Papers by Li Cao
Thread: A Logic-Based Data Organization Paradigm for How-To Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kaikai An, Fangkai Yang, Liqun Li, Junting Lu, Sitao Cheng, Shuzheng Si, Lu Wang, Pu Zhao, Lele Cao, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have substantially improved question-answering systems, particularly for factoid ‘5Ws’ questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a data organization paradigm where large language models transform documents into more structured and loosely interconnected LUs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in open-domain and industrial settings show that the proposed paradigm outperforms existing paradigms and shows high adaptability across diverse document formats. |
Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Jiang, Jiahao Chen, Zhenghao Xiang, Zhixiong Yang, Hanchen Wang, Jiabao Zhuang, Xinmeng Che, Jiajun Sun, Hui Li, Yifei Cao, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Junjie Ye, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, but academic research remains non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning that includes a licensed synthetic dataset and a song generation model, Muse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. |
Beyond the Final Actor: Modeling the Dual Roles of Creator and Editor for Fine-Grained LLM-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect large language models (LLMs) use binary or ternary classifications, which can only distinguish pure human/LLM text or collaborative text at best. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained method that characterizes distinct signatures of creator and editor by using Rhetorical Structure Theory to construct a logic graph for creator's foundation and extracting Elementary Discourse Unit (EDU)-level features for the editor's style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 12 baselines in identifying fine-grained types with low false alarms, offering a policy-aligned solution for LLM regulation. |
Towards Storage-Efficient Visual Document Retrieval: An Empirical Study on Reducing Patch-Level Embeddings (2025.findings-acl)
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Yubo Ma, Jinsong Li, Yuhang Zang, Xiaobao Wu, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Cao, Haodong Duan, Jiaqi Wang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun
| Challenge: | Visualized Document Retrieval (VDR) uses large vision-language models to encode document pages into embeddings. |
| Approach: | They evaluate methods to reduce patch embeddings per page while minimizing performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maintains 98.2% of retrieval performance with only 11.8% of original memory usage and preserves 94.6% effectiveness at 2% memory footprint. |
VPTQ: Extreme Low-bit Vector Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on pushing weight-only quantization to extremely low-bit due to numerical representation limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a vector-based quantization approach that pushes LLMs to extremely low-bit . they propose scalar-based weight quantization that reduces memory requirements and optimizes storage costs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model quantization perplexity by 0.01-0.34 on LLaMA-2, 0.38-0.68 on mistral-7B, 4.41-7.34, on llaMA-3 on QA tasks on average. |
ChuLo: Chunk-Level Key Information Representation for Long Document Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional approaches to truncate inputs, sparse self-attention, and chunking often lead to information loss and hinder the model’s ability to capture long-range dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel chunk representation method that uses unsupervised keyphrase extraction to group input tokens to retain core document content while reducing input length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method minimizes information loss and improves the efficiency of Transformer-based models. |
FC-KBQA: A Fine-to-Coarse Composition Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) suffer from generalization issues due to coarse-grained modeling of the logical expression. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-to- coarse-grained framework for KBQA to ensure generalization and executability of the logical expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework derives new state-of-the-art performance on GrailQA and WebQSP, and runs 4 times faster than baseline. |
Event Ontology Completion with Hierarchical Structure Evolution Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection require predefined schemas, but manual defining is expensive and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to achieve event clustering, hierarchy expansion and type naming . they propose 'neighbor Contrastive Clustering' module and a Hierarchy-Aware Linking module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on 1D text-related tasks, but lack 2D graph perception, a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules’ topological structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a cross-modal projector and a uni-modal adapter to enable an LM to understand both text- and graph-based molecular contents via a Q-Former. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baselines on tasks such as molecule captioning, IUPAC name prediction, and molecule-text retrieval. |
Data Selection Curriculum for Abstractive Text Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive Text Summarization (ATS) models are commonly trained using large-scale data that is randomly shuffled. |
| Approach: | They propose a data selection curriculum scoring system that measures the learning difficulty of an ATS model and expected performance on an instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system surpasses baselines on CNN/DailyMail dataset, utilizing 20% of available instances. |
Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Introducing **MARK**, a framework for cultural value survey simulation . based on type dynamics theory, it improves accuracy and interpretation of models . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates psychological theory into cultural value survey simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the World Values Survey by 10% accuracy and reduces divergence between model predictions and human preferences. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Joint Representation Learning of Cross-lingual Words and Entities via Attentive Distant Supervision (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning word and entity representations in monolingual settings are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for joint representation learning of cross-lingual words and entities that captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-linguistic inferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-lingual inferences among knowledge bases and texts. |
To Diff or Not to Diff? Structure-Aware and Adaptive Output Formats for Efficient LLM-based Code Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code editing, yet the full-code generation paradigm suffers from severe efficiency bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a structure-aware diff format to train LLMs to choose the most token-efficient format between a given diff format and full code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach matches the most token-efficient format with full-code generation while reducing latency and cost by over 30% on long-code editing tasks. |
Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators (2024.acl-long)
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Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Liang Chen, Zefan Cai, Dawei Zhu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks that use large language models as referees are insufficient for accurately assessing their alignment with human intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration framework to address positional bias in large language models as evaluators by manually annotating the “win/tie/lose” outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicun A Benchmark’s question prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework alleviates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments. |
Format-Adapter: Improving Reasoning Capability of LLMs by Adapting Suitable Format (2026.findings-acl)
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Dingzirui Wang, Xuanliang Zhang, Rongyu Cao, Longxu Dou, Xianzhen Luo, Yingwei MA, Qingfu Zhu, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Prior work showed that multiple reasoning formats outperform a single format when generating multiple answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to measure reasoning error when generating multiple answers . they propose 'formatadapter' which generates and selects suitable reasoning formats . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 4.3% performance improvement over previous works on math and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Improving Event Detection via Open-domain Trigger Knowledge (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detecting are prone to overfitting densely labeled trigger words due to the small scale of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Enrichment Knowledge Distillation model to leverage external open-domain trigger knowledge to reduce in-built biases to frequent trigger words in annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms nine strong baselines and is especially effective for unseen/sparsely labeled trigger words. |
LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-Context QA (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiajie Zhang, Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Wanjun Gu, Danqing Liu, Minhao Zou, Shulin Cao, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Current long-context large language models lack citations to support their responses, making verification difficult due to potential hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf LLMs to automatically construct long-context QA instances with precise sentence-level citations and leverage this pipeline to construct a large-scale SFT dataset for LQAC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can generate responses with fine-grained citations on the fly, surpassing existing models including GPT-4o. |
RippleCOT: Amplifying Ripple Effect of Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Chain-of-Thought In-Context Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2022: ripple effect challenges knowledge editing for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve the accuracy of large language models by integrating Chain-of-Thought reasoning into the ICL editing approach. |
| Outcome: | RIPPLE-COT outperforms the state-of-the-art on the ripple effect, with gains ranging from 7.8% to 87.1%. |
Beyond Token Length: Step Pruner for Efficient and Accurate Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods for large reasoning models suffer from excessive verbosity, known as "overthinking." Existing models penalize generated tokens to promote conciseness, but these methods encounter two challenges: they may develop hacking behavior in later stages of training by discarding reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that steers large reasoning models toward more efficient reasoning . they prioritize correctness while imposing penalties for redundant steps . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by 69.7% on AIME24. |
LEGO: A Multi-agent Collaborative Framework with Role-playing and Iterative Feedback for Causality Explanation Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Causality explanation generation is a generative task that aims to explain why a given cause-effect pair is true using natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with role-playing and iterative feedback for causality explanation generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing frameworks on WIKIWHY and e-CARE datasets. |
Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge (2025.naacl-long)
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Li Zhou, Taelin Karidi, Wanlong Liu, Nicolas Garneau, Yong Cao, Wenyu Chen, Haizhou Li, Daniel Hershcovich
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates cultural context significantly and improves its ability to access cultural knowledge. |
Few-shot Query-Focused Summarization with Prefix-Merging (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Query-focused summarization has been considered as an important extension for text summarizing . lack of large-scale datasets hinders its development . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate text summarization and question answering into a prefix-based pretraining strategy for few-shot learning in query-focused summarizing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prefix-based pretraining outperforms fine-tuning on query-focused summarization. |
Formality is Favored: Unraveling the Learning Preferences of Large Language Models on Data with Conflicting Knowledge (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have shown excellent performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, but pretraining data tends to contain misleading and conflicting information. |
| Approach: | They systematically analyze LLMs’ learning preferences for data with conflicting knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human-level models on knowledge-intensive tasks by analyzing pretraining data. |
Reliably Bounding False Positives: A Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus excessively on detection accuracy, neglecting the societal risks posed by high false positive rates (FPRs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Conformal Prediction framework that constrains the upper bound of false positive rates and introduces a real-time detection framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false positive rates and improves detection performance. |
FFN Lens: How Transformers Divide Labor for Multilingual Tasks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance on multilingual tasks, yet the process of constructing predictions in the target language remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel interpretability method focusing on the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interpretability method is based on the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layer of Large Language Models. |
Tug-of-War between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge conflicts in RALMs can ensnare them in a tug-of-war between knowledge and evidence, limiting their practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model’s confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can resolve knowledge conflicts in large language models with the help of conflict-disentangle contrast decoding (CD2) . |
MDERank: A Masked Document Embedding Rank Approach for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Keyphrase extraction (KPE) extracts phrases in a document that provide a concise summary of the core content. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that ranks candidates by similarity between embeddings of source document and masked document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on six benchmarks . it achieves average 3.53 improvement over the existing method . |
Towards Advanced Mathematical Reasoning for LLMs via First-Order Logic Theorem Proving (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chuxue Cao, Mengze Li, Juntao Dai, Jinluan Yang, Zijian Zhao, Shengyu Zhang, Weijie Shi, Chengzhong Liu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising first-order logic (FOL) reasoning capabilities with applications in various areas, but their effectiveness in complex mathematical reasoning involving multi-step FOL deductions remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-adaptive solution that enhances the Diversity and REAsonability of LLMs’ generation strategies by introducing an Axiom-Driven Strategy Diversification mechanism and a Sub-Proposition Error Feedback to help LLM reflect on and correct their proofs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves diversity and REAsonability of LLMs’ generation strategies by introducing an Axiom-Driven Strategy Diversification mechanism and a Sub-Proposition Error Feedback to help LLM reflect on and correct proofs. |
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongcheng Guo, Wei Zhang, Junhao Chen, Yaonan Gu, Jian Yang, Junjia Du, Shaosheng Cao, Binyuan Hui, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work. |
Unveiling Project-Specific Bias in Neural Code Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based neural code models struggle to generalize effectively to real-world inter-project out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cond-Idf measurement to measure the relatedness of a token with a label and its project-specificness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves both inter-project OOD generalization and adversarial robustness while not sacrificing accuracy on intra-project IID data. |
NCRE: A Benchmark for Document-level Nominal Compound Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on detecting specific relations between entities, often constrained to specific fields and lacking general applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that concentrates on abstract relation extraction between noun phrases . they annotate a Chinese dataset and develop a model incorporating a rotary position-enhanced word pair detection schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is more efficient than previous methods. |
