specific calculation problems with KIPG . they use it to extract key variables and calculate outcomes dependent on domain knowledge .
Outcome: The proposed pipeline solves domain-specific calculation problems more effectively . it generates knowledge-intensive programs according to the domain- specific documents .
Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: closed-ended question-based benchmarks struggle with saturation as newer models emerge . crowd-sourced leaderboards rely on costly and slow human judges .
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages collective intelligence from all large language models to evaluate each other.
Outcome: a new framework enables a democratic, pairwise evaluation of all large language models . it achieves 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost.
Exophoric Pronoun Resolution in Dialogues with Topic Regularization (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on pronoun coreference resolution focus on anaphora and cataphores . exophoric pronounos are common in daily communications, but can be disambiguated by general topics of the dialogue.
Approach: They propose to leverage local context and global topics of dialogues to solve out-of-text PCR problem by adding topic regularization.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that topic regularization can be used to solve the out-of-text PCR problem.
MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for GMNER fail to address semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and long-tail distribution of datasets.
Approach: They propose a framework for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to address semantic ambiguity.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets.
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications.
Approach: They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities.
Outcome: The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions.
Uncertainty Guided Label Denoising for Document-level Distant Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract semantic relations between entities in a document.
Approach: They propose a Document-level distant relation extraction framework with unreliable pseudo labels to denoise DS data.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on two public datasets.
C-World: A Computer Use Agent Environment Creator (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: C-World enables users to build agent environments on demand.
Approach: They propose a system that enables users to build agent environments on demand.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms baselines on 119k samples and achieves Spearman = 0.883 ranking correlation with real execution.
Correctable-DST: Mitigating Historical Context Mismatch between Training and Inference for Improved Dialogue State Tracking (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing dialogue state tracking approaches predict the dialogue state of a target turn sequentially based on the ground-truth previous dialogue state.
Approach: They propose a method that predicts dialogue state sequentially based on previous dialogue state . they propose generating a previously “predicted” dialogue state using ground-truth previous dialogue states .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 67.51%, 68.24%, 70.30%, 71.38%, and 81.27% joint goal accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4 datasets.
Multiplex Word Embeddings for Selectional Preference Acquisition (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing word embeddings are limited in their ability to represent fixed vectors . instead, they incorporate relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables - a limitation that is addressed by a multiplex model .
Approach: They propose a word embedding model which incorporates relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables.
Outcome: The proposed model can be easily extended according to various relations among words.
Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that contrastive learning improves pre-trained language models to derive high-quality sentence representations.
Approach: They propose a framework to punish false negatives and generate noise-based negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves pre-trained language models while pushing apart irrelevant negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space.
CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data (2026.acl-long)

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Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob Van Der Goot, Lanwenn ar C’horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, null Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray, Sarah K. K. Luger
Challenge: Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora.
Approach: They introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers 109 languages and shows that existing evaluations overestimate accuracy for many languages in the web domain.
Semantic Role Labeling Guided Multi-turn Dialogue ReWriter (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing attentive models attend to all words without prior focus, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words.
Approach: They propose to use semantic role labeling to provide additional guidance for multi-turn dialogue rewriting models.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on multi-turn dialogue rewriting tasks.
Tailoring Diagnostic Modeling to Individual Learners: Personalized Distractor Generation via MCTS-Guided Reasoning Reconstruction (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current distractor generation methods produce shared distractors for all students, ignoring individual variations in reasoning, which limits their diagnostic effectiveness.
Approach: They propose a method which tailors distractors to each student’s specific cognitive flaws, inferred from their past question-answering (QA) history.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in generating plausible distractors and adapts to group-level settings.
Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to incorporate retriever’s preference during the training of query rewriting models rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting their generalization and adaptation capabilities.
Approach: They propose a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label.
Outcome: The proposed approach decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers.
Structured Discourse Representation for Factual Consistency Verification (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to verify factual consistency of text capture a performance gap compared with sentence-level entailment.
Approach: They propose a method that combines structured discourse information extraction with a classifier, FDSpotter, for factual consistency verification.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves competitive performance on two tasks: data-to-text generation and text summarisation.
Don’t Change Me! User-Controllable Selective Paraphrase Generation (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: a new technique allows paraphrase generation to be user-controlled . a user looking for cheap hotels in New York would not find the other answer helpful .
Approach: They propose a method that provides a user with explicit tags that can be placed around any arbitrary segment of text to mean "don't change me!" they propose allowing user-controllable paraphrase generation by fine-tuning model that exhibits this behavior .
Outcome: The proposed technique is language agnostic and tested in English and Chinese.
De-Biased Court’s View Generation with Causality (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to court’s view generation can be used to address this problem, but neglecting the confounding bias in data can limit the model performance and pollute learning outcomes.
Approach: They propose a novel Attentional and Counterfactual based Natural Language Generation method consisting of an attentional encoder and a pair of innovative counterfactual decoders to generate judgment-discriminative court's views.
Outcome: The proposed method is able to generate judgment-discriminative court's views (both supportive and non-supportive views) under both quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.
DeepSynth-Eval: Objectively Evaluating Information Consolidation in Deep Survey Writing (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving towards autonomous agents . retrieval capabilities are well-benchmarked, but post-retrieval synthesis is under-evaluated due to open-ended writing.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate information consolidation capabilities using survey papers as gold standards.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark analyzes the post-retrieval synthesis stage of large language models . it leverages high-quality survey papers as gold standards and reverse-engineers research requests . the proposed benchmark outperforms single-turn generation and reduces hallucinations .