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models are limited in their generalizability, despite their performance being over-estimated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
Knowledge-augmented Self-training of A Question Rewriter for Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent rise of conversational applications has promoted the development of conversation KBQA (ConvKBQA). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to produce a full-fledged rewritten question based on conversation history and then reason the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces a full-fledged rewritten question based on the conversation history and reasoned the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
Dynamic and Efficient Inference for Text Generation via BERT Family (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve performance of pre-trained language models are limited due to large-scale parameters and the universal autoregressive decoding paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-tuning method which can make a single pre-trained model support Dynamic and Efficient infERence and achieve an adaptive trade-off between model performance and latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher BLEU scores than the strong autoregressive Transformer model on translation tasks with 3 12 times speedup and faster inference speed compared with the BART model on four GLGE benchmark tasks. |
CSS: A Large-scale Cross-schema Chinese Text-to-SQL Medical Dataset (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases . a single-domain task evaluates the performance on identical databases based on the same domain . |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-domain text-to-SQL task that parses user questions into SQL on unseen databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases. |
Leveraging Dual Process Theory in Language Agent Framework for Real-time Simultaneous Human-AI Collaboration (2025.acl-long)
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Shao Zhang, Xihuai Wang, Wenhao Zhang, Chaoran Li, Junru Song, Tingyu Li, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Wen Yao, Weinan Zhang, Xinbing Wang, Ying Wen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel in turn-by-turn human-AI collaboration but struggle with simultaneous tasks requiring real-time interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a language agent framework that integrates *System 1* and *System 2* for efficient real-time simultaneous human-AI collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing LLM-based agents and human collaborators by integrating Theory of Mind and asynchronous reflection to infer human intentions and perform reasoning-based autonomous decisions. |
Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation" |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC) |
Article Reranking by Memory-Enhanced Key Sentence Matching for Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect false claims ignore the characteristics of FC-articles . claims are often quoted to describe checked events, providing lexical information . sentence templates to introduce or debunk claims are common across articles, providing pattern information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to rerank FC-articles using key sentences and pattern information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on two real-world datasets showing that key sentences can be used to predict if an article fact-checks the given claim. |
RAG or Learning? Understanding the Limits of LLM Adaptation under Continuous Knowledge Drift in the Real World (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to update or supplement large language models struggle under continuous knowledge drift. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic event benchmark and time-aware retrieval baseline that captures how knowledge evolves over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables systematic evaluation of model adaptation under continuous knowledge drift. |
Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Dialog State Tracking do not generalize well to new domains and unseen slots. |
| Approach: | They propose an ontology-free framework that queries for unseen constraints and slots in multi-domain task-oriented dialogs using a conditional language model pre-trained on substantive English sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves goal accuracy in zero-shot domain adaptation settings by up to 9% over the previous state-of-the-art on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset. |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
AMO-Bench: Large Language Models Still Struggle in High School Math Competitions (2026.findings-acl)
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Junlin Liu, Shengnan An, Shuang Zhou, Dan Ma, Yehao Lin, Xinxuan Lv, Xuanlin Wang, Xiaoyu Li, Ziwen Wang, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for mathematical reasoning are becoming less effective due to performance saturation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a mathematical reasoning benchmark with Olympiad difficulty to evaluate top-tier LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are cross-validated by experts to meet IMO difficulty standards and entirely original problems to prevent performance leakages from data memorization. |
Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Program induction for complex questions over knowledge bases relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB, but the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to leverage program annotations on rich KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for low-resourced KB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP. |
Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought-like method to elicit models' potential abilities to generate rationales and answers that are based on attribution tracing and causal tracers to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates Toxic CoT problems and improves the model’s overall commonsense reasoning performance by 5.5%. |
Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongkang Wu, Meng Han, Yutao Zhu, Lei Li, Xinyu Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xiaoguang Li, Yuanhang Ren, Zhicheng Dou, Zhao Cao
| Challenge: | SylloBase is a benchmark for syllogistic reasoning, a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to learn syllogistic reasoning on a set of templates and to use them to generate and understand slogisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers a complete taxonomy of syllogism reasoning patterns, and contains both automatically and manually constructed samples. |
Depth Aware Hierarchical Replay Continual Learning for Knowledge Based Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Continual learning models adapt well to the latest data but lose ability to remember past data due to changes in the data source. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical replay framework that allows models to keep a small memory of previous learned data that uses replay. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous continual learning methods in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. |
Latent Suicide Risk Detection on Microblog via Suicide-Oriented Word Embeddings and Layered Attention (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect suicidal ideation on social media are limited to a small group of people. |
| Approach: | They propose to use tree holes to embed words into microblogs to strengthen the sensibility of suicide-related lexicons and to use a two-layered attention mechanism to grasp intermittently changing points from individual's open blog streams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve over 91% accuracy with the use of suicide-oriented word embeddings and attention on a large-scale well-labelled suicide data set. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
R2F: A General Retrieval, Reading and Fusion Framework for Document-level Natural Language Inference (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level natural language inference (DOCNLI) is a new task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level natural language inference framework that fuses sentence-level tasks into a set of sentence-based tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves interpretability and performance with evidence. |
Type-Driven Multi-Turn Corrections for Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on data augmentation to combat exposure bias . but data augmented models lack the ability to recognize the procedure of gradual corrections . |
| Approach: | They propose a type-driven multi-turn corrections approach that uses multiple training instances to train dominant models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art single-model performance on English GEC benchmarks. |
Step Guided Reasoning: Improving Mathematical Reasoning using Guidance Generation and Step Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve mathematical reasoning require extensive datasets for training or depend on few-shot methods that compromise computational accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free adaptation framework that efficiently equips general-purpose pre-trained language models with enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen2.5-72B-Math-Instruct on MMLU-STEM with a score of 90.9%, compared to 87.3%. |
RuleEdit: Towards Rule-Level Knowledge Generalization to Mitigate Over-Editing in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods focus on instance-level editing, which is prone to knowledge degradation and general ability deterioration due to redundant instance-specific modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-level editing method that generalizes rule-derived knowledge to update rule-based instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves portability and performance over baselines for LLaMA-2-7B on RULEmix. |
Multi-Faceted Self-Consistent Preference Alignment for Query Rewriting in Conversational Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rewrite ambiguous queries ignore feedback from query rewriting, passage retrieval and response generation in the rewritten process. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct self-consistent preference alignment data to generate more diverse rewritten queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in both in- and out-of-distribution scenarios. |
Personalized Large Language Model Assistant with Evolving Conditional Memory (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | With the rapid development of large language models, personalized large language model assistants like ChatGPT are limited in personalized services. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that could facilitate personalized large language model assistants with evolving conditional memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can preserve the knowledge and experience from the history dialogue with the user, which can be applied to future tailored responses that better align with the users' preferences. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment (2022.acl-long)
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Zijie Huang, Zheng Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianyu Cao, Hanqing Lu, Bing Yin, Karthik Subbian, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited in language alignment . SS-AGA uses seed alignment as an edge type to fuses all KGs as a whole graph . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised adaptive graph alignment method that fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as 'a new edge type' they propose SS-AGA method that uses relation-aware attention weights to capture potential alignment pairs in a new paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) but language alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is noisy. |
An Empirical Comparison of Unsupervised Constituency Parsing Methods (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised constituency parsing are inconsistent due to data preprocessing, lexicalization, and evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose to standardize experimental settings for better comparability between methods . they compare existing methods with those proposed by decade-old models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better than decade-old models on English and Japanese, respectively, compared with decade- old models. |
Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter (2020.acl-demos)
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Runxin Xu, Jun Cao, Mingxuan Wang, Jiaze Chen, Hao Zhou, Ying Zeng, Yuping Wang, Li Chen, Xiang Yin, Xijin Zhang, Songcheng Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Xiaomingbot is a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four inte- gal capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates Chinese news, then reads it in multiple languages and generates an animated avatar reading it. |
Interactive Learning for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent learning approaches foster collaboration among Large Language Models (LLMs) yet they still rely on re-executing the MAS during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-learning framework that integrates Dynamic Interaction and Perception Calibration to enhance LLMs' independent problem-solving ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates Dynamic Interaction and Perception Calibration to improve LLMs' independent problem-solving ability. |
ChatEdit: Towards Multi-turn Interactive Facial Image Editing via Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to interactive facial image editing treat multi-turn editing as a sequence of successive single-turn edits, leading to attribute forgetting and error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for interactive facial image editing through dialogues based on the CelebA-HQ dataset and a benchmark dataset to evaluate this. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and improves existing ones. |
RankPrompt: Step-by-Step Comparisons Make Language Models Better Reasoners (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to reasoning tasks require extensive human annotations or fail in scenarios with inconsistent responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that enables LLMs to self-rank their responses without additional resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 with 13% improvement over existing methods. |
Putting Captions to the Test: Evaluating Video Caption Quality through Multiple-Choice Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics for video captioning are based on text-based comparisons with ground-truth references. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-free benchmark that assesses video captions based on their utility . they will release the benchmark to facilitate reproducible research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves on human-verified, fine-grained questions . it correlates significantly better with human judgments than existing metrics . |
Rethinking Depression Prediction from a Fine-Grained Subscore Modeling Perspective via Multi-Task Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for depression assessment rely on standardized ratings, but they are time-consuming and subject to inter-rater variability. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained model for subscore prediction via multi-task learning that can be used to predict depression severity using multiple tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and Qwen3-14B direct scoring on the public E-DAIC dataset and to a large-scale private clinical dataset. |
Exons-Detect: Identifying and Amplifying Exonic Tokens via Hidden-State Discrepancy for Robust AI-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated text detection assume uniform token contributions, making them less robust under short sequences or localized token modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method for AI-generated text detection based on an exon-aware token reweighting perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and robustness to adversarial attacks and varying input lengths. |
Take a Break in the Middle: Investigating Subgoals towards Hierarchical Script Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work assumes that events are sequentially arranged in a script, while this assumption leads to linear generation that is far from sufficient for comprehensively acquiring the representation about how events are organized towards a task goal. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend goal-oriented Script Generation task from the perspective of cognitive theory by incorporating subgoals into hierarchical script generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a new dataset and human evaluation metrics. |
Instance-level Randomization: Toward More Stable LLM Evaluations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Evaluations of large language models suffer from instability, where small changes of random factors can lead to drastic fluctuations of scores and even model rankings. |
| Approach: | They propose an instance-level randomization method to reduce variance and improve fairness in evaluations by randomizing all factors that affect evaluation scores for every single instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces variance and improves fairness in model comparisons by using instance-level randomization. |
Can Diffusion Model Achieve Better Performance in Text Generation ? Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference ! (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text generation use a discrete data embedding module to map the data into the continuous space. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to bridge the gap between training and inference by mapping the discrete text into the continuous space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can achieve 100 200 speedup with better performance on 6 generation tasks. |
TASA: Deceiving Question Answering Models by Twin Answer Sentences Attack (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial models rely on keyword matching and ignore relevant contextual relations for answer prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use keyword matching to attack model with two biases that rely on a perturbed answer sentence and a distracting answer sentence to misguide model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. |
Memorizing is Not Enough: Deep Knowledge Injection Through Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Ruoxi Xu, Yunjie Ji, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Yingfei Sun, Xiangang Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection frameworks focus on knowledge memorization and retrieval, but static nature of large language models leads to outdated information as the real world evolves or when adapting to domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a four-tier knowledge injection framework that defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies attribute catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come . Continual relation extraction models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new relations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial class augmentation mechanism to learn more precise representations . they propose to train the model on a sequence of tasks where two new relations are discovered . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two popular benchmarks. |
KB-Plugin: A Plug-and-play Framework for Large Language Models to Induce Programs over Low-resourced Knowledge Bases (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Program induction (PI) is a promising paradigm for using knowledge bases (KBs) to help large language models answer complex knowledge-intensive questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that enables large language models to induce programs over any low-resourced KB. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that KB-Plugin outperforms SoTA low-resourced PI methods with 25x smaller backbone LLM on large-scale and domain-specific KBs and even approaches the performance of supervised methods. |
Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zeping Li, Hongru Wang, Yiwen Zhao, Guanhua Chen, Yixia Li, Keyang Chen, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai, Zhenfei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks, but in long trajectories, agents often invoke tools excessively or inappropriately, increasing computation cost and derailing the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use entropy reduction as a supervisory signal to reduce tool calls . they propose to design two reward strategies to address the needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward strategies reduce tool calls by 72.07% and improve performance by 22.27%. |
D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, WenJie Lu, Yuqi Wang, Jinyuan Li, Song Cao, He Cui, Tengfei Tian, Xuelin Zhang, Haotian Luo, Di Sun, Jun Fang, Hua Chai, Naiqiang Tan, Gang Pan
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative framework that leverages a fine-grained tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves SOTA among open-source general models on AndroidWorld and ScreenSpot-V2 . it leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process . |
DualGuard: Dual-stream Large Language Model Watermarking Defense against Paraphrase and Spoofing Attack (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking algorithms focus on defending against paraphrase and piggyback spoofing attacks, which can inject harmful content, compromise reliability, and undermine trust in attribution. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm capable of defending against paraphrase and spoofing attacks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models and language models show that DualGuard is the first watermarking algorithm capable of defending against both paraphrase and spoofing attacks. |
T2DR: A Two-Tier Deficiency-Resistant Framework for Incomplete Multimodal Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing incomplete multimodal learning frameworks are inadequate for integrating multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for incomplete multimodal learning that is deficiency-resistant and provides two modules to address fine-grained deficiencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the SOTA models on two well-known multimodal benchmarks. |
Can Public Large Language Models Help Private Cross-device Federated Learning? (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that public data can be used to improve privacy-utility trade-offs for large and small language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale public data to help differentially private FL training . they propose a distribution matching algorithm with theoretical grounding to sample public data close to private data distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is efficient and effective for training private models by taking advantage of public data. |
UniICL: An Efficient ICL Framework Unifying Compression, Selection, and Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have limitations due to excessive growth in context length, causing large hardware burden. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Unified ICL framework that unifies demonstration compression, demonstration selection, and final response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies demonstration compression, demonstration selection, and final response generation. |
Seeking Patterns, Not just Memorizing Procedures: Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models memorize procedures from context and rely on shallow heuristics to solve MWPs. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning approach where the neural network perceives the divergence of patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method greatly improves performance in monolingual and multilingual settings. |
Rethinking LLM Watermark Detection in Black-Box Settings: A Non-Intrusive Third-Party Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing secret-key schemes tightly couple detection with injection . this dependency creates a fundamental barrier for real-world governance . |
| Approach: | et al. introduce a black-box framework for non-intrusive, third-party watermark verification . they propose a proxy model to amplify watermark-relevant signals and complementary relative measurements . |
| Outcome: | a new framework decouples detection from injection and assesses alignment of query text with watermark distributions. |
STAR: SQL Guided Pre-Training for Context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zefeng Cai, Xiangyu Li, Binyuan Hui, Min Yang, Bowen Li, Binhua Li, Zheng Cao, Weijie Li, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show that STAR outperforms previous pre-training methods and ranks first on the leaderboard . text-to-SQL parsing aims to translate natural language (NL) questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing . they propose two objectives that explore context-dependence of NL utterances and SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two downstream benchmarks and ranks first on the leaderboard. |
Divide, Conquer, and Combine: Mixture of Semantic-Independent Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance the zeroshot generalization of DST fail to effectively decouple semantics of samples, limiting the zero-shot performance of the system. |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning schema that explicitly disentangles the semantics of seen data and leverages the performance and robustness with the mixture-of-experts mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiWOZ2.1 with 10M trainable parameters and is robust to the mixture-of experts mechanism. |
LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Jiajie Zhang, Zhongni Hou, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Zhenyu Hou, Yilin Niu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | In recent years, significant advancements have been achieved in the development of long-context large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes an off-the-shelf LLM to provide rewards for long-context model responses from four human-valued dimensions: helpfulness, logicality, faithfulness, and completeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves models’ long-context performance and enhances their ability to follow short instructions. |
Enhancing Dialogue-based Relation Extraction by Speaker and Trigger Words Prediction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying relations from dialogues do not fully consider the particularity of dialogues, making them difficult to understand the semantics between conversational arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose two tasks to enhance the extraction of dialogue-based relations . speaker prediction captures the characteristics of speakerrelated entities . the trigger words prediction provides supportive contexts for relations between arguments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks improve the extraction of dialogue-based relations . speaker prediction captures the characteristics of speakerrelated entities . the trigger words prediction provides supportive contexts for relations between arguments . |
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
Rectified Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Sun, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Yuqing Xia, Jian Chen, Yizhao Gao, Shijie Cao, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency but suffer from KV cache misalignment, resulting in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines block-sparse attention with periodic dense rectification to bound error accumulation and preserve alignment with the pretraining distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning, language modeling, and retrieval tasks show that ReSA achieves near-lossless generation quality with significantly improved efficiency. |
Token Preference Optimization with Self-Calibrated Visual-Anchored Rewards for Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting hallucinations suffer from two drawbacks: Lack of scalable token-level rewards and Neglect of visual-anchored tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a Token Preference Optimization model with self-calibrated rewards . they propose based on visual-anchored tokens and visual-aware training objective . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves hallucination performance by focusing on visual-anchored tokens without fine-grained annotations. |
Read, Listen, and See: Leveraging Multimodal Information Helps Chinese Spell Checking (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous characters for usergenerated text in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese spell checker that leverages multimodal Chinese characters' information to predict the correct output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the SIGHAN benchmarks by a large margin. |
Geo-Encoder: A Chunk-Argument Bi-Encoder Framework for Chinese Geographic Re-Ranking (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chinese geographic re-ranking task aims to find the most relevant addresses among retrieved candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate Chinese geographic semantics into re-ranking pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two Chinese benchmark datasets. |
Discourse Coherence and Response-Guided Context Rewriting for Multi-Party Dialogue Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on multi-party dialogue generation has focused on structural information inherent in dialogues, but colloquial expressions and incomplete utterances often impede comprehension and weaken the fidelity of dialogue structure representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve multi-party dialogue generation through dialogue context rewriting using two complementary feedback signals to construct preference data for both context & response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multi-party dialogue generation through dialogue context rewriting. |
Explore More Guidance: A Task-aware Instruction Network for Sign Language Translation Enhanced with Data Augmentation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on the recognition step, while paying less attention to sign language translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware instruction network, namely TIN-SLT, for sign language translation, by introducing the isntruction module and the learning-based feature fuse strategy into a Transformer network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing solutions on two benchmark datasets, PHOENIX-2014-T and ASLG-PC12, and outperformed previous best solutions by 1.65 and 1.42 in terms of BLEU-4. |
Incomplete Utterance Rewriting with Editing Operation Guidance and Utterance Augmentation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing generation methods on Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) can generate coherent utterances, but they often include irrelevant and redundant tokens in rewritten utteras . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that uses editing operation labels to guide generation model to focus on critical tokens in dialogue context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on open-domain and task-oriented dialogues on three datasets. |
Separating Context and Pattern: Learning Disentangled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Extractive Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Context information is one of the key factors for extractive summarization, but other factors can be used to identify sentence importance. |
| Approach: | They propose to disentangle context and pattern factors for extractive summarization . they separate context and patterns for a better generalization ability in low-resource setting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used in the zero-shot setting or fine-tuned in the few-shot settings. |
Which Sense Dominates Multisensory Semantic Understanding? A Brain Decoding Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Decoding semantic meanings from brain activity is open to multisensory stimulation, as word meanings can be delivered by both auditory and visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They aim to develop a computational model to probing what information from the act of language understanding is represented in human brain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model dissociates multisensory integration of word understanding into written text, spoken text and image perception respectively, exploring the decoding efficiency and reliability of unisensory information in the brain representation. |
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. |
FLAG-TRADER: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading (2025.findings-acl)
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Guojun Xiong, Zhiyang Deng, Keyi Wang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xueqing Peng, Mingquan Lin, Kaleb E Smith, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive reasoning capabilities in financial tasks, but struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large language models with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in trading and other financial domain tasks. |
LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)
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Yushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Jiazheng Xu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on longcontext large language models fail to reflect their deep understanding capabilities across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of long-context large language models to handle long-text problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 50.1% accuracy when directly answering the questions . human experts achieve only 53.7% accuracy under a 15-minute time constraint . |
KoRC: Knowledge Oriented Reading Comprehension Benchmark for Deep Text Understanding (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for deep text understanding have encountered two major limitations . most require human annotation of knowledge, which leads to limited knowledge coverage . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to help readers understand a document with prior knowledge . they use massive knowledge bases to guide annotators and large language models to construct knowledgable questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks have limited knowledge coverage and use choices or spans as answers, which results in narrow answer space. |
FactVerse: A Benchmark for Factual Consistency in Interleaved Image–Text Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yubo Shan, Kun Zhang, Qiming Xu, Liping Cao, Yingying Cao, Jian Zhang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Li, Yuanzhuo Wang
| 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. |
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting. |
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning. |