MasRouter: Learning to Route LLMs for Multi-Agent Systems (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to push the boundaries of LLM capabilities, yet they often face significant costs and challenges in dynamic LLM selection.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent system routing solution that integrates all components of MAS into a unified routing framework.
Outcome: The proposed solution is high-performing, cost-effective, and efficient . it reduces overhead by up to 52.07 compared to current methods on HumanEval .
Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Pipelined Error-Mitigated Aggregation and Matrix-Wise Freezing (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models often suffer from biased model aggregation and are hindered by significant communication and computation burden.
Approach: They propose a Federated low-rank adaptation system for large language models that leverages pipelined error-mitigated model aggregation and adaptive matrix-wise parameter freezing to mitigate aggregations.
Outcome: The proposed system improves time-to-target by 2.17-8.48 on real-world datasets.
Learn with Noisy Data via Unsupervised Loss Correction for Weakly Supervised Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to filter noise for machine reading comprehension (MRC) are difficult to control and introduce noisy data.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical loss correction strategy to avoid fitting noise and enhance clean supervision signals by using an unsupervisedly fitted Gaussian mixture model and a hard bootstrapping loss method.
Outcome: The proposed methods can help improve models significantly on weakly supervised machine reading comprehension datasets.
FactSpotter: Evaluating the Factual Faithfulness of Graph-to-Text Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Graph-to-text (G2T) generation is an important task in natural language generation as it renders graphs accessible to non-technical users in downstream applications such as question answering.
Approach: They propose a metric that correctly identifies factual faithfulness and uses it to determine if a triple is present in a generated text.
Outcome: The proposed metric achieves highest correlation with human annotations on data correctness, data coverage, and relevance.
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection.
Approach: They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization.
Outcome: The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models.
LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing systems that translate optimization formulas manually are cumbersome and time-consuming.
Approach: They propose a system that converts optimization formulas from TeX document to solver language.
Outcome: The proposed system helps operations research practitioners convert optimization formulations into solver modeling languages.
MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs.
Approach: They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair.
DemonAgent: Dynamically Encrypted Multi-Backdoor Implantation Attack on LLM-based Agent (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a new method for detecting advanced backdoors is proposed to bypass safety audits.
Approach: They propose a backdoor implantation strategy that introduces dynamic encryption to bypass safety audits.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves an attack success rate approaching 100% while maintaining a detection rate of 0%.
Joint Coreference Resolution and Character Linking for Multiparty Conversation (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Character linking is the task of linking mentioned people in conversations to the real world . human use of pronouns or normal entities makes it difficult to link mentioned people to real people . a critical step towards understanding conversations is grounding mentioned people - a goal of the natural language processing community .
Approach: They propose to integrate richer context from the coreference relations among different mentions to help the linking task.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms all previous models on both tasks.
M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: In this paper, we introduce a new embedding model for semantic retrieval of more than 100 working languages.
Approach: They propose a new embedding model that supports multi-lingual, cross-lingual and long-document retrieval . they propose integrating relevance scores from different retrieval functionalities into the teacher signal .
Outcome: The proposed model exhibits superior performance on multilingual, cross-lingual, and long-document retrieval benchmarks.
FactVerse: A Benchmark for Factual Consistency in Interleaved Image–Text Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks lack effective mechanisms to evaluate factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation.
Approach: They propose a benchmark dedicated to evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods in evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation.
Mind Reader: Latent User Demand-Guided Content Optimization for Generative Search Engine (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Generative Search Engines (GSEs) have reshaped information retrieval and Generating Engine Optimization (GEO) emerges to improve the content visibility in GSEs’ responses.
Approach: They propose a method to optimize content to cover latent semantic information of GSEs by decomposing query into diverse perspectives and capturing underlying semantic information.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines and effectively improves content visibility (with up to 2.44x objective metrics and 1.23x subjective metrics on average).
SrDetection: A Self-Referential Framework for Data Leakage Detection in Code Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating code large language models assume access to proprietary training corpora or use external reference sets with manually tuned, non-generalizable thresholds.
Approach: They propose a framework for self-referential leakage detection for gray-box and black-box settings.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves average F1 by 21.52 points in the gray-box setting and 14.46 points in black-box settings over strong baselines.
RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics that characterize authentic physical environments.
Approach: They propose a robustness benchmark to stress-test Audio Large Models (ALLMs) using high-fidelity auditory scene simulations.
Outcome: The proposed model performs well on a wide range of tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and audio-based reasoning.
Towards Interactivity and Interpretability: A Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction Framework (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process.
Approach: They propose a rationale-based legal judgment prediction framework that follows the judge's real trial logic and provides good interactivity and interpretability.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use.
STORM-BORN: A Challenging Mathematical Derivations Dataset Curated via a Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets suffer from outdated and insufficient challenging content, neglecting human-like reasoning, and limited reliability due to single-LLM generation.
Approach: They propose a human-in-the-loop, multi-agent data generation framework that integrates reasoning-dense filters, multiagent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations to ensure the reliability and quality of the dataset.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves accuracy and quality of the 2,000-synthesized datasets by integrating reasoning-dense filters, multi-agent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations.
Virtual Data Augmentation: A Robust and General Framework for Fine-tuning Pre-trained Models (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that powerful pre-trained language models can be fooled by small perturbations or intentional attacks.