HyperEdit: Unlocking Instruction-based Text Editing in LLMs via Hypernetworks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiming Zeng, Jinghan Cao, Zexin Li, Wanhao Yu, Zhankai Ye, Dawei Xiang, Ting Hua, Xin Liu, Shangqian Gao, Tingting Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat instruction-based text editing as a generic text generation problem. Existing methods either over-edit or fail to apply modifications consistently. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that processes each editing request to best align with it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 9% improvement over the state-of-the-art model. |
LINKED: Eliciting, Filtering and Integrating Knowledge in Large Language Model for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to elicit, filter and integrate knowledge in large language models (LINKED) they propose 'reward model' to filter out noisy knowledge and 'take marginal consistent reasoning module' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SOTA baselines on two commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Are Missing Links Predictable? An Inferential Benchmark for Knowledge Graph Completion (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) are unsatisfactory . |
| Approach: | They propose to use rule-guided train/test generation instead of conventional random split to ensure that each testing sample is predictable with supportive data in the training set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing benchmarks in inferential ability, assumptions, and patterns. |
STORM-BORN: A Challenging Mathematical Derivations Dataset Curated via a Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Zhenyi Lu, Xinyu Hu, Jerry Zhang, Dailin Li, Jiacheng Cen, Huilin Cao, Haiteng Wang, Yuhan Li, Xie Kun, Dandan Li, Pei Zhang, Chengbo Zhang, Yuxiang Ren, Xiaohong Huang, Yan Ma
| 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. |
CoLA: A Choice Leakage Attack Framework to Expose Privacy Risks in Subset Training (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing threat models underestimate subset-training privacy risks because of the scale of modern datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for analyzing privacy leakage in subset selection based on side-channel metadata from the subset process or via the outputs of the target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes privacy leakage in subset selection based on two different scenarios . |
Privacy Risks of Intermediate Representations: Attribute Inference in Distributed LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Distributed LLMs avoid raw inputs by transmitting intermediate hidden states, a practice widely assumed to preserve privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributed inference framework that transmits intermediate hidden states to avoid sending raw inputs by exposing sensitive user attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves Top-1 accuracy of 0.997 on CMS, 0.980 on Skytrax, and 0.986 on ECHR. |
See the World, Discover Knowledge: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Vision Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jihao Gu, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Chen Wang, Ziming Wang, Tengtao Song, Donglai Wei, Jiale Yuan, Yingxiu Zhao, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Meng Cao, Jun Song, Yingshui Tan, Xiang Li, Wenbo Su, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing models for large vision language models do not fully reflect their knowledge capacity and reliability, resulting in erroneous outputs that do not align with the image content or provide answers lacking knowledge evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based benchmark for visual factuality across 8 major topics and 56 subtopics and a multi-hop question construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples visual factuality into two parts: seeing the world and discovering knowledge. |
SHARP: Self-adaptive Harmful Category-aware Prompt Generation for Black-box Jailbreaking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreak ignore the semantic differences between categories of harmful questions, leading to inconsistent success rates and reduced overall attack effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a category-aware jailbreak framework that incorporates the semantic category of harmful questions into prompt generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves attack success rates and category alignment and achieves better cross-category robustness compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
MoA: Heterogeneous Mixture of Adapters for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Bo Yuan, Rolan Yan, Hongyang He, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Dongping Zhang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) are limited by computational costs and performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) they propose combining expert load imbalance and representation collapse to improve LLM performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms homogeneous MoE-LoRA architectures in performance and parameter efficiency. |
INVESTORBENCH: A Benchmark for Financial Decision-Making Tasks with LLM-based Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Haohang Li, Yupeng Cao, Yangyang Yu, Shashidhar Reddy Javaji, Zhiyang Deng, Yueru He, Yuechen Jiang, Zining Zhu, K.p. Subbalakshmi, Jimin Huang, Lingfei Qian, Xueqing Peng, Jordan W. Suchow, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Recent advances have underscored the potential of large language model (LLM)-based agents in financial decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLM agents using 13 different LLMs as backbone models across various market environments and tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of 13 different LLMs across various market environments and tasks. |
ML-LMCL: Mutual Learning and Large-Margin Contrastive Learning for Improving ASR Robustness in Spoken Language Understanding (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite efforts to improve ASR robustness, errors from pipeline approaches can lead to error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for improving ASR robustness in SLU by using mutual learning and large-margin contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three datasets. |
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 . |
TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks focus on symbolic inference but rarely involve understanding complex number combination reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof and evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
ChatSOP: An SOP-Guided MCTS Planning Framework for Controllable LLM Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Yong Cao, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, YuQian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing models that use Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks, but lack of controllability leads to unfocused conversations or task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a standard operating procedure (SOP) framework to regulate dialogue flow by integrating Chain of Thought reasoning and supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also shows notable gains for open-source models. |
S*: Test Time Scaling for Code Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dacheng Li, Shiyi Cao, Chengkun Cao, Xiuyu Li, Shangyin Tan, Kurt Keutzer, Jiarong Xing, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
| Challenge: | S* is the first hybrid test-time scaling framework that significantly improves the coverage and selection accuracy of generated code. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid test-time scaling framework that augments parallel scaling with sequential scaling to further increase the performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing scaling approaches in large-scale modeling and reasoning models. |
FRSUM: Towards Faithful Abstractive Summarization via Enhancing Factual Robustness (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of abstractive summarization are able to generate fluent and coherent summaries, but they still suffer from the unfaithful generation problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the faithfulness of existing models by enhancing their factual robustness by using a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy improves faithfulness of various models, such as T5, BART, and T5 . |
Evidence-Augmented Policy Optimization with Reward Co-Evolution for Long-Context Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence-Augmented Policy Optimization (EAPO) improves long-context reasoning performance . Xu et al., 2025): large language models are a critical part of NLP . |
| Approach: | They propose an Evidence-Augmented Reasoning paradigm that uses a group-relative reward to improve evidence quality. |
| Outcome: | EAPO significantly improves long-context reasoning performance compared to baselines. |
CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs fail to capture the nuances of human emotions, making their interactions seem impersonal or inadequate. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage automatic data generation framework to generate a Chinese dataset called CAPE . their data is a cognitive appraisal theory-based Emotional corpus that accounts for personal and situational factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate human-like responses in conversation with large language models. |
Remember Me, Refine Me: A Dynamic Procedural Memory Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks treat memory as a static append-only archive . Existing systems focus on passive accumulation, resulting in a 'passive accumulation' of memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for experience-driven agent evolution that integrates procedural memory with contextual information to create a high-quality experience pool. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on BFCL-V3 and AppWorld show that ReMe outperforms memoryless Qwen3-8B. |
Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on entity representation and final answer reasoning, which results in limited supervision for this task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes relations to enhance entity representation and introduce additional supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the F1 score on two benchmark datasets by 5.8% . it improves by 6.7% on WebQSP, better than state-of-the-art methods . |
EpiGEN: An Efficient Multi-Api Code GENeration Framework under Enterprise Scenario (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models fail to meet expectations for code generation tasks . existing approaches are faced with drawbacks of high resource consumption and inadequate handling of multi-API tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient multi-Api code GENeration framework that uses private APIs to pre-train LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows good acceptability and readability on single-GPU tasks compared to fully fine-tuned LLMs with a larger number of parameters. |
Semantic Parsing with Dual Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to parse natural language queries are limited by lack of labeled data and constrained decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing framework with the dual learning algorithm that makes full use of data through a dual-learning game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on ATIS dataset and gets competitive performance on overnight dataset. |
RSVP: Reasoning Segmentation via Visual Prompting and Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (2025.acl-long)
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Yi Lu, Jiawang Cao, Yongliang Wu, Bozheng Li, Licheng Tang, Yangguang Ji, Chong Wu, Jay Wu, Wenbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multi-modal learning have enhanced MLLMs' ability to reason about visual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies multi-step multimodal reasoning with grounded visual understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods by +6.5 gIoU and +9.2 cIou on ReasonSeg and achieves 49.7 mAP on SegInW under zero-shot settings. |
Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Ancient people translated classical Chinese into Japanese using a system of annotations placed around characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce an LLM-based annotation pipeline and construct a dataset from digitized open-source translation data to improve sequence tagging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high scores on direct machine translation, but could serve as a supplement to LLMs to improve the quality of character’s annotation. |
SeaKR: Self-aware Knowledge Retrieval for Adaptive Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective strategy to alleviate hallucination of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adaptive RAG model that extracts self-aware uncertainty of large language models from their internal states and invokes retrieval accordingly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing adaptive RAG methods on complex and simple Question Answering datasets. |
Enhancing Chinese Pre-trained Language Model via Heterogeneous Linguistics Graph (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained Chinese language models ignore linguistics knowledge to learn representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-free enhancement module to integrate linguistics knowledge into Chinese pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves Chinese pre-trained language models on 6 tasks with 10 benchmark datasets. |
Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompting to perform iterative refinement . they propose to combine the two methods to produce a more favorable outcome . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process . the results show that the prompt chaining method produces a more favorable outcome . |
Rethinking Text-based Protein Understanding: Retrieval or LLM? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on integrating protein-related knowledge into large language models through continued pretraining and multi-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-enhanced method which significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs for protein-to-text generation and shows accuracy and efficiency in training-free scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs for protein-to-text generation and shows accuracy and efficiency in training-free scenarios. |
Better Red Teaming via Searching with Large Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating large language models face challenges in managing semantic intricacies and optimizing the efficiency of the search process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconceptualizes test case generation as a strategic planning problem, leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a range of LLM architectures show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates without sacrificing computational efficiency. |
RiSAWOZ: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | RiSAWOZ contains 11.2K human-to-human (H2H) multi-turn semantically annotated dialogues spanning over 12 domains . despite of substantial progress made, there are challenges in creating challenging datasets in terms of size, multiple domains, semantic annotations and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multi-domain Chinese Wizard-of-Oz dataset with rich semantic annotations that captures discourse phenomena for task-oriented dialogue modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11.2K human-to-human (H2H) multi-turn semantically annotated dialogues with more than 150K utterances spanning over 12 domains. |
MMEKG: Multi-modal Event Knowledge Graph towards Universal Representation across Modalities (2022.acl-demo)
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Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Mukai Li, Yixin Cao, Meiqi Chen, Xinze Li, Wenqi Sun, Kunquan Deng, Kun Wang, Aixin Sun, Jing Shao
| Challenge: | Recent Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store billions of world facts in a directed graph, but expression ability of such entity-centric KGs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multi-modal event knowledge graph named MMEKG that unifies different modalities of knowledge via events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system unifies different modalities of knowledge via events, which complement and disambiguate each other. |
Zoom Out and Observe: News Environment Perception for Fake News Detection (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection "zoom in" to verify content with knowledge sources or check readers’ replies to posts but neglect information in the external news environment where a fake news post is created and disseminated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to capture news environment signals and a module to perceive useful signals and assist final prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve the performance of basic fake news detectors by capturing the environmental signals of news posts and analyzing the results. |
Anchored Cyclic Generation: A Novel Paradigm for Long-Sequence Symbolic Music Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive sequence modeling has been successful in many domains, but maintaining long-term coherence and structural integrity remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an ACG paradigm that relies on anchor features from previously generated musical content to guide subsequent generation during the autoregressive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in symbolic music generation tasks. |
Specialization through Collaboration: Understanding Expert Interaction in Mixture-of-Expert Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models are popular for multitasking . however, whether each expert can specialize to a task remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dictionary learning approach to analyze expert collaboration mechanisms in MoE LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by 2.5% while enabling 50% expert reduction. |
NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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Ruisheng Cao, Hanchong Zhang, Tiancheng Huang, Zhangyi Kang, Yuxin Zhang, Liangtai Sun, Hanqi Li, Yuxun Miao, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets . |
LLM-empowered Dynamic Prompt Routing for Vision-Language Models Tuning under Long-Tailed Distributions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) often suffer from bias in class-imbalanced scenes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional dynamic prompt routing framework that integrates a knowledge base for classes spanning multiple visual-semantic dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable results with current SOTA methods on long-tailed benchmarks, including CIFAR-LT, ImageNet-LT and Places-LT. |
AdaReTaKe: Adaptive Redundancy Reduction to Perceive Longer for Video-language Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are limited by context length when processing long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that flexibly reduces redundancy by allocating compression ratios among time and model layers with theoretical guarantees. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on videoMME, MLVU, LongVideoBench, and LVBench show that AdaRETAKE outperforms existing methods by 2.3% and 2.8% for 7B and 72B models. |
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to formalizing mathematical statements face limitations in accuracy, especially in the context of complex, highlevel problems that involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a CriticLean framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component and introduce a benchmark to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open- and closed-source benchmarks and shows that it significantly outperformed existing models. |
One Token Is Enough: Improving Diffusion Language Models with a Sink Token (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Diffusion Language Models lack a structural constraint to stabilize attention sinks. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective extra sink token that is constrained to attend to itself while remaining globally visible to all other tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed token is able to stabilize attention sinks and improve model performance. |
Forewarned is Forearmed: Pre-Synthesizing Jailbreak-like Instructions to Enhance LLM Safety Guardrail to Potential Attacks (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Despite advances in improving large language model (LLM) to refuse to answer malicious instructions, LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks where attackers generate instructions with distributions differing from safety alignment corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages embedding space distribution analysis to generate jailbreak-like instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant decreases in attack success rate on Qwen2.5, Llama3.1, and Llma3.2 without compromising their utility. |
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. |
Semi-supervised Entity Alignment via Joint Knowledge Embedding Model and Cross-graph Model (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment aims at integrating complementary knowledge graphs (KGs) from different sources or languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised entity alignment method by joint Knowledge Embedding model and Cross-Graph model to make better use of seed alignments to propagate over the entire graphs with KG-based constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can make better use of seed alignments to propagate over entire graphs with KG-based constraints. |
Retrieve, Rerank and Rewrite: Soft Template Based Neural Summarization (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization systems rely on the source text to generate summaries, which tends to work unstably. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing summaries as soft templates to guide the seq2seq model . they use a popular IR platform to Retrieve proper summary as candidate templates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of informativeness and readability. |
Multi-Channel Graph Neural Network for Entity Alignment (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn alignment-oriented knowledge graph embeddings suffer from structural heterogeneity and limited seed alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-channel Graph Neural Network model to learn alignment-oriented knowledge graph embeddings by encoding two KGs via multiple channels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is expected to reconcile the structural differences of two KGs, and thus make better use of seed alignments. |
On the Complementarity between Pre-Training and Random-Initialization for Resource-Rich Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-Training (PT) of text representations has been successfully applied to low-resource Neural Machine Translation (NMT) however, it often fails to achieve notable gains on resource-rich NMT on par with its Random-Initialization (RI) counterpart. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine pre-training and random-initialization techniques to achieve significant improvements in NMT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fusion algorithm can achieve significant improvements on two resource-rich translation benchmarks. |
Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference (2025.coling-main)
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Lanrui Wang, Jiangnan Li, Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Hongyin Tang, Huan Liu, Yanan Cao, Jingang Wang, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on integrating commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enhance their ability to understand and generate dialogue responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enable them to elicit more empathetic responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to uncover the implicit requirements of the conversation, aiming to elicit more empathetic responses. |
Decoupled Dialogue Modeling and Semantic Parsing for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest . current approaches mostly employ end-to end models and face data sparsity problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled multi-turn text-to-SQL framework where dialogue context is explicitly solved by an utterance rewrite model and a single-turn Text-toSQl parser are proposed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on SParC and CoSQL datasets without annotated in-domain data. |
Language Models Can Easily Learn to Reason from Demonstrations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dacheng Li, Shiyi Cao, Tyler Griggs, Shu Liu, Xiangxi Mo, Eric Tang, Sumanth Hegde, Kourosh Hakhamaneshi, Shishir G Patil, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) tackle complex problems by following long chain-of-thoughts (Long CoT) however, the training techniques and data requirements to elicit Long CoT remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data-efficient supervised fine-tuning and parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation to elicit Long CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn Long CoT reasoning through data-efficient supervised fine-tuning and parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation. |
CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL methods focus on making full use of history context, but neglect to explicitly comprehend the schema and conversational dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a CQR-SQL that explicitly exploits schema and conversational dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits schema and contextual dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. |
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhucong Li, Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Zhijian Zhou, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Fenglei Cao, Xu Yinghui, Yuan Qi
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. |
ATG: Benchmarking Automated Theorem Generation for Generative Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative language models (LMs) can generate new or reusable theorems, but their ability to generate new theorels is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Metamath library to generate new theorems that can be saved as reusable knowledge for future theoretical proving. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates whether an agent can generate valuable (and possibly brand new) theorems that are applicable for downstream theoretic proving as reusable knowledge. |
MoleculeQA: A Dataset to Evaluate Factual Accuracy in Molecular Comprehension (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models generate erroneous information and evaluations fail to assess factual correctness of models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MoleculeQA to evaluate molecular factual correctness in large language models by organizing molecules into a taxonomy and building QA pairs through human and LLM efforts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the factual correctness of generated information and enables the development of new models. |
ICR: Iterative Clarification and Rewriting for Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conversational Query Rewriting (CQR) is a key step in conversational question answering . it aims to rewrite vague queries into de-contextualized queries, thereby promoting conversational search. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative rewriting scheme that pivots on clarification questions . they propose to rewrite queries into de-contextualized queries to promote conversational search . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval performance on two popular datasets. |
Exploring and Evaluating Attributes, Values, and Structures for Entity Alignment (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) aims at building a Knowledge Graph (KG) of rich content by linking the equivalent entities from various KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an attributed value encoder to partition a Knowledge Graph into subgraphs to model the various types of attribute triples efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements over 12 baselines in cross-lingual and monolingual datasets. |
MetaTS: Meta Teacher-Student Network for Multilingual Sequence Labeling with Minimal Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sequence labeling aims to predict fine-grained sequences of labels for text, but lack of token-level annotated data hinders the effectiveness of supervised methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta Teacher-Student (MetaTS) Network to alleviate data scarcity by leveraging large multilingual unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed meta learning method alleviates data scarcity by leveraging large multilingual unlabeled data. |
Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. Existing work in XQA focuses on integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on complex QA datasets. |
PAD: A Robustness Enhancement Ensemble Method via Promoting Attention Diversity (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance robustness of deep neural networks focus on perturbation . weak robustness is a problem for many types of adversarial attacks, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework for enhancing robustness by perturbing parameters of a model and diversifying adversarial example distributions among different models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve robustness against adversarial attacks while maintaining accuracy on clean data. |
How Proficient Are Large Language Models in Formal Languages? An In-Depth Insight for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have validated that large language models (LLMs) are capable of solving some KBQA problems, but there has been little discussion on the differences in LLMs’ proficiency in formal languages used in semantic parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the understanding and generation ability of large language models (LLMs) to deal with differently structured logical forms by examining the inter-conversion of natural and formal language through in-context learning of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand formal languages as well as humans, but generating correct logical forms remains a challenge. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
O1-Pruner: Length-Harmonizing Fine-Tuning for O1-Like Reasoning Pruning (2026.findings-acl)
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Haotian Luo, Haiying He, Yibo Wang, Shiwei Liu, Wei Li, Xiaochun Cao, Dacheng Tao, Naiqiang Tan, Li Shen
| Challenge: | Recent long-thought reasoning models adopt extended reasoning processes similar to how humans ponder over complex problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses RL-style fine-tuning to reduce inference overhead while maintaining accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces inference overhead while maintaining accuracy. |
Breaking the Reasoning Barrier A Survey on LLM Complex Reasoning through the Lens of Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)
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Tao He, Hao Li, Jingchang Chen, Runxuan Liu, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao, Zihao Zheng, Zheng Chu, Jiafeng Liang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | OpenAI's O1 and subsequent projects like DeepSeek R1 have significantly advanced research on complex reasoning in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing reasoning studies from the perspective of self-evolution and summarize O1-like works from open-source projects like DeepSeek R1 and Kimi-k1.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on open-source models and pioneer advanced methodologies like Scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
Recognizing Everything from All Modalities at Once: Grounded Multimodal Universal Information Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on IE tasks have focused on recognizing and analyzing cross-modal information . a multimodal large language model (MLLM) is developed to analyze IE across modalities . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model (MLLM) capable of grounding information from all modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a framework to analyze IE tasks over various modalities and their fine-grained groundings. |
SEC-FinTables: Evaluating Large Language Models for Detecting Logical Inconsistencies on Tabular Data (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where logical inconsistencies are unrecognized. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking system that decomposes inconsistency detection into granular subtasks and a protocol that decompiles it into subtask. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decomposes inconsistencies into subtasks and identifies them in 103,395 real-world and error-injected table instances. |
DocEE: A Large-Scale and Fine-grained Benchmark for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on sentence-level event extraction, but document-level EE is limited due to the lack of large-scale and practical training and evaluation datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction dataset with 27,000+ events and 180,000+ arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 27,000+ events, 180,000+ arguments and large-scale manual annotations, fine-grained argument types and application-oriented settings. |
Neural Collective Entity Linking (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking aims to link entity mentions in texts to knowledge bases, but existing methods rely on local contexts to resolve entities independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for collective entity linking that integrates local contextual features and global coherence information to improve the computation efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves its performance on five publicly available datasets and can be used to train on Wikipedia hyperlinks to avoid overfitting and domain bias. |
Adam’s Law: Textual Frequency Law on Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Textual frequency is a topic of understudied research, but its relevance to Large Language Models is not well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to estimate textual data frequency using a paraphraser and a textual distillation method to refine LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to estimate sentence-level frequency with word-level frequencies. |
KBioXLM: A Knowledge-anchored Biomedical Multilingual Pretrained Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multilingual biomedical training are monolingual, resulting in limited cross-lingual capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that transforms a multilingual biomedical corpus into a biomedically domain using a knowledge-anchored approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monolingual and multilingual models in cross-lingual scenarios. |