Approach: They propose a framework for fine-tuning PLMs using a masked language model and Gaussian noise to augment semantically relevant examples with sufficient diversity.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the robustness of pre-trained language models and alleviates performance degradation under adversarial attacks.
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons.
Approach: They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation .
Neural News Recommendation with Long- and Short-term User Representations (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing news recommendation methods learn a single representation for each user, which may be insufficient.
Approach: They propose a neural news recommendation approach which can learn both long- and short-term user representations by using a news encoder and a user encoder.
Outcome: The proposed approach can learn both long- and short-term user representations on a real-world dataset.
G-Safeguard: A Topology-Guided Security Lens and Treatment on LLM-based Multi-agent Systems (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various complex tasks, but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks, misinformation propagation, and unintended behaviors have raised significant concerns.
Approach: They propose a topology-guided security lens and treatment for robust LLM-MAS that leverages graph neural networks to detect anomalies on the multi-agent utterance graph and employ topological intervention for attack remediation.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed security lens recovers 40% of the performance under various attack strategies and integrates with mainstream MAS with security guarantees.
ThinkAnswer Loss: Balancing Semantic Similarity and Exact Matching for LLM Reasoning Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for knowledge distillation use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and answer pairs, but they lack appropriate supervision signals.
Approach: They propose a framework that decouples CoT and answer supervision . the framework applies semantic similarity constraints while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer .
Outcome: The proposed framework decouples CoT and answer supervision while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer.
Enhancing Partially Relevant Video Retrieval with Robust Alignment Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on enhancing multi-scale clip representations but lack robust data alignment . inherent data uncertainty renders PRVR vulnerable to distractor videos with spurious similarities .
Approach: proposed framework for partially relevant video retrieval aims to retrieve untrimmed videos partially relevant to a given query.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be seamlessly integrated into existing architectures.
JARVIS or Ultron? A Survey on the Safety and Security Threats of Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in computer-using agents have created new safety and security risks . despite the impressive capabilities of CUAs, there are still significant security risks.
Approach: They propose a systematization of knowledge on the safety and security threats of Computer-Using Agents.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a framework for assessing the safety and security risks of computer-using agents.
DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: DialogStudio is the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets . existing datasets lack diversity and comprehensiveness, authors say .
Approach: They introduce DialogStudio: the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets . DialogStuio aggregates more than 80 diverse dialogue dataset .
Outcome: a new dataset is created to improve the quality and diversity of dialogue datasets . DialogStudio is the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue data .
Decoding-Unlearning: Fact Forgetting via Entropy-Guided Inference (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for large-scale modeling memorize sensitive information . however, they are limited in real-world scenarios and require updating parameters .
Approach: They propose a training-free, plug-and-play inference-time unlearning strategy that uses a probe to detect queries involving forgettable concepts and applies entropy-guided decoding to suppress target knowledge.
Outcome: Experiments on MUSE, RWKU, and WMDP datasets show that SEGUE outperforms existing methods.
TIU-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Text-rich Image Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing text-rich image understanding benchmarks lack scale and fragmented scenarios . a new full-image structured output format is proposed to enable fine-grained evaluation of perception and reasoning capabilities.
Approach: They propose a large-scale, multilingual benchmark that includes over 100,000 annotations and 22,000 question-answer pairs.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a comprehensive platform for developing and evaluating next-generation multimodal AI systems.
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.
Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Court View Generation by Stimulating Internal Knowledge and Incorporating External Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain.
Approach: They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task.
Outcome: The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022.
DECOR: Improving Coherence in L2 English Writing with a Novel Benchmark for Incoherence Detection, Reasoning, and Rewriting (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing automated writing evaluation systems only detect incoherence in writing . a recent study has found that incorporating specific reasons for incohence improves the quality of rewrites .
Approach: They propose a benchmark that includes expert annotations for detecting incoherence in L2 English writing, identifying the underlying reasons, and rewriting the incoerent sentences.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark improves coherence in L2 English writing by fine-tuning models . the authors find that incorporating specific reasons improves quality of rewrites .
RexUIE: A Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal Information Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) models have limited success when extracting general schemas such as quadruples and quintuples.
Approach: They propose a formal formulation that covers almost all extraction schemas and a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for UIE.
Outcome: The proposed method shows strong performance under full-shot and few-shot settings and achieves state-of-the-art results on the tasks of extracting complex schemas.
Dissecting Failure Dynamics in Large Language Model Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models achieve strong performance through extended inference-time deliberation, yet how their reasoning failures arise remains poorly understood.
Approach: They propose a framework that probes and redirects critical transitions using uncertainty signals.
Outcome: Empirical evaluations show that GUARD improves reasoning performance . GUard probes critical transitions and redirects them using uncertainty signals .
Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets (P19-1)

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Challenge: Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) is a popular NLP task.
Approach: They propose to use QuoraQP to train and evaluate NLSM models using a selection bias framework.
Outcome: The proposed framework can improve generalization ability of trained models and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions.
Visual-Linguistic Dependency Encoding for Image-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to image-text retrieval ignore semantic discrepancies caused by syntactic structure in natural language expressions and relationships among visual entities.
Approach: They propose a visual-linguistic dependency encoder framework which explicitly models the dependency information among textual words and interaction patterns between image regions.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on a vision-linguistic compositional structure reasoning dataset.
Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve context faithfulness in large language models are either inadequate or overlook the potential for self-improvement.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances context faithfulness through fine-grained sentence-level optimization.