Is Multi-Hop Reasoning Really Explainable? Towards Benchmarking Reasoning Interpretability (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-hop reasoning are not able to evaluate their interpretability . a recent study found that many paths are unreasonable . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the interpretability of multi-hop reasoning models . they annotate all possible rules and establish a benchmark . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in terms of performance and interpretability. |
We Need to Talk About Reproducibility in NLP Model Comparison (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that standard splits produce low reproducible and unreliable conclusions . reproducibility of empirical experimental conclusions is a problem in NLP domain . |
| Approach: | They propose to transform the reproducibility of a model comparison into a probabilistic function . they propose to use a regularized corpus splitting strategy to estimate the model's performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed estimator achieves a high SNR and significantly increases reproducibility. |
From Trajectories to Graphs: Contract-Checked Editing for Verifier-Guided LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference-time search refine single trajectories and lack a reliable mechanism for composing partial solutions across candidates. |
| Approach: | a new method uses a gate-based algorithm to validate a nontrivial edit before invoking the verifier. |
| Outcome: | a new method improves verifier-runnable recombination and accuracy over existing methods . it outperforms execution-guided beam search on Spider and humanEval-MF on MCTS . a contract-checked graph editing improves recompilation and recombines partial solutions . |
CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation is needed to address the problem of knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation that uses dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns to bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally. |
KG-ViP: Bridging Knowledge Grounding and Visual Perception in Multi-modal LLMs for Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Visual Question Answering lack synergistic potential of scene graphs and scene graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-and-fusion pipeline that fuses scene graphs and commonsense graphs to enable multi-modal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on FVQA 2.0+ and MVQA benchmarks show that KG-ViP outperforms existing methods. |
AiM: Taking Answers in Mind to Correct Chinese Cloze Tests in Educational Applications (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct handwritten assignments are to use OCR to recognize characters and compare them to answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach to correct handwritten Chinese characters by combining the visual information of students' handwriting with the encoded representations of answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. |
Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) models can be used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a more practical and universal attack that does not require the presence of a target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses both text and image safety checkers while preserving high semantic alignment with the target prompt. |
SAMem: State-Aware Memory as a Fine-Grained Memory for LLM Agents in Decision-Making (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing experiential memory approaches rely on task-level memory, but this lacks the situational alignment required for complex multi-step decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a new fine-grained memory paradigm that aligns memory retrieval with the current state instead of storing and reusing globally shared experiences. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on complex decision-making benchmarks show that the proposed state-aware memory outperforms existing experiential memory approaches and significantly improves task-solving efficiency. |
OneEE: A One-Stage Framework for Fast Overlapping and Nested Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Event extraction (EE) is an essential task of information extraction, which aims to extract structured event information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a tagging scheme and a model to form EE as word-word relation recognition using parallel grid tapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 3 overlapped and nested EE benchmarks and faster than baselines. |
Bridging the Editing Gap in LLMs: FineEdit for Precise and Targeted Text Modifications (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that large language models can perform precise text editing tasks. |
| Approach: | InstrEditBench is a benchmark dataset that compares 30,000 structured editing tasks . experimental evaluations show FineEdit outperforms state-of-the-art models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on single-turn edits and mistral-7B-OpenOrca on direct edits. |
DEIE: Benchmarking Document-level Event Information Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese News Dataset (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing event-based datasets mainly target sentence-level tasks . current models struggle with "document" annotation, a key feature of the current model . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale document-level event information extraction dataset with over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset has over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments. |
Alleviating Over-smoothing for Unsupervised Sentence Representation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn better unsupervised sentence representations have been successful . over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentences reduces the capacity of powerful PLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve the over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentence representations by combining negatives from PLMs intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on different strong baselines on Semantic Textual Similarity and Transfer datasets. |
Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, but they introduce safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified benchmark to assess the trustworthiness of Large Reasoning Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates truthfulness, safety and efficiency on 26 models. |
AscendKernelGen: LLM-Driven Kernel Generation for NPUs (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinzi Cao, Jianyang Zhai, Pengfei Li, Zhiheng Hu, Cen Yan, null Mubingxu, Guanghuan Fang, Bin She, Jiayu Li, Yihan Su, Dongyang Tao, Feidiao Yang, Chang-Dong Wang, Yutong Lu, Weicheng Xue, Bin Zhou, Yonghong Tian
| Challenge: | Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are critical for AI infrastructure, but their development remains a bottleneck due to vendor-specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for NPU kernel development that bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding . compiler success on complex Level-2 kernels improves from 0% to 95.5%, they say . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding, showing a near-zero success rate on complex kernels. |
Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models capture factual knowledge from massive texts . but they are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance . |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-world assumption to evaluate PLM-based knowledge graph completion models . they propose to convert each triple and its support information into natural prompt sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more accurate under the open-world assumption (OWA) this setting manual checks the correctness of knowledge that is not in KGs. |
Towards Better Chain-of-Thought: A Reflection on Effectiveness and Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to recall extra information from the question to enhance CoT generation and evaluate CoTs based on their information gain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both the faithfulness and effectiveness of CoT and evaluates it based on their information gain. |
Towards Verifiable Generation: A Benchmark for Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics and benchmarks to attribute large language models to structured knowledge are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution that improves upon three core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves upon core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. |
Meeseeks: A Feedback-Driven, Iterative Self-Correction Benchmark evaluating LLMs’ Instruction Following Capability (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaming Wang, Yunke Zhao, Peng Ding, Jun Kuang, Yibin Shen, Zhe Tang, Yilin Jin, ZongYu Wang, Xiaoyu Li, Xuezhi Cao
| Challenge: | Existing models lack the ability to adhere to instructions, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated iterative instruction-following benchmark with integrated feedback mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark identifies erroneous components in model responses and provides feedback accurately. |
GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural semantic parsing are limited by the semantic gap between natural and formal languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified intermediate representation for graph query languages, named GraphQ IR, which has a natural-language-like expression that bridges the semantic gap and formally defined syntax that maintains the graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representation can convert user queries into graphQ IR, which can later be losslessly compiled into various downstream graph query languages. |
Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li, Rongyi Sun, Qingyu Zhou, Shulin Huang, Ding Zhang, Li Yangning, Ruiyang Liu, Zhongli Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of existing CGEC models and the benchmark is excellent resource for further development. |
To See a World in a Spark of Neuron: Disentangling Multi-Task Interference for Training-Free Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zitao Fang, Guodong Du, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yiwei Zhang, Yiyao Cao, Jing Li, Ho-Kin Tang, Sim Kuan Goh
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model merging ignore the fundamental roles of neurons, connectivity and activation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that relies on neuronal mechanisms to mitigate task interference . they decomposed task-specific representations into two complementary subspaces . their results offer new insights into mitigating task interference and improving knowledge fusion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces task interference within neurons and improves knowledge fusion. |
Augmenting Large Language Model Translators via Translation Memories (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongyu Mu, Abudurexiti Reheman, Zhiquan Cao, Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Yinqiao Li, Tong Xiao, Chunliang Zhang, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Using translation memories (TMs) as prompts is a promising approach to in-context learning of machine translation models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation memories (TMs) as prompts to prompt large language models (LLMs) they find that the ability of LLMs to "understand" prompts is helpful . |
| Outcome: | The results are comparable to state-of-the-art NMT systems with bilingual data and are tuned on downstream tasks. |
Intra-Event and Inter-Event Dependency-Aware Graph Network for Event Argument Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models do not build dependency information among event argument roles . Existing methods do not learn the interactions between different roles based on event structure . |
| Approach: | They propose an intra-event and inter-e event dependency-aware graph network to model dependencies between roles . they use event structure as the fundamental unit to construct role dependencies within events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the ACE05, RAMS, and WikiEvents datasets. |
DORA: A Dual-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Effective and Efficient Multimodal Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)
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Guangming Qin, Yuhao Deng, Yukun Zhao, Zhenyang Li, Junfeng Wang, Dawei Yin, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang, Yizhou Yan, Chengliang Chai, Lei Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train large language models overlook quality of intermediate search results . existing methods often invoke search calls during reasoning, making inference inefficient . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-objective reinforcement learning framework to improve search strategies of MLLMs . DORA outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 8.4% higher accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while reducing search calls by 9.7%. |
SOP-Maze: Evaluating Large Language Models on Complicated Business Standard Operating Procedures (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as domain-specific agents, but evaluation of their capabilities in such contexts has not been fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow instructions and make decisions in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world business data and adapted into 23 complex SOP scenarios. |
Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents are limited by simplistic schemas and shallow logical dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents . they propose BREX, a carefully curated benchmark comprising 409 real-world business documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard prompts in rule extraction and execution. |
Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Qingyu Zhou, Zhongli Li, Li Yangning, Shulin Huang, Ruiyang Liu, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which renders Chinese Spell Checking model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework renders the CSC model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
Prompt for Extraction? PAIE: Prompting Argument Interaction for Event Argument Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using a prompt-based model, we find that event argument extraction is efficient and generalized well to few-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a model PAIE for event argument extraction using prompt tuning for extractive objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract arguments with the same role instead of heuristic threshold tuning. |
TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation Graph (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models infer the answer by predicting the sequential relation path or aggregating the hidden graph features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which jumps between entities at multiple steps . they demonstrate that TransferNet surpasses state-of-the-art models by a large margin . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art models on MetaQA and on other datasets. |
Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents (2025.naacl-long)
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Zheyuan Zhang, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Linlu Gong, Jinchang Zhou, Zhanxin Hao, Jianxiao Jiang, Jie Cao, Huiqin Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Initial studies have focused on task-specific, independent LLM-empowered agents, but the potential of LLMs within a multi-agent collaborative framework for classroom simulation with real user participation remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent classroom simulation teaching framework that recognizes representative class roles and introduces a novel class control mechanism for automatic classroom teaching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can simulate dynamic learning environment for users with active teacher-student and student-studente interactions. |
Unveiling the Spectrum of Data Contamination in Language Model: A Survey from Detection to Remediation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Data contamination is a problem in Large language models due to the reliance on extensive internet-derived training corpora. |
| Approach: | They present a survey on the topic of data contamination in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The results of the first survey on data contamination in large language models provide a comprehensive guide for NLP researchers seeking a systematic understanding of the issue. |
Complex Event Schema Induction with Knowledge-Enriched Diffusion Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event schema induction have been hindered by errors and data quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enriched discrete diffusion model that distills event scenario knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves outstanding performance across evaluation metrics. |
Diversity in Unity, Theory in Practice: Hierarchical Multitask Benchmarks for Chinese Minority Languages (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | CMiLBench is a framework to evaluate linguistically and culturally diverse minority languages . rapid evolution of LLMs has revolutionized NLP, but progress is unevenly distributed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to translate a theoretical notion of "diversity in unity" into practical evaluation for three minority languages . CMiLBench comprises 24,663 instances across 5 difficulty levels and 17 tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 14 state-of-the-art LLMs with a hybrid framework . it integrates automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge scoring . |