Outcome: Experiments on ASQA and ConFiQA datasets show that GenDiE surpasses baselines in faithfulness and correctness and exhibits robust performance for domain adaptation.
iAgent: LLM Agent as a Shield between User and Recommender Systems (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Traditional recommender systems focus on the user-platform paradigm, where users are directly exposed under the control of the platform's recommendation algorithms.
Approach: They propose a user-agent-platform paradigm where agent serves as the protective shield between user and recommender system that enables indirect exposure.
Outcome: The proposed model improves 16.6% over baselines on four datasets and mitigates echo chamber effects and reduces model bias in disadvantaged users.
DialogBench: Evaluating LLMs as Human-like Dialogue Systems (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks only evaluate LLMs' abilities for task completion as assistant AI.
Approach: They propose a dialogue evaluation benchmark that contains 12 dialogue tasks to evaluate LLMs' capabilities as human-like dialogue systems.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark contains 12 tasks to evaluate LLMs' capabilities . it shows that instruction tuning improves human likeness, but not as human-like systems .
RAG-Zeval: Enhancing RAG Responses Evaluator through End-to-End Reasoning and Ranking-Based Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks rely on direct prompting of resource-intensive models with complex multi-stage prompts, introducing significant computational cost and underutilizing models’ reasoning capabilities.
Approach: They propose a framework that trains evaluators with reinforcement learning to generate comprehensive and sound assessments with detailed explanation in one-pass.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline evaluation frameworks that rely on LLMs with 10-100 more parameters and achieves the strongest correlation with human judgments.
NetSafe: Exploring the Topological Safety of Multi-agent System (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have fueled significant progress in intelligent Multi-agent Systems (MAS), with expanding academic and industrial applications.
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies diverse MAS workflows via iterative RelCom interactions to enable generalized analysis.
Outcome: The proposed framework unifies diverse MAS workflows via iterative RelCom interactions to enable generalized analysis.
DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) enabled dialogue systems are one of the central modes in human-machine interaction.
Approach: They propose a benchmark task for dialogue element MOdeling and Element Awareness and a new benchmark for dialogue agent interaction that allows the agent to model dialogue elements via imitation learning.
Outcome: The proposed agent performs well in both dialogue element modeling and out-of-domain tasks.
Harder Task Needs More Experts: Dynamic Routing in MoE Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Unlike existing MoE approaches that rely on fixed TopK Routing, our dynamic expert selection framework dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input.
Approach: They propose a dynamic expert selection framework that dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves an average improvement of 0.7% with less than 90% activated parameters and outperforms dense models in QA and machine translation tasks.
Structural Information Preserving for Graph-to-Text Generation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing models that mess up or drop the core structural information of input graphs are lacking in graph-to-text generation.
Approach: They propose to leverage richer training signals to guide a graph-to-text generation model by focusing on autoencoding losses and back-propagating the losses to better calibrate the model.
Outcome: Experiments on two benchmarks show the proposed model over a state-of-the-art model . two types of autoencoding losses are used to back-propagate the model based on multitask training .
Automatic Slide Updating with User-Defined Dynamic Templates and Natural Language Instructions (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing automation methods follow fixed template filling and cannot support dynamic updates for diverse, user-authored decks.
Approach: They propose a framework that combines multimodal slide parsing, natural language instruction grounding, and tool-augmented reasoning for tables, charts, and textual conclusions.
Outcome: The proposed framework updates content while preserving layout and style while maintaining a strong reference baseline on DynaSlide.
ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to identify event-event causal relations in a document are noisy and require heuristic rules or external tools.
Approach: They propose a document-level event-event causality identification framework that uses heuristic rules to design edges between events.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.
Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages the strength of both LLMs and domain-specific models in the context of precedents.
Outcome: The proposed framework leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents.
Meta-CQG: A Meta-Learning Framework for Complex Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods train one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions . however, such a one-size-fits-all strategy may not perform well for complex questions involving multiple KB relations or functional constraints.
Approach: They propose a meta-learning framework for complex question generation over knowledge bases . they propose he meta-trained generator can acquire universal meta-knowledge .
Outcome: The proposed framework can acquire universal and transferable meta-knowledge and quickly adapt to long-tailed samples under different dimensions.
A Comparison between Pre-training and Large-scale Back-translation for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: BERT is a promising technique to improve NMT, but how it outperforms standard NMT is understudied.
Approach: We compare MT engines trained with pre-trained BERT and back-translation with incrementally larger amounts of data.
Outcome: The proposed technique outperforms standard NMT models on morphology and syntax.
Just Ask One More Time! Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective on complex reasoning tasks, but the naive greedy decoding used in CoT prompting causes the repetitiveness and local optimality.
Approach: They propose a generalizable ensemble-optimization method that uses a set of reasoning paths to prompt a language model one more time to determine the optimal answer.
Outcome: The proposed method can be generalized to almost all scenarios where the type of input questions and answer format of reasoning paths may be unknown.
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception.
Outcome: The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks.
SoMeLVLM: A Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Genereal domain large models lack nuanced multimodal understanding of social media . general domain models focus more on text than other modalities, which is not consistent with real-world user habits.
Approach: They propose a Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing that combines five key capabilities to understand and generate real social media behavior.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple social media tasks.
Unsupervised Context Rewriting for Open Domain Conversation (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to model conversation context have drawbacks, such as lack of coreferences and long dependency.
Approach: They propose a context rewriting method which explicitly rewrites the last utterance by considering context history.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of rewriting quality, multi-turn response generation, and end-to-end retrieval-based chatbots.
Decoding on Graphs: Faithful and Sound Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs through Generation of Well-Formed Chains (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research on the utilization of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) for large language models (LLMs) relies on subgraph retriever or iterative prompting, overlooking the potential synergy of LLMs’ step-wise reasoning capabilities and KGs’ structural nature.
Approach: They propose a graph-aware constrained decoding framework that facilitates a deep synergy between LLMs and KGs by constraint derived from the topology of the KG.
Outcome: The proposed framework can provide faithful and sound reasoning for KGQA.
Inductive-Deductive Strategy Reuse for Multi-Turn Instructional Dialogues (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods target instruction dialogues as learning goal and fine-tune user simulators to pose instructions.
Approach: They propose to use real instruction dialogues to model complex dialogue flows and pose high-quality instructions.
Outcome: The proposed method generates diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions for a given dialogue history.
Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia (2025.acl-long)

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Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amit Agarwal, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Vicky Feliren, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Manuel Antonio Rufino, Genta Indra Winata, Rian Adam Rajagede, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed Imam, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Kevin Pratama, Yeshil Bangera, Adisai Na-Thalang, Patricia Nicole Monderin, Yueqi Song, Christian Simon, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Richardy Lobo Sapan, Taki Hasan Rafi, Bin Wang, null Supryadi, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Matthew Theodore Roque, Karissa Vincentio, Takdanai Kreangphet, Phakphum Artkaew, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Yanzhi Yu, Rochana Prih Hastuti, William Nixon, Mithil Bangera, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim, Aye Hninn Khine, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Teddy Ferdinan, Audra Aurora Izzani, Ayushman Singh, Evan Evan, Jauza Akbar Krito, Michael Anugraha, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Haochen Li, John Amadeo Daniswara, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Fadil Risdian Ansori, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Giang Nguyen, Anab Maulana Barik, Dan John Velasco, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Saptarshi Saha, Chengwei Wei, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Kenneth Chen Ko Han, Anjela Gail D. Santos, Wan Shen Lim, Kaung Si Phyo, Tim Santos, Meisyarah Dwiastuti, Jiayun Luo, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Ming Shan Hee, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, M.Alif Al Hakim, Muhammad Rizky Sya’ban, Kun Kerdthaisong, Lester James Validad Miranda, Fajri Koto, Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Alham Fikri Aji, Jostin Jerico Rosal, Jun Kevin, Robert Wijaya, Onno P. Kampman, Ruochen Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
Challenge: Southeast Asia is underrepresented in vision-language research . SEA-VL is an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages.
Approach: They propose to use crowdsourced, automated image crawling and synthetic image generation to develop culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages.
Outcome: The proposed datasets capture SEA cultural nuances and contexts better than existing datasets.
Knowledge Graph-Driven Memory Editing with Directional Interventions (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are hampered by inaccuracies and outdated information.
Approach: They propose a framework that constructs knowledge graphs using available information to guide the direction of knowledge editing.
Outcome: The proposed framework allows consistent, aligned, and stable information during large-scale editing scenarios.
MoRE: A Mixture of Low-Rank Experts for Adaptive Multi-Task Learning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains, offering unprecedented performance across numerous tasks.
Approach: They propose a new Mixture of Low-Rank Experts (MoRE) for multi-task PEFT to improve performance of LLMs with fewer parameters.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance over multiple tasks and no additional inference cost.
Crafting Adversarial Examples for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Effective adversary generation for neural machine translation is crucial for robust systems.
Approach: They propose to leverage round-trip translation technique to build valid metrics for evaluating NMT adversarial attacks.
Outcome: The proposed method could break the state-of-art NMT models with small perturbations.
RepoShapley: Shapley-Enhanced Context Filtering for Repository-Level Code Completion (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models have strong reasoning, coding, and generation capabilities, but retrieval-augmented generation remains difficult under fixed context budgets.
Approach: They propose a coalition-aware context filtering framework supervised by Shapley-style marginal contributions that captures sign effects via teacher-forced probing and computes exact Shaply values for small retrieval sets.
Outcome: Experiments show that RepoShapley improves completion quality while reducing harmful context and unnecessary retrieval.
Incorporating Dynamic Semantics into Pre-Trained Language Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in a sentence.
Approach: They propose to use a dynamic aspect-oriented semantics-based method to learn ABSA.
Outcome: The proposed method can learn dynamic aspect-oriented semantics for ABSA on three benchmark datasets.
CE-GPPO: Coordinating Entropy via Gradient-Preserving Clipping Policy Optimization in Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for proximal policy optimization discard valuable gradient signals from low-probability tokens due to the clipping mechanism.
Approach: They propose an algorithm that reintroduces gradients from clipped tokens in native PPO in a gentle and bounded manner.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms strong baselines on reasoning benchmarks on different model scales.
Optimizing Language Models with Fair and Stable Reward Composition in Reinforcement Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent research has developed algorithms for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback.
Approach: They propose a method for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback that incorporates weighting, ranking, and constraining to handle disparate rewards.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces disparity and enhances stability among rewards . empirical results show that the proposed method is efficient and straightforward .
KMatrix: A Flexible Heterogeneous Knowledge Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Existing Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models (K-LLMs) toolkits focus on free-textual knowledge and lack robust datasets, models, and user-friendly experience.
Approach: They propose a flexible heterogeneous knowledge enhancement toolkit to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) using external knowledge.