Entity Relation Extraction as Dependency Parsing in Visually Rich Documents (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on key information extraction from visually rich documents focus on labeling the text within bounding boxes, while relations between words are unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dependency parsing model to extract semantic entities from visually rich documents by combining entity labeling and relation extraction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 65.96% F1 score on the FUNSD dataset. |
SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog understanding only consider self-augmented dialogs as positive samples and treat all other dialogs like negative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured pre-trained conversation model which learns dialog representations from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised contrastive pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results on the DialoGLUE benchmark. |
Robust Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models Against Distribution Shifts (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has explored automatic prompt optimization methods to eliminate manual effort in identifying effective prompts for a given task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompt optimization that can be generalized to an unlabeled target group. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on target group and source group while generalizing to unlabeled target group. |
Improving BERT with Syntax-aware Local Attention (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that attention-based models benefit from more focused attention over local regions. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-aware local attention which restrains attention over syntactically relevant words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on all benchmark datasets, including sentence classification and sequence labeling tasks. |
Instilling Type Knowledge in Language Models via Multi-Task QA (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Current methods to learn entity types rely on coarse, noisy labels . current methods rely only on text-to-text pre-training on type-centric questions . |
| Approach: | They propose to instill fine-grained type knowledge in language models by pre-training on type-centric questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in zero-shot dialog state tracking benchmarks and can accurately infer entity types in Wikipedia articles. |
Com2 : A Causal-Guided Benchmark for Exploring Complex Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Kai Xiong, Xiao Ding, Yixin Cao, Yuxiong Yan, Li Du, Yufei Zhang, Jinglong Gao, Jiaqian Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing works focus on complex tasks like math and code, while complex commonsense reasoning remains underexplored due to its uncertainty and lack of structure. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a benchmark for large language models based on complex commonsense reasoning based upon causal event graphs and causal theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines a complex commonsense reasoning benchmark with a detective story to achieve a more challenging subset. |
Towards Multi-System Log Anomaly Detection (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing models require dataset-specific training, causing costly procedures and performance bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a log anomaly detection model with semantic relational reasoning that extracts cross-system semantic patterns and encodes them as high-dimensional learnable vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts cross-system semantic patterns and encodes them as high-dimensional learnable vectors. |
RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Tianyi Men, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval augmented language models often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RMs in retrieval augmented language models . they incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity of data sources. |
Dependency Parsing via Sequence Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dependency parsing are transition-based, graph-based and sequence-to-sequence method. |
| Approach: | They propose to achieve dependency parsing (DP) via Sequence Generation (SG) by utilizing only the pre-trained language model without any auxiliary structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on DP benchmarks including PTB, UD2.2, SDP15 and SemEval16. |
Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiqing Sun, Sheng Shen, Shengcao Cao, Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yikang Shen, Chuang Gan, Liangyan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang, Yiming Yang, Kurt Keutzer, Trevor Darrell
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modality can result in "hallucination" . developing LMMs faces challenges such as a lack of data and a limited number of data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that augments the reward model with additional factual information such as image captions and ground-truth multi-choice options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the LLaVA-Bench dataset with the 96% performance level of the text-only GPT-4 and an improvement of 60% on MMHAL-BENCH over other baselines. |
BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for Seq2Seq as it does not analyze long-distance relations in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. |
Learning from Miscellaneous Other-Class Words for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify named entity mentions with fewshots fail to differentiate rich semantics in other-class words, which will aggravate overfitting under few shot scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can automatically induce different unde- fined classes from the other class to improve few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms five state-of-the-art models in 1- shot and 5-shots settings on four NER bench marks. |
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chenliang Li, Haiyang Xu, Junfeng Tian, Wei Wang, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Jiabo Ye, He Chen, Guohai Xu, Zheng Cao, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. |
When Slower Isn’t Truer: Inverse Scaling Law of Truthfulness in Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Sitong Fang, Wenjing Cao, Jiahao Li, Xuyao Wang, Chi-Min Chan, Sirui Han, Juntao Dai, Yike Guo, Yaodong Yang, Jiaming Ji
| Challenge: | a study of slow reasoning models for multimodal reasoning finds that they are more prone to fabricating plausible yet false details when confronted with incomplete or misleading visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first systematic study of the inverse scaling law in slow-thinking paradigms for multimodal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The findings suggest that slower reasoning models are more prone to fabricating false details . the study analyzed 5,000-sample hierarchical prompt dataset by 50 participants . |
From Storage to Experience: A Survey on the Evolution of LLM Agent Memory Mechanisms (2026.findings-acl)
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Jinghao Luo, Yuchen Tian, Chuxue Cao, Ziyang Luo, Hongzhan Lin, Kaixin Li, Chuyi Kong, Ruichao Yang, Jing Ma
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents have fundamentally reshaped artificial intelligence . however, the inherent statelessness of LLMs hinders their ability to maintain logical consistency across complex, multi-step tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for LLM agent memory mechanisms that formalizes the development process into three stages: storage, reflection, and experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework breaks the development process into three stages . it analyzes the need for long-range consistency, challenges in dynamic environments, and the ultimate goal of continual learning. |
From Signal Degradation to Computation Collapse: Uncovering the Two Failure Modes of LLM Quantization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on PTQ spans three primary directions. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic analysis of post-training quantization failures using PTQ . they show that targeted repair can mitigate Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. |
Enhancing Multiple-choice Machine Reading Comprehension by Punishing Illogical Interpretations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice MRC is one of the most studied tasks in MRC due to the convenience of evaluation and the flexibility of answer format. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple-choice MRC to explain a trained model and reveal how it arrives at the prediction by punishing illogical attributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model performance without external information and model structure change without any external information. |
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)
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Zijun Yao, Yuanyong Chen, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Amy Xin, Jifan Yu, Hailong Jin, Jianjun Xu, Peng Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer. |
Task-Stratified Knowledge Scaling Laws for Post-Training Quantized Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws focus on general performance, overlooking crucial fine-grained factors and how quantization differentially impacts diverse knowledge capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies model size, bit-width, and fine-grained factors into memorization, application, and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows strong fit and cross-architecture consistency on 293 different PTQ configurations. |
Few-shot Temporal Pruning Accelerates Diffusion Models for Text Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing acceleration methods for text generation ignore the importance of the distribution of sampling steps, resulting in slow sampling rates. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to accelerate diffusion models for text generation without additional training by using a Bayesian optimization approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves 400x acceleration even with minimal sampling steps after down to less than 1 minute of optimization yielding a competitive performance even with minimum sampling steps. |
Improving Large Language Models in Event Relation Logical Prediction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Event relation extraction tasks require rigorous logical reasoning and semantic comprehension, a challenge for narrative understanding and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose three approaches to endow LLMs with event relation logic to generate more coherent answers across different scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on a set of ERE tasks and provides insights for future work. |
TEBNER: Domain Specific Named Entity Recognition with Type Expanded Boundary-aware Network (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to label data and identify entities require large amounts of manually annotated texts for training supervised models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dictionary extension method which extracts new entities through the type expanded model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art supervised systems on different types of datasets and surpasses supervised models. |
SOM-NCSCM : An Efficient Neural Chinese Sentence Compression Model Enhanced with Self-Organizing Map (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence Compression (SC) is an important natural language processing task . it aims to shorten sentences while preserving the original meanings of the words . improvements on Chinese SC models are still lacking due to several difficulties . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural Chinese SC model enhanced with a Self-Organizing Map from Chinese colloquial sentences from a real-life question answering system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a promising F1 score of 89.655 and BLEU4 score of 70.116 . it improves the performance of the whole neural Chinese SC model in a valid manner . |
Slot Dependency Modeling for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot learning methods ignore slot dependencies in a multidomain dialogue . experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed method over existing state-of-art generation methods . |
| Approach: | They propose to use slot prompts combination, slot values demonstration and slot constraint object to model slot-slot dependency, slot-value dependency and slot-context dependency respectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods under zero-shot/few-shot settings. |
KQA Pro: A Dataset with Explicit Compositional Programs for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base (2022.acl-long)
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Shulin Cao, Jiaxin Shi, Liangming Pan, Lunyiu Nie, Yutong Xiang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Bin He, Hanwang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Complex KBQA lack compositional reasoning capabilities . Existing methods for Complex questions are poor in diversity or scale . |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional programming language to represent the reasoning process of complex questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes around 120K diverse natural language questions . it provides a compositional and interpretable programming language to represent the reasoning process of complex questions based on the proposed model . |
Looking Beyond the One: Operationalizing and Eliciting Visual Ambiguity in VLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual question answering systems typically collapse ambiguity, committing to a single interpretation during decoding and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They operationalize ambiguity as the existence of multiple answer-supporting regions in an image . they show that ambiguities are already encoded in their internal representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach makes ambiguity observable without exhaustive annotations . ambiguities are already encoded in models, but not reliably expressed in outputs despite hidden states . |
From Informal to Formal – Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs (2025.acl-long)
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Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Meiziniu Li, Haoyang Ma, Haokun Li, Mengda He, Cheng Wen, Le Sun, Hongyu Zhang, Shengchao Qin, Shing-Chi Cheung, Cong Tian
| Challenge: | Recent studies in formal mathematical reasoning have shown an unstoppable growth trend. |
| Approach: | They constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five mainstream formal specification languages and evaluated them against ten open-sourced LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compared instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages and found that the LLMs were good at writing proof segments when given either the code, or the detailed description of proof steps. |
PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding. |
OpenKE: An Open Toolkit for Knowledge Embedding (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge embedding tools are available for embeddable knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework and various fundamental models to embed knowledge graphs into a continuous low-dimensional space. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit and pre-trained embeddings are available on http://openke.thunlp.org/. |
Relaxing the Constraints: A Dual-Importance Projection Mechanism for Lifelong Model Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenghai Chen, Senbin Xu, Jiaxi Tan, Xinhua Wu, Yan Zhang, Xiawu Zheng, Shengchuan Zhang, Ke Li, Sicheng Zhao, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on strict orthogonal projection to preserve previously edited knowledge, but this constraint limits gradient expressiveness, resulting in degradation of model generalization and overall performance as the number of edits increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages Singular Value Decomposition to identify critical gradient subspaces and introduces a dual mechanism comprising "accumulated importance" and "projection importance" |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five mainstream LLMs show that the proposed method achieves an average comprehensive performance improvement of 10.36% and effectively maintains the model’s general capabilities on downstream tasks. |
Phrase-level Textual Adversarial Attack with Label Preservation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks are usually realized through word-level or sentence-level perturbations, which either limit the perturbation space or sacrifice fluency and textual quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level perturbation-based adversarial ATtack that generates adversarials through phrase- level perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of natural language processing models by reducing the need for word-level perturbations and preserving the fluency and grammaticality of the samples. |
Lightweight Haar Wavelet Subband Pruning for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive performance but require computational and memory resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-training framework that uses a Haar wavelet transform to prune weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework reduces pruning time and computational costs by removing less important weights while preserving model architecture. |
Sound Signal Processing with Seq2Tree Network (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent LSTM models have been used to model sequential data processing tasks because of their ability to preserve previous information weighted on distance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a tree-structured tree-based neural network architecture to solve the problem of unbalanced connections between data units inside and outside semantic groups. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art Bidirectional LSTM model on a signal and noise separation task. |
Enhancing the Comprehensibility of Text Explanations via Unsupervised Concept Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing concepts-based explainable approaches do not discover unseen concepts . a recent approach to solve this problem is concept-based explanations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts comprehensible concepts automatically with no annotations . ECO-Concept uses an object-centric architecture to extract task-specific semantic concepts . |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts comprehensible concepts with no concept annotations . the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in computability tests on diverse tasks . |
Diversity and Consistency: Exploring Visual Question-Answer Pair Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks to generate question-answer pairs from visual images are under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that targets question-answer pair generation from visual images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse or consistent QAPs on two benchmarks. |
From Scores to Preferences: Redefining Evaluation Paradigm for Speech Quality Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Cao, Changhao Jiang, Jiabao Zhuang, Jiajun Sun, Ming Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Hui Li, Shihan Dou, Yuran Wang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
| Approach: | They propose a MOS-aware reward model that incorporates MOS gap into reward function during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
CATS: A Pragmatic Chinese Answer-to-Sequence Dataset with Large Scale and High Quality (2023.acl-long)
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Liang Li, Ruiying Geng, Chengyang Fang, Bing Li, Can Ma, Rongyu Cao, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Current datasets bias in the English language while leaving other languages underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset with high quality and large scale . they propose encoding space for two hybrid knowledge resources to convert this task to a graph-totext problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in generating textual descriptions for the Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset. |
CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentations for coherence evaluation rely on heuristic rules and lack designing criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that breaks down coherence into global and local aspects and designs augmentation strategies for both aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses recent models in scoring and ranking tasks with 233M parameters. |
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have significantly impacted the legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for judicial decision-making that simulates the court trial process . they propose 420 Chinese judgment documents to support their framework and build a large-scale legal knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles. |
Conjoin after Decompose: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Named Entity Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based NER models fail to detect entity boundaries, causing performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which consists of a BART encoder and a parabiotic decoder and propose ' boundary expansion strategy' to enhance the model's capability in entity type classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art models. |
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)
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Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications. |
Multi-level Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Internalization in Dialogue Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Lanrui Wang, Chong Tian, Liang Pang, Jiangnan Li, Qirong Ho, Yanan Cao, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models struggle with dull and repetitive outputs, a problem commonly termed as text degeneration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows the model to "cheat" the objective by duplicating knowledge segments in a superficial pattern matching based on overlap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a WoW dataset and shows that it works across models and decoding strategies. |
Improving Fake News Detection of Influential Domain via Domain- and Instance-Level Transfer (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Social media spreads both real news and fake news in various domains including politics, health, entertainment, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a Domain- and Instance-level Transfer Framework for Fake News Detection which could improve the performance of specific target domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of target domains by hurting other domains, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in the target domain. |
Two-stage Incomplete Utterance Rewriting on Editing Operation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate rewritten utterances based on dialogue context ignore coreference and ellipsis in dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where the first stage generates editing operations and the second stage rewrites incomplete utterances utilizing the generated editing operations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing models on three IUR datasets. |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios. |
Dynamic Guided and Domain Applicable Safeguards for Enhanced Security in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing defense methods struggle with two key issues: inadequate defense capabilities and over-defensiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agents-based framework that leverages accurate external information to provide an unbiased summary of user intentions and safety response guidance. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on popular jailbreak attacks and benign datasets show that the proposed framework can enhance LLM's robustness against jailbreaks without compromising its general functionality. |
Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Standard RALMs often neglect their intrinsic knowledge due to the interference from retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to improve robustness of RALMs by generating sequential reading notes for each retrieved document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms standard RALMs on four open-domain QA benchmarks. |
EquiBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models’ Reasoning about Program Semantics via Equivalence Checking (2025.emnlp-main)
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Anjiang Wei, Jiannan Cao, Ran Li, Hongyu Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ziheng Wang, Yuan Liu, Thiago S. F. X. Teixeira, Diyi Yang, Ke Wang, Alex Aiken
| Challenge: | EquiBench is a new benchmark to evaluate large language models' ability to reason about program semantics . Unlike natural language, code is executable. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models through equivalence checking . EquiBench consists of 2400 program pairs across four languages and six categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 2400 program pairs across four languages and six categories. |
RL-PLUS: Countering Capability Boundary Collapse of LLMs in Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid-policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Yongding Tao, Huanyu Liu, Kechi Zhang, Lili Mou, Rongyu Cao, Yingwei MA, Jue Chen, Binhua Li, Zhi Jin, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid-policy optimization approach that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks and superior performance on out-of distribution reasoning tasks. |
Speed Up Your Code: Progressive Code Acceleration Through Bidirectional Tree Editing (2025.acl-long)
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Longhui Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Meishan Zhang, GaoXiong Cao, Ensheng Shi, Mayuchi Mayuchi, Jun Yu, Honghai Liu, Jing Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing training methods, such as direct instruction fine-tuning, overlook hierarchical relationships among acceleration patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a new training paradigm that uses bidirectional tree editing and progressive code acceleration learning to improve LLMs’ CA capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm outperforms prompt-enhanced GPT-4 and current training-based methods on average across five programming languages. |
DPWriter: Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Planning Branching for Creative Writing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models (LLMs) lack explicit mechanisms for guiding diverse exploration and instead prioritize efficiency and performance over diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning-based framework that decomposes the generation process into explicitly planned intermediate steps and introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing baselines on creative writing benchmarks on a semi-structured long chain-of-thought (CoT) it introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation, alongside a group-aware diversity reward to encourage distinct trajectories. |
iTAG: Inverse Design for Natural Text Generation with Accurate Causal Graph Annotations (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Lack of causally annotated text data for use as ground truth hinders causal discovery . early template-based generation methods sacrifice text naturalness in exchange for high annotation costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which performs real-world concept assignment to nodes before converting causal graphs into text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows high annotation accuracy and naturalness across extensive tests. |
Dynamic Evaluation with Cognitive Reasoning for Multi-turn Safety of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety evaluation methods rely on static assessments that use fixed harmful prompts or predefined prefixes as jailbreak templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic evaluation framework for multi-turn safety assessment of LLMs based on cognitive theories to simulate real chatting process and scenario simulation and strategy decision to guide dynamic generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has been applied to evaluate the safety of widely used LLMs. |
RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter (2024.findings-acl)
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Meng Cao, Haoran Tang, Jinfa Huang, Peng Jin, Can Zhang, Ruyang Liu, Long Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Li Yuan, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align relevant video content with natural language queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct efficient text-video Retrieval with a salient-and-correlated AdaPter . they propose a low-rank modulation module to refine per-image features from frozen CLIP backbone . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four TVR datasets show that the proposed method performs better than other methods. |
Navigating Large-Scale Document Collections: MuDABench for Multi-Document Analytical QA (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-document QA benchmarks require information from only a few documents with limited cross-document reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multi-document analytical QA that extracts and synthesizes information across multiple documents to perform quantitative analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves both process and outcome metrics but still has bottlenecks compared to human experts. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Jiawei Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Lan Luo, Ke Zhan, Enrui Hu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Fan Yu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train dense passage retrieval have a large data gap between upstream and downstream relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlinks within Web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods under different scenarios and in the open-domain question answering domain. |
Leros: Learning Explicit Reasoning on Synthesized Data for Commonsense Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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Chenhao Wang, Pengfei Cao, Jiachun Li, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Li Qiuxia, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent work shows large language models can generate useful rationales for commonsense question answering (CQA) however, the cost of deployment and further tuning is relatively expensive for the large models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages both knowledge graphs and large language models to synthesize rationale-augmented CQA data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate useful rationales on unseen CQA benchmarks. |
Untangle the KNOT: Interweaving Conflicting Knowledge and Reasoning Skills in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explained to what extent LLMs extract conflicting knowledge from the provided text, but they neglect the necessity to reason with conflicting information. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset for knowledge conflict resolution examination in the form of question answering that divides reasoning with conflicting knowledge into three levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset enables analysis of reasoning with conflicting knowledge in the form of question answering. |
Re3: Relevance & Recency Retrieval for Mitigating Temporal Hallucination (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrievers suffer from temporal-semantic misalignment and outdated-document interference . Existing frameworks suffer from both temporal validity and outdated factual versions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that mitigates temporal hallucinations by embedding heterogeneous temporal signals into the semantic space to ensure retrieval fidelity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Re3 outperforms baselines by 9.7% in generation accuracy . the framework outperformed strongest baselines on challenging dynamic tasks . |
Learning Kernel-Smoothed Machine Translation with Retrieved Examples (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to update deployed models are prone to overfit . however, non-parametric methods are liable to over-fit the retrieved examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to learn Kernel-Smoothed Translation with Example Retrieval (KSTER) this approach allows users to adapt models to emerging cases without retraining . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 1.1 to 1.5 BLEU scores over existing methods without retraining . the proposed model is released on https://github.com/jiangqn/KSTER. |
The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking (2022.findings-acl)
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Yinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou, Yangning Li, Zhongli Li, Ruiyang Liu, Rongyi Sun, Zizhen Wang, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors, which are caused by the phonological or visual similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Error-driven COntrastive Probability Optimization framework to refine the knowledge representations of pre-trained language models to avoid predicting common characters. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on SIGHAN datasets demonstrate that ECOPO is simple yet effective. |
InstructMol: Multi-Modal Integration for Building a Versatile and Reliable Molecular Assistant in Drug Discovery (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can attain professional-level proficiency in specific domains through fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal LLM that aligns molecular structures with natural language via an instruction-tuning approach. |
| Outcome: | InstructMol surpasses existing models and reduces the gap with specialists in drug discovery tasks. |
CodeIF: Benchmarking the Instruction-Following Capabilities of Large Language Models for Code Generation (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | CodeIF assesses the ability of large language models to adhere to task-oriented instructions in code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark designed to assess LLMs' ability to adhere to task-oriented instructions within diverse code generation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses LLMs' ability to adhere to task-oriented instructions in code generation tasks across a wide range of complexity levels and programming domains. |