Outcome: KMatrix: a flexible heterogeneous knowledge enhancement toolkit for LLMs includes verbalizing-retrieval and parsing-query methods.
ODTQA-FoRe: An Open-Domain Tabular Question Answering Dataset for Future Data Forecasting and Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing tabular question answering systems cannot perform future-oriented numerical prediction . open-domain tabular questions are a popular approach for QA tasks .
Approach: They propose a task that covers time-series forecasting and forecast-based reasoning scenarios using real estate data.
Outcome: The proposed framework decomposes the problem into three collaborative roles that synthesize the results to construct a precise and consistent final answer.
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)

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Challenge: Existing studies on K-LLMs systems focus on declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (rules) .
Approach: They propose to build a toolkit that supports comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement for Large Language Models (LLMs).
Outcome: The proposed toolkit provides unified knowledge integration and joint knowledge retrieval methods to achieve more comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement.
Learning a Grammar Inducer from Massive Uncurated Instructional Videos (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: aims to find more accurate syntactic grammars for accompanying text using video data.
Approach: They build a video-aided grammar induction model that can learn video-span correlation without manual features.
Outcome: The proposed model can learn video-span correlation without manual features adopted by previous systems.
SplitThenMerge: Token-Level Skill-Compositional Sparse Mixture-of-Experts for Complex Domain-Specific Tasks (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing domain adaptation methods train heterogeneous skills together, making it difficult to reliably coordinate multiple skills when solving complex tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework that decomposes domain competence into atomic skills and composes them dynamically during generation.
Outcome: The proposed framework decomposes domain competence into atomic skills, trains them independently, and composes them dynamically during generation.
On the In-context Generation of Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have the ability of in-context generation (ICG) when given an in-text prompt, they can implicitly recognize the pattern of the examples and complete the prompt in the desired way.
Approach: They propose a plausible latent variable model to model the distribution of pretrained corpora and formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction.
Outcome: The proposed model can model the distribution of pretrained corpora and then formalize ICG as a problem of next topic prediction.
PuzzleClone: A DSL-Powered Framework for Synthesizing Verifiable Data (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets with verifiable answers are limited in reliability, diversity, and scalability . a new approach to generate verifikatable data at scale is needed to improve models' performance .
Approach: They propose a formal framework for synthesizing verifiable data at scale using a novel DSL-driven approach.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance on a wide range of puzzles and logic benchmarks.
LeCoDe: A Benchmark Dataset for Interactive Legal Consultation Dialogue Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current systems for legal consultation are insufficient to handle the knowledge-intensive nature of real-world consultations.
Approach: They propose a multi-turn benchmark dataset to evaluate LLMs in legal consultation settings.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses LLMs’ consultation capabilities in terms of (1) clarification capability and (2) professional advice quality.
Noisy-Labeled NER with Confidence Estimation (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies in deep learning have shown significant progress in named entity recognition (NER) . however, most existing works assume clean data annotation, while real-world data typically involve a large amount of noises.
Approach: They propose a confidence estimation approach for named entity recognition using noisy labels using local and global independence assumptions.
Outcome: The proposed method marginalizes out labels of low confidence with a CRF model and integrates it into a self-training framework for boosting performance.
OTExtSum: Extractive Text Summarisation with Optimal Transport (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Extractive text summarisation aims to select salient sentences from a document to form a short yet informative summary.
Approach: They propose to formulate extractive text summarisation as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem and use it to obtain an optimal summary that minimises the transportation cost to a given document.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and learning-based methods on multiNews, PubMed, BillSum, and CNN/DM datasets.
On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19 (2021.acl-short)

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Challenge: under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVI D19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors.
Approach: They develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations . they use two dialog datasets containing conversations between doctors and patients .
Outcome: The proposed system can provide COVID19-related consultations, but is too small compared with general-domain dialog datasets.
A General Knowledge Injection Framework for ICD Coding (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve ICD coding focus on a single type of knowledge and design specialized modules that are complex and incompatible with each other.
Approach: They propose a general knowledge injection framework that integrates three key types of knowledge without specialized design of additional modules.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and is comparable to models relying on extra human annotations.
Rotation Control Unlearning: Quantifying and Controlling Continuous Unlearning for LLM with The Cognitive Rotation Space (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to remove undesirable data from Large Language Models suffer from cumulative catastrophic utility loss under continuous unlearning requests.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages the rotational salience weight of RCU to quantify and control the unlearning degree in the continuous unlearning process.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves SOTA performance without a retained dataset.
DSMoE: Matrix-Partitioned Experts with Dynamic Routing for Computation-Efficient Dense LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing sparsification methods like pruning can lose model knowledge through parameter removal.
Approach: They propose a novel approach that achieves sparsification by partitioning pre-trained FFN layers into computational blocks.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves superior performance across language modeling and downstream tasks under equivalent computational constraints.
ODUTQA-MDC: A Task for Open-Domain Underspecified Tabular QA with Multi-turn Dialogue-based Clarification (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to tabular QA are limited to closed-domain scenarios . existing approaches do not solve the core challenge of generating correct answers without user clarification .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to tackle underspecified or uncertain queries in tabular question answering . they propose ODUTQA-MDC task and a multi-agent framework to detect ambiguities .
Outcome: The proposed framework excels at detecting ambiguities, clarifying them through dialogue, and refining answers.
ChatCoT: Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Chat-based Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have excellent performance in evaluation benchmarks, but struggle in complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning framework for chat-based LLMs . they model chain- of-thoughting reasoning as multi-turn conversations to utilize tools .
Outcome: The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on complex reasoning tasks.
Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty.
Approach: They propose to extract crime amounts from fact description and use them to learn distinguishable representations to exploit the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on real-world datasets and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.
ZPR2: Joint Zero Pronoun Recovery and Resolution using Multi-Task Learning and BERT (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Zero pronoun recovery and resolution aim at recovering the dropped pronounce and pointing out its anaphoric mentions.
Approach: They propose to solve two tasks together to recover the dropped pronoun and point out its anaphoric mentions.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms previous state of the arts benchmarks on two benchmarks.
Advancing Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models with Denoising Process Rewards (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for improving reasoning in diffusion language models rely on outcome-based rewards that provide no direct supervision over the denoising process.
Approach: They propose a method that provides a process-level reinforcement signal over denoising trajectory of diffusion language models.
Outcome: Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed model improves reasoning stability, interpretability and overall performance.
SGP-TOD: Building Task Bots Effortlessly via Schema-Guided LLM Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that SGP-TOD provides state-of-the-art zero-shot performance . prevailing approach for creating task bots is to fine-tune pre-trained language models .
Approach: They propose a Schema-Guided Prompting for building Task-Oriented Dialog systems . they use predefined task schema and dialog policy to instruct fixed LLMs to generate appropriate responses .
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms few-shot approaches on multiwoz, RADDLE, and STAR datasets.
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks.
Approach: They propose a communication inference attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision.
Outcome: The proposed attack achieves an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC up to 0.99, revealing the privacy risk in MAS.
Unmasking Style Sensitivity: A Causal Analysis of Bias Evaluation Instability in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to assess social biases in natural language processing models show unexpected instability when input texts undergo minor stylistic changes.
Approach: They conduct a comprehensive analysis of how style transformations impact bias evaluation results . they find formal style transformation significantly affects bias scores . larger models show greater sensitivity to stylistic variations, they find .
Outcome: The proposed method fails to detect appearance bias, sexual orientation bias, religious bias and religious bias in large language models.
DuSQL: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing text-to-SQL parsing methods mainly focus on English, but there is no labeled data available for the language . a larges-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset is used for cross-domain text- to-Sql task .
Approach: They propose a larges-scale Chinese dataset for a cross-domain text-to-SQL task . they analyze questions from several representative applications and use an effective data construction framework .
Outcome: The proposed dataset contains 200 databases, 813 tables, and 23,797 question/SQL pairs.
PASUM: A Pre-training Architecture for Social Media User Modeling Based on Text Graph (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have incorporated different digital traces to better learn the representations of social media users, limited by overloaded text information and hard-to-collect social network information.
Approach: They propose a Pre-training Architecture for Social Media User Modeling based on Text Graph and combine microblogs to represent social media users based upon the text graph model.
Outcome: The proposed framework can represent users based on text even without social network information on microblogs.
What Have We Achieved on Text Summarization? (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text summarization have been investigated, but there are still gaps between them and human professionals.
Approach: They analyze 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarization models manually.
Outcome: Aiming to gain more understanding of summarization systems with respect to their strengths and limitations on a fine-grained syntactic and semantic level, we use 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarizing models.
Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to parse text-to-SQL data are lacking labeled data for unseen evaluation databases.
Approach: They propose a framework for enhancing SQL queries by automatically producing large numbers of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar.
Outcome: The proposed framework can produce high-quality natural language questions over strong baselines.
GaLa: Hypergraph-Guided Visual Language Models for Procedural Planning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for procedural planning over-rely on visual inputs and lack structured semantic information.
Approach: They propose a vision–language framework for multimodal procedural planning that exploits implicit spatial relations and deep semantics encoded in object attributes.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in terms of execution success rate, LCS, and planning correctness.
Demographics Should Not Be the Reason of Toxicity: Mitigating Discrimination in Text Classifications with Instance Weighting (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Recent research has found that text classification datasets contain certain unintended biases, such as text containing demographic identity-terms that are more likely to be abusive.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic debiasing framework that recovers the non-discrimination distribution using instance weighting, which does not require extra resources or annotations apart from a pre-defined set of demographic identity-terms.
Outcome: The proposed framework alleviates the unintended biases without hurting models’ generalization ability.
Domain-Adaptive Pretraining Methods for Dialogue Understanding (2021.acl-short)

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Challenge: Recent advances in pretraining methods have achieved promising results on NLP tasks . however, it is unclear which pretraining objective is the most effective for each downstream task .
Approach: They evaluate the effectiveness of domain-adaptive pretraining objectives on downstream tasks . they use open-domain data to pretrain language models like BERT and SpanBERT .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two dialogue understanding tasks with domain-adaptive pretraining objectives.
Focus-aware Response Generation in Inquiry Conversation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on response generation focus on relevance and fluency, rarely paying attention to the focus.
Approach: They propose a Focus-aware response generation method that takes the focus into consideration and optimizes a multi-level encoder and focal decoder to generate multiple candidate responses.
Outcome: The proposed method generates candidate responses that correspond to different focuses and performs better on two orthogonal inquiry conversation datasets.
Mitigating Safety Context Amnesia in Multimodal Reasoning Models via Intent-Guided Safety Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have enabled explicit chain-of-thought inference across vision and language, improving performance on complex cognitive tasks.
Approach: They propose an inference-time defense that uses a percept decoupler to extract objective visual evidence into a structured intent output and a cognitive arbiter to enforce explicit safety constraints prior to generation.
Outcome: The proposed defense improves defense success rates by over 62% compared to baselines while preserving task utility.
CausalNLP Tutorial: An Introduction to Causality for Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-tutorials)

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Challenge: Establishing causal relationships is a fundamental goal of scientific research . lack of clear definitions, notations, benchmark datasets, and challenges remains .
Approach: They introduce the fundamentals of causal discovery and causal effect estimation to the natural language processing audience and provide an overview of causal perspectives to NLP problems.
Outcome: This tutorial introduces the fundamentals of causal discovery and causal effect estimation to the natural language processing audience and provides an overview of causal perspectives to NLP problems.
Unleashing the Native Recommendation Potential: LLM-Based Generative Recommendation via Structured Term Identifiers (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for constructing item identifiers face bottlenecks due to their large output space and expensive vocabulary expansion and alignment training.
Approach: They propose to use Large Language Models to develop general-purpose, semantically-aware recommender systems that can be generalized and reusable.
Outcome: Experiments on real-world datasets show that GRAM outperforms baselines and significantly outperformed baselines.
Stick to the Facts: Learning towards a Fidelity-oriented E-Commerce Product Description Generation (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing models for product description generation do not take the product attribute information into account.
Approach: They propose a model that takes the embedding and the entity label of each word into account . they establish a keyword memory that stores the entity labels as keys and keywords as values .
Outcome: The proposed model increases the fidelity of the generated descriptions by 25%.
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide.
Approach: They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions .
Outcome: The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks.
Video-aided Unsupervised Grammar Induction (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods of multi-modal grammar induction focus on grammar inducing from text-image pairs, but videos provide even richer information, such as static objects and actions.
Approach: They propose a video-aided grammar induction model which learns a constituency parser from unlabeled text and its corresponding video.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing systems on three benchmarks.
Decoding at the Speed of Thought: Harnessing Parallel Decoding of Lexical Units for LLMs (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in natural language understanding and generation, but their generation speed is limited by the inherently sequential nature of their decoding process.
Approach: They propose a method that accelerates decoding process without sacrificing quality . they propose lexical unit decoding, which can be integrated with other methods .
Outcome: The proposed method significantly reduces decoding time while maintaining quality while maintaining output quality.
Code-Switching for Enhancing NMT with Pre-Specified Translation (N19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to constrain NMT use placeholder tags for lexicon words and hard constraints during decoding.
Approach: They propose to use placeholder tags to replace lexicon words with target translations . they use a data augmentation method to make code-switched training data .
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation quality without hurting unconstrained words.
Visually-augmented pretrained language models for NLP tasks without images (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to improve pre-trained language models lack visual commonsense and semantics.
Approach: They propose a visual-augmented approach to fine-tune pre-trained language models by using retrieved or generated images instead of relying on explicit images.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baselines on ten tasks and consistently outperformed other approaches.
OneRec-Think: In-Text Reasoning for Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing generative models lack the capacity for explicit and controllable reasoning, a key advantage of LLMs.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates dialogue, reasoning, and personalized recommendation.
Outcome: Experiments across public benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance.
Improving Large Language Models via Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning with Minimum Editing Constraint (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing reinforcement learning methods do not provide fine-grained supervision for complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning method that incorporates a generative model as the reward model and a token-level supervision model for RL training.
Outcome: Experiments on 8 tasks show the proposed method is effective .
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on hallucination detection rely heavily on closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based agent framework called HaluAgent that integrates LLMs, multi-functional toolbox and a memory mechanism for hallucination detection.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and can detect hallucinations on Chinese and English datasets.
CORES: Code-Oriented Reasoning for Complex Text-to-SQL and Generalizable TableQA (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Text-to-SQL models struggle with complex analytical tasks such as generating simple SQL queries.
Approach: They propose a text-to-sql model that leverages Python as a procedural reasoning pivot to enhance both complex SQL generation and tabular reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on six text-to-SQL benchmarks by 6.44% on average while maintaining good capability on three tableQA benchmarks.
VarBench: Robust Language Model Benchmarking Through Dynamic Variable Perturbation (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent benchmarks release only training and validation sets, keeping the test set labels closed-source.
Approach: They propose to extract variables from each test case and define a value range for each variable.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the accuracy of the evaluations on four datasets covering mathematical generation and multiple-choice tasks.
Scaling Law for Multimodal Large Language Model Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for multimodal large language models, yet a comprehensive scaling law is lacking . et al.: scaling laws focus on model size, pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT data volumes .
Approach: They propose two scaling laws to guide optimal model-data configuration . they propose one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers .
Outcome: The proposed scaling laws provide valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation . they show that the proposed laws are more accurate than existing models .
CORBA: Contagious Recursive Blocking Attacks on Multi-Agent Systems Based on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing security models rely on open-ended communication, but the collaborative process itself can be exploited and disrupted.
Approach: They propose a new threat class, called Denial-of-Collaboration, which corrupts collaborative structure and transforms communication topology into self-sabotage.
Outcome: The proposed attacks bypass conventional safety alignments that are not designed to detect behavioral or systemic attacks.
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of large language models (LLMs) Extensive experiments show that Parrot improves current LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi- turn instruction following.
Approach: They propose a method for collecting multi-turn instructions that feature human-like queries, such as anaphora and ellipsis, and a context-aware preference optimization strategy to further enhance LLMs for complex queries.
Outcome: The proposed method improves existing LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi-turn instruction following.

